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He looks straight at you. He’s sitting on the coffee table, and he’s not supposed to be up there in the first place. You’ve told him that. But there he is, all naked muscle and furry little ears, and he’s inching your glass of water off it.
“Nonono!” you tell him. “Kitty, no. No.”
He nudges the glass further toward the edge of the table.
“No!” you insist. “Ssss. No! No, yeah?”
He doesn’t even look down at it, and pushes it off. Crash. Razor-sharp fragments and water go everywhere. He’s still looking at you, pointy shades blank, the rest of his expression utterly inert and yet, somehow, implying that all this is your fault.
At some point this seemed like a good idea.
You remember that point pretty well, actually. It had been one of those days, after one of those nights where you were out there just being there for people as hard as you could but nobody was even vaguely fucking interested in what a great listener you were and what a cushy shoulder to cry on you had and how you were totally prepared at a moment’s notice to drop everything and offer totally unconditional support to any of your friends who might find themselves in an emotionally vulnerable state.
Yeah, that hadn’t gone well.
You were salving your viciously abused pride with some explicit pitch videos on one of your favorite sites, strictly to take the edge off, when one of those shitty advertisements popped up for something called e_bubblr. In a moment of weakness, you made a profile. Two weeks later you were on the verge of making sweet pail to the weird human guy who ran the place, and a few weeks after that you were telling him you wanted to take things to a new level. You’d been reading some things, looking at some saucy snapshots, and for all that you’ve been calling people cats and kittens longer than you can remember, you hadn’t ever really realized that having somebody around who was actually your kitten was a thing that could happen. That sounded swell to you--somebody who’d listen to you, somebody you could play your music for, somebody who’d be happy to see you and who you could pail all the time, wow. Who’d come up with this pet person thing? Best idea ever.
He thought that was a fucking great idea, the new level thing. He’d always wanted to marry a dead-ass troll, he said.
Better than that, you’d said, something a little friskier than that, and pulled out the kitty ears, tail, and a pair of ladies’ frillies. He hadn’t been impressed, at first, and had said so.
You called him kitten-cheeks and helpfully pointed out how strokable he was and how he’d obviously liked it when you told him what to do, and that you’d always wanted a cat of your very own to love and cherish and spoil and, like, be there for. Whatever it was that people other than Meulin did with cats, except in a cool way that meant you could still pail without things getting awkward. Or something to that effect, anyway, the important thing was that you’ve always had a way with words, and the ears and such were so fuckin’ pink and SO fuckin’ feminine they were basically just sucking up. They were pastel tyrian, for chute’s sake, could you possibly have made it any clearer that you were going to treat your baby kitty heiress like an empress as long as he was good to you? You asked that, straight out. Could you?
He’d given you a look. Humans were hard to read sometimes but you figured he was going for it, because who wouldn’t?
So you want me to be a meowbeast, he’d said. It was cute when humans spoke like lowbloods.
My meowbeast, you’d said, petting his back through that shirt with its hotsy-totsy sticky-up collar, because you had so clearly nailed it.
Hell yeah, he’d said, and he’s been your meowbeast ever since. That was maybe a quarter-sweep ago. And he’s just knocked something off your table, not for the first time or even the twentieth.
“Ssss!” you hiss at him again, standing up to chase him off the table. He hops off it, not like a cat but just like somebody getting off a table, and looks back over his shoulder at you. He looks so...unimpressed. Like a real cat, but kind of also like a total jerk who doesn’t even vaguely appreciate all this sweet treatment he’s getting. You put out food in his dish twice a day, you cleaned the litter box last night, and you are absolutely not depriving him of bone bulge at all. He’s clearly just a naughty kitty, which is totally hot. And that’s kind of the point of this whole deal, so you dodge the wet spot and the bigger, more obvious pieces of broken glass to get over there and get right up in his business, all authoritative.
“Bad kitty,” you say. “Bad. NO.”
“Yeah about that,” he says.
You cut him off. “Ssss!” Cats don’t talk, it just wrecks the whole motif of the scene when he talks and you’ve told him not to do it. You point at the floor. “Down!” That’s a dog thing, but he’s a human; he probably doesn’t know the difference. He’s supposed to kneel when you say it, that’s the important thing.
He’s not supposed to be grinning either, and he so very much is, but he does drop his knees one by one to the floor and hang out there at your feet. Puts his hands on the floor all cupped up next to each other so cute and fussy, too. He’s just like a real cat, even if he’s twenty times the size and is covered with spotted brown skin instead of fur and when he raises his hand up to lick it and groom his plush pink ear with it, it makes you think of lowblood words like slinkbeast. You can’t stay mad. Also, you have a tent in your pants.
“Groom me,” you say, because that’s cat for “lick my nook”. Apparently. You read that somewhere. Cats lick their nooks in public all the time.
Long story short, he does. He crawls straight over there with exciting undulating shoulders and undoes your pants with the opposable thumbs he’s not supposed to have as a cat and he licks your nook like it’s the catnip treat you gave him--which he ignores when he’s not trying to show off the weird things he can do with his tongue, which is exactly what he’s doing. You get the shit pailed out of you like it’s your goddamned wriggling day right there in the pseudo-habitatblock of your bubble, right there where anyone could see you, and when it’s over he sits on you.
“Purr,” he says, flatly.
“You’re fuckin’ heavy,” you tell him.
“Your mom’s fuckin’ heavy,” he says, and licks his hand.