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smackenzie"Ok, ok," I mutter "I'll feed you."
Kay is still fast asleep, so I slide out of bed as quietly as possible, make a pit stop in the bathroom, and go into the kitchen to feed and water the cat and make myself some coffee.
I've never needed a lot of sleep, and most mornings I don't need the caffeine, but I like to ease into my day, and sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee is a good way to do that. I consider breakfast, decide I should probably wait until my houseguest is awake because it would be rude to eat without him, and then lean down and pick Diego up and put him on the table. He sniffs my coffee, sneezes, and jumps back down to the floor. He sits on my feet. He's fuzzy and warm and heavy.
"You're a weird cat," I tell him. "But so cute."
Kay is still asleep even after I've finished my coffee. Shower, then. I take a long one, because I can, and when I get out Kay is finally - finally! - awake. I throw on a t-shirt and jeans, twist my hair up on top of my head, and discover him in the kitchen, making scrambled eggs. Diego is sitting on a kitchen chair, apparently watching with interest.
"Good morning, sunshine," I say cheerfully. "How'd you sleep?"
"Really good. Thanks." Kay scrapes the eggs around the frying pan. "I owe you breakfast. I think Diego wanted to help."
"Of course he did." I pull out a chair and sit in it. I don't mind that Kay has apparently gone through my fridge, my pantry, and my cupboards, and clearly neither does he. "Do you want some coffee?"
"No, that's ok."
"Do you still feel like something horrible is going to happen?"
"Not horrible, just... something. Sort of. I think. I don't know." His shoulders tense. I feel bad.
"I'm sorry," I tell him. He pulls the frying pan off the stovetop, puts it on the counter, and opens a cabinet, seemingly at random. It's full of cups and glasses and plastic containers. "Next one. On the left. How many cabinets did you open before you found the frying pan?"
"Two."
I take pity on him and get out silverware and napkins, two juice glasses, the carton of orange juice. I hope he likes pulp.
I set the table. Kay divides the eggs between the plates. I pop some bread in the toaster. Diego sticks his furry face in my plate, licks my eggs, makes the cutest, most disgusted face, and hops off the chair. He saunters out of the kitchen.
"That was gross," Kay observes. "I can make you more eggs. I didn't finish them."
"Don't worry about it." I wipe my eggs with a napkin, more for show than because I object to the idea of eating something that my cat just tasted. I'll put ketchup on my breakfast and I'll never be able to tell that Diego wanted to try it.
We have butter and jam on our toast and Kay looks grossed out by my ketchup. And then he puts sugar in his orange juice and I'm appalled.
"That is the most horrifying thing I've seen all week," I say, aghast. I can imagine orange growers all over Florida staring at my kitchen in disbelief. "You don't put sugar in your orange juice. It already has sugar in it!"
"It's tart," Kay says. "I don't like it tart."
"Where did you learn to put sugar in it?"
"Nowhere. I just tried it one day and liked it."
I add that to the random collection of things I know about him. My cat likes him and he puts sugar in his orange juice.
He cleans up after breakfast and I go into the bathroom to take my hair down, comb it out - it's still damp from having been twisted into a bun - and braid it. It's a nice day and I have nothing to do, and while I was originally planning to spend some of my morning painting, it seems rude to do that with Kay hanging around. So he helps me tend to the garden instead. We weed and pull dead leaves and harvest some tomatoes and shoo away a couple of curious squirrels. Maybe I need to throw some more change in between the rows of neatly planted cauliflower and eggplants and zucchini and leeks, and the empty spot where my cucumbers were. The magpies have clearly let their diligence lapse, if small rodents are approaching my garden while I'm still in it.
It's warm and sunny and crawling all over the garden is very pleasant. Kay and I don't talk about much, but we don't have to, and when we're done I offer him a zucchini for his troubles. He's not interested, but he does volunteer to take some tomatoes off my hands.
"Tomato sandwiches," he explains. "Butter the bread and put some salt on the tomatoes. It's really good."
"Butter?" I repeat.
"Yeah. Why not?"
"Why?" I can think of a lot better things to put on a sliced tomato besides butter. Kay just shrugs, unbothered by my disapproval. "I should probably head out to the studio. There's always paperwork to do. Do you want to come with? Or I can give you a ride somewhere. Or you can stay here, if you want, but I won't be home until late."
This is how much I trust him, that I'd willingly offer to let him stay in my house by himself. But Kay has never given me reason to think it would be a bad idea.
"Can you just take me into town?" he asks.
"Sure. Anywhere in particular?"
