He shook his head. “Dogs are easy. You get a dog. You train him what to do, he does it. There’s no fun in that. You can’t train a cat. A cat does what a cat wants to do. It likes who it wants to like. A dog lives to please you. A cat lives to be pleased. Randomly, every week or two, she curls into me while I watch television. I feel like I’ve won a medal.”

Through all of this, I was smiling up at him, and when he stopped speaking, I didn’t quit.

Then he kept talking.

“Though, if I wake up in the middle of the night, almost always, she’s with me at my feet or in the bend of my knees. Last night, she slept on the back of the couch. She senses me awake and then she’s gone. So I know somewhere along the line, I won her. She just wants to make sure I keep putting in the work.”

Keep putting in the work.

I was still smiling, but my heart had started beating a lot faster.

I ignored that and asked, “What’s her name?”

“Cleo, after Cleopatra, because she’s a queen.”

Oh wow.

Okay.

I was getting that he really liked his cat.

“Did you rescue her?”

“Nope. I stole her.”

I felt my head twitch in surprise. “You stole her?”

“Yep.” He nodded. “My neighbors are assholes. Their kids are arguably bigger assholes. I saw the kids out there with her, I knew shit was about to get real. I was right. I didn’t like what I saw, and I won’t share what it was. I was deciding how to intervene when I was coming home from a run, and Cleo, still a little kitten, was in their backyard alone, freaked, mewing repeatedly, wandering the grass like it was a war zone and every step she took might mean she’d hit a mine. I jumped their fence and took her. The dad saw me, came over and got in my shit. I told him either he let me keep the cat or I take the cat to the vet and he can talk to a cop about why he’s letting his kids abuse an animal. And I advised him to keep that in mind if he thinks about getting his kids another animal. Haven’t talked to the man since. They still live there, and Cleo’s three years old. And they never got another animal.”

He hadn’t shared the exact truth.

He did, indeed, rescue his cat.

Just not the normal way.

So, Axl was a man who would rush into danger to rescue Ryn and jump a fence to rescue a cat.

Yeah.

How did I get this lucky?

I didn’t want to ask my next.

But I asked.

“Did you…take her to see a vet?”

He nodded, this time shortly.