Page 56 of Never Too Late

I was still trying to take it all in and make sense of it when Cillian appeared. “Hey!” he said, hooking an arm around my waist and greeting me with a kiss on the cheek that had I not still been transfixed by all the cat stuff, would probably have been domestic enough to make me swoon. There were times during our ill-fated first attempt at a relationship where I would havecut off my arm for something as simple as that kiss. “I hate to be the one to break it to you,” I said. “but I think Quasimodo sneaked on your laptop while you weren’t looking. You might want to check your bank statement.”

There were a couple of seconds of confusion before Cillian got it and smiled. He gave an embarrassed little shrug. “I figured he could do with a few things.”

I finally got around to letting the door close behind me and dropped my work bag on the floor. “This is not a few things. There was a moment when I walked in where I thought I’d taken a wrong turn and walked into a pet shop instead.”

Cillian grimaced. “Too much?” He surveyed the array of cat stuff, as if trying to see it through fresh eyes. “Some of it can probably go back. Not the cat tree because he’s already been on that, and he likes it. And we played with some of the toys, so we probably can’t return them now that he’s bitten and clawed them, even if we wanted to. He likes the tunnel. He spent an hour in there while I had lunch. Maybe the litter tray?”

“It self cleans, right?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Sounds much easier than me having to do it.”

Cillian nodded. “It automatically weighs him as well. It’s really useful for monitoring their diet and checking they’re not overweight.”

“Has he been in the wheel?”

“Not yet.”

“Maybe the wheel can go back. It’s rather big.”

Cillian followed as I wandered into the kitchen to explore the interesting smells coming out of it. “I just thought with him being an indoor cat, he might need the exercise now.”

“Good point. We’ll keep it.” I hastened to correct myself. “I mean, I’ll keep it.” Although the “we” could have been me and Quasimodo rather than Cillian and me. Too late for thatrealization when I’d already made it into a thing, but if Cillian had picked up on it, he didn’t comment.

The kitchen was where the music was coming from, Cillian’s laptop playing something I didn’t recognize. I waved a hand at it. “You’re going to have to turn that down or we’ll have my next-door neighbor hammering on the door. She is not a fan of any sound above a whisper.”

“Ada?”

I turned slowly to face Cillian. “Who?”

Cillian jerked his head toward the flat that adjoined mine. “Ada from next door. Lovely woman. We had a long chat earlier.”

The struggle to wrap my head around what he was saying took some time. “You call her Ada?”

Cillian lifted the pan lid to stir the contents inside. “She insisted I did.”

This was beginning to feel like I’d walked into a parallel universe. “Did I bang my head?”

Abandoning the pan, Cillian was in front of me in a flash, probing gently at my scalp. “Did you? I can’t feel anything.” He tugged me closer to the light. “I can’t see any bruising or swelling. Have you been experiencing any dizziness or nausea? What about double vision?”

I pushed him off. “I didn’t bang my head. I’m fine. I just feel like I did.”

“Why?”

I shook my head. “Cat things. Cooking. Ada.” I waved a hand at him. “You’re even wearing an apron.” He was, the black apron emblazoned withI’ll feed all of you fuckers across the front. “I don’t think I saw you in anything except a suit, or naked, the entire six months we were together.”

“Yeah,” he said, glancing down at it. “It was this orMr. Good Looking is Cooking, which seemed a little too arrogant. Adathought it was funny. Although, I think some of it might have gotten lost in translation.”

“I need to sit down.” True to my word, I went back into the living room and threw myself down on the sofa. A hard lump under my thigh proved to be a fuzzy blue mouse when I extracted it. I stared at it, small beady black eyes staring back at me. “Where is Quasimodo?”

Cillian perched on the arm of the sofa. “In his cat condo in the bedroom.”

“In hiswhat?” My voice was at least three octaves higher than it should have been.

“His cat condo,” Cillian said with a nod. “I had to get rid of the bed, but I figured you wouldn’t mind. Not when Quasi has had such a hard life.” The three seconds he maintained a straight face before his lips twitched to reveal he was talking crap were three seconds too long. “He’s on the bed,” he said. “I think he wore himself out exploring all the stuff.”

“You’re not funny.”

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