"The record store?"
The fact that there's a university here is the single reason we still have an honest-to-goodness record store, with honest-to-goodness records for sale. I no longer have a record player, but every so often I'll go in and just wander the aisles looking at all the record sleeves and poking through the CDs. You might be surprised at the design ideas I can get from a pile of used LPs.
Kay says goodbye to Diego and I take him into town and drop him off at the record store. I tell him to take it easy. He thanks me for letting him stay over. I tell him he was much more polite than the last person I shared a bed with, and he blushes.
He waves me off with a "See you later" and goes inside the store, and I drive to work.
* * *
I'm about twenty minutes from finishing a mandala style design on the back of a client's shoulder when Kona interrupts me to tell me there are two kids who need to see me and who won't wait.
"They'll have to," I tell him. "I'm almost done."
"Good," mutters the client, a heavyset red-haired guy who already has several tattoos but doesn't seem to enjoy the process at all.
"Deep breaths," I remind him. "I have maybe twenty minutes."
"That's not 'almost done'."
"Are you Sparrow?" someone says, close enough to make me look up.
The speaker is a girl, probably in her late teens but maybe twenty - I'd guess about Kay's age - with black hair and black eyes and brown skin. The boy with her looks enough like her to be her twin.
"I told you they wouldn't wait," Kona says, and goes back to the waiting area, where he was tidying up and trying to reorganize the appointment book when these kids came in.
"Where's Kay?" the girl demands.
"What?" I ask. "I don't know. I haven't seen him. Can you wait? I'm working." I turn back to my client's shoulder.
"He's missing."
I straighten up and fix the girl with the sternest, most sit-down-and-shut-up glare I can muster. She's not short, but neither am I, and even in my Keds I can look down at her. "And I am working. Go over there" - I gesture to the couch in the waiting area with my free hand - "and wait until I'm done. I'm not gonna talk to you while I'm in the middle of something."
"But you - "
"Alene," the boy says. "Come on." He practically drags her away and I go back to my tattoo.
Only after my red-haired client is finished and bandaged and paid for do I turn my attention to the kids. Sitting together on the couch, they look freakily similar, except the girl looks angry and the boy mostly looks resigned.
"Ok," I say, not bothering to sit, "who are you and what's your problem?"
"Kay's missing," the boy says, "and we thought you might know where he is."
"What makes you think that?"
"Because he's here all the time."
"A couple-three times a week."
"Do you know where he is?" the girl asks, speaking slowly as if she thinks I'm stupid.
"No. I don't. If he comes by I'll let him know you were looking for him."
"You haven't seen him in a week. You don't think that's weird?"
Now that she mentions it, I do. But she put my back up and I'm not about to concede any points to a pushy girl fourteen years younger than I am.
"What I think is that you're wasting my time," I say, "unless you have any clues to offer me as to where I might start looking for him."
"We don't know," the boy says. "That's why we're here."
I sigh. "Look. I have a client coming in twenty minutes and I have to clean up my station and get ready for her. If I see Kay I'll send him home. I don't know what else you want me to do."
"Help us look for him!" the girl cries.
Maya picks this moment to walk in the door.
"Uh... did someone lose something?" she asks.
"Someone," I tell her. "Apparently Kay's gone missing."
"Kay. Oh! The skinny kid! Your boyfriend." She grins.
"Him. I haven't seen him in a week. I didn't realize."
To be fair, I've been busy. I met Maggie the kickboxer for a coffee date that went well enough for us to set up a real date. I went to Maya's house for breakfast twice, Kona's house for dinner once, and another friend's house for dessert after a movie. I met people for drinks. I inked a lot of clients, worked on tattoos for a lot more, drew up some new flash designs, ordered a lot of supplies, cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. I talked to Alicia one night for three hours, mostly about her aunt. I fielded one phone call from my sister and two from Nila. I talked to Grandma Dolly. I took Diego to the vet for a check-up, on Alicia's suggestion. I ignored a phone call from my mother. I made tomato sauce. I painted, I worked in my garden, I replaced my microwave, I had to get a new tire for my car after I ran over a nail. I did a lot of yoga. I did laundry. I dropped coins in my garden to distract the magpies and put out bread and milk to placate the brownies. I did not see anyone else turn into a spiky woodland creature, although I did see a fox in my back yard, and it did look to me as if it had three tails.
I haven't been paying attention to the passage of time, other than to mark appointments at my studio. And now that I know it's been a week since I saw Kay, and now that I remember his belief that something's coming, a storm he can taste on the back of his tongue, now I might be a little worried.
words: 1936
total words: 19,352
Kay is still fast asleep, so I slide out of bed as quietly as possible, make a pit stop in the bathroom, and go into the kitchen to feed and water the cat and make myself some coffee.
I've never needed a lot of sleep, and most mornings I don't need the caffeine, but I like to ease into my day, and sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee is a good way to do that. I consider breakfast, decide I should probably wait until my houseguest is awake because it would be rude to eat without him, and then lean down and pick Diego up and put him on the table. He sniffs my coffee, sneezes, and jumps back down to the floor. He sits on my feet. He's fuzzy and warm and heavy.
"You're a weird cat," I tell him. "But so cute."
Kay is still asleep even after I've finished my coffee. Shower, then. I take a long one, because I can, and when I get out Kay is finally - finally! - awake. I throw on a t-shirt and jeans, twist my hair up on top of my head, and discover him in the kitchen, making scrambled eggs. Diego is sitting on a kitchen chair, apparently watching with interest.
"Good morning, sunshine," I say cheerfully. "How'd you sleep?"
"Really good. Thanks." Kay scrapes the eggs around the frying pan. "I owe you breakfast. I think Diego wanted to help."
"Of course he did." I pull out a chair and sit in it. I don't mind that Kay has apparently gone through my fridge, my pantry, and my cupboards, and clearly neither does he. "Do you want some coffee?"
"No, that's ok."
"Do you still feel like something horrible is going to happen?"
"Not horrible, just... something. Sort of. I think. I don't know." His shoulders tense. I feel bad.
"I'm sorry," I tell him. He pulls the frying pan off the stovetop, puts it on the counter, and opens a cabinet, seemingly at random. It's full of cups and glasses and plastic containers. "Next one. On the left. How many cabinets did you open before you found the frying pan?"
"Two."
I take pity on him and get out silverware and napkins, two juice glasses, the carton of orange juice. I hope he likes pulp.
I set the table. Kay divides the eggs between the plates. I pop some bread in the toaster. Diego sticks his furry face in my plate, licks my eggs, makes the cutest, most disgusted face, and hops off the chair. He saunters out of the kitchen.
"That was gross," Kay observes. "I can make you more eggs. I didn't finish them."
"Don't worry about it." I wipe my eggs with a napkin, more for show than because I object to the idea of eating something that my cat just tasted. I'll put ketchup on my breakfast and I'll never be able to tell that Diego wanted to try it.
We have butter and jam on our toast and Kay looks grossed out by my ketchup. And then he puts sugar in his orange juice and I'm appalled.
"That is the most horrifying thing I've seen all week," I say, aghast. I can imagine orange growers all over Florida staring at my kitchen in disbelief. "You don't put sugar in your orange juice. It already has sugar in it!"
"It's tart," Kay says. "I don't like it tart."
"Where did you learn to put sugar in it?"
"Nowhere. I just tried it one day and liked it."
I add that to the random collection of things I know about him. My cat likes him and he puts sugar in his orange juice.
He cleans up after breakfast and I go into the bathroom to take my hair down, comb it out - it's still damp from having been twisted into a bun - and braid it. It's a nice day and I have nothing to do, and while I was originally planning to spend some of my morning painting, it seems rude to do that with Kay hanging around. So he helps me tend to the garden instead. We weed and pull dead leaves and harvest some tomatoes and shoo away a couple of curious squirrels. Maybe I need to throw some more change in between the rows of neatly planted cauliflower and eggplants and zucchini and leeks, and the empty spot where my cucumbers were. The magpies have clearly let their diligence lapse, if small rodents are approaching my garden while I'm still in it.
It's warm and sunny and crawling all over the garden is very pleasant. Kay and I don't talk about much, but we don't have to, and when we're done I offer him a zucchini for his troubles. He's not interested, but he does volunteer to take some tomatoes off my hands.
"Tomato sandwiches," he explains. "Butter the bread and put some salt on the tomatoes. It's really good."
"Butter?" I repeat.
"Yeah. Why not?"
"Why?" I can think of a lot better things to put on a sliced tomato besides butter. Kay just shrugs, unbothered by my disapproval. "I should probably head out to the studio. There's always paperwork to do. Do you want to come with? Or I can give you a ride somewhere. Or you can stay here, if you want, but I won't be home until late."
This is how much I trust him, that I'd willingly offer to let him stay in my house by himself. But Kay has never given me reason to think it would be a bad idea.
"Can you just take me into town?" he asks.
"Sure. Anywhere in particular?"
"The record store?"
The fact that there's a university here is the single reason we still have an honest-to-goodness record store, with honest-to-goodness records for sale. I no longer have a record player, but every so often I'll go in and just wander the aisles looking at all the record sleeves and poking through the CDs. You might be surprised at the design ideas I can get from a pile of used LPs.
Kay says goodbye to Diego and I take him into town and drop him off at the record store. I tell him to take it easy. He thanks me for letting him stay over. I tell him he was much more polite than the last person I shared a bed with, and he blushes.
He waves me off with a "See you later" and goes inside the store, and I drive to work.
I'm about twenty minutes from finishing a mandala style design on the back of a client's shoulder when Kona interrupts me to tell me there are two kids who need to see me and who won't wait.
"They'll have to," I tell him. "I'm almost done."
"Good," mutters the client, a heavyset red-haired guy who already has several tattoos but doesn't seem to enjoy the process at all.
"Deep breaths," I remind him. "I have maybe twenty minutes."
"That's not 'almost done'."
"Are you Sparrow?" someone says, close enough to make me look up.
The speaker is a girl, probably in her late teens but maybe twenty - I'd guess about Kay's age - with black hair and black eyes and brown skin. The boy with her looks enough like her to be her twin.
"I told you they wouldn't wait," Kona says, and goes back to the waiting area, where he was tidying up and trying to reorganize the appointment book when these kids came in.
"Where's Kay?" the girl demands.
"What?" I ask. "I don't know. I haven't seen him. Can you wait? I'm working." I turn back to my client's shoulder.
"He's missing."
I straighten up and fix the girl with the sternest, most sit-down-and-shut-up glare I can muster. She's not short, but neither am I, and even in my Keds I can look down at her. "And I am working. Go over there" - I gesture to the couch in the waiting area with my free hand - "and wait until I'm done. I'm not gonna talk to you while I'm in the middle of something."
"But you - "
"Alene," the boy says. "Come on." He practically drags her away and I go back to my tattoo.
Only after my red-haired client is finished and bandaged and paid for do I turn my attention to the kids. Sitting together on the couch, they look freakily similar, except the girl looks angry and the boy mostly looks resigned.
"Ok," I say, not bothering to sit, "who are you and what's your problem?"
"Kay's missing," the boy says, "and we thought you might know where he is."
"What makes you think that?"
"Because he's here all the time."
"A couple-three times a week."
"Do you know where he is?" the girl asks, speaking slowly as if she thinks I'm stupid.
"No. I don't. If he comes by I'll let him know you were looking for him."
"You haven't seen him in a week. You don't think that's weird?"
Now that she mentions it, I do. But she put my back up and I'm not about to concede any points to a pushy girl fourteen years younger than I am.
"What I think is that you're wasting my time," I say, "unless you have any clues to offer me as to where I might start looking for him."
"We don't know," the boy says. "That's why we're here."
I sigh. "Look. I have a client coming in twenty minutes and I have to clean up my station and get ready for her. If I see Kay I'll send him home. I don't know what else you want me to do."
"Help us look for him!" the girl cries.
Maya picks this moment to walk in the door.
"Uh... did someone lose something?" she asks.
"Someone," I tell her. "Apparently Kay's gone missing."
"Kay. Oh! The skinny kid! Your boyfriend." She grins.
"Him. I haven't seen him in a week. I didn't realize."
To be fair, I've been busy. I met Maggie the kickboxer for a coffee date that went well enough for us to set up a real date. I went to Maya's house for breakfast twice, Kona's house for dinner once, and another friend's house for dessert after a movie. I met people for drinks. I inked a lot of clients, worked on tattoos for a lot more, drew up some new flash designs, ordered a lot of supplies, cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. I talked to Alicia one night for three hours, mostly about her aunt. I fielded one phone call from my sister and two from Nila. I talked to Grandma Dolly. I took Diego to the vet for a check-up, on Alicia's suggestion. I ignored a phone call from my mother. I made tomato sauce. I painted, I worked in my garden, I replaced my microwave, I had to get a new tire for my car after I ran over a nail. I did a lot of yoga. I did laundry. I dropped coins in my garden to distract the magpies and put out bread and milk to placate the brownies. I did not see anyone else turn into a spiky woodland creature, although I did see a fox in my back yard, and it did look to me as if it had three tails.
I haven't been paying attention to the passage of time, other than to mark appointments at my studio. And now that I know it's been a week since I saw Kay, and now that I remember his belief that something's coming, a storm he can taste on the back of his tongue, now I might be a little worried.
words: 1936
total words: 19,352
