Page 3 of Justice & Liberty

I would never hear from her again. Never be able to call her when everything was going wrong and have her soothing voice wash over me, shoving away all the wrong in the world.

I slid down to my knees on the pavement in the breezeway in front of my apartment. Ostensibly, it was to pick my keys up, even though I could barely see them in the waning light and through the blur of tears. For a moment, though, I just knelt there and sobbed.

A plaintive meow was what finally grabbed my attention, and it made me snatch the keys up and try again. Poor Bee probably knew I was out there, and she needed me. I’d beengone almost a week, and it was longer than we’d been apart in her whole life.

Hex had stayed with September in Iowa, and suddenly I wished I’d brought her with me. Like maybe having her there would make things better.

Weirdly, though, when I managed to fumble the front door open, Bee wasn’t there to greet me.

“Bee?” I asked the vacant entryway as I closed the door behind me, and there was another pitiful meow. It was coming from the coat closet.

I crossed the entryway and threw the closet open, and a black blur leaped at me. I barely had the mental power left to hold out my hands and catch my cat as she flung herself at my chest, landing gracefully in my arms as though that had been her intention all along. She braced her paws on my collarbones and leaned up to furiously mark my face with her own.

The message was clear:don’t do that again.

But also, why had she been in the closet? It had happened once before, and Tanya had suggested Bee had somehow locked herself in the coat closet, but that didn’t seem awfully likely. She never went in there, even when I was putting coats away, and besides, it was March in LA. No one was wearing a coat.

“That cat is crying again,” an unfamiliar feminine voice said from the direction of the hallway. “Are you sure it’s not in here somewhere? I swear it’s coming from?—”

A beautiful, wispy blonde came around the corner, wearing nothing but one of Tanya’s old jerseys. She made a hell of a picture like that, the jersey coming halfway down her slender tanned thighs, hair flowing loose around her shoulders. She froze when she saw me, my cat in my arms, blinking, then her eyes narrowed.

“Hey,” she called back down the hallway. “You said yourroommate isn’t going to be back until Monday, right? What washisname? Jay?”

The slight emphasis on the word his told me that this query was for my benefit, not her own.

“Yeah,” Tanya yelled back, sounding distracted. “Why? You want to stay the rest of the weekend?”

“Jay, I presume?” the blonde said quietly, her jaw tight.

“Jaycie,” I half-agreed, and I couldn’t help the sob that slipped out with it.

It wasn’t for Tanya. I wasn’t...I didn’t know how I felt about the revelation that my girlfriend of three years was cheating on me, but all I could muster up was a sort of numb irritation, mostly because she’d locked my cat in the coat closet so she could get laid.

It had been a good choice, though.

Bee probably would have scratched her eyes out.

The blonde rushed to my side, reaching out to take my elbow, but hesitating at the last minute. Her voice was still low as she spoke up, like she didn’t want Tanya to hear. “I’m sorry. I...do you want me to go? Or...I think there’s tea. I could make some.”

Of course there was tea. My tea.

I swallowed hard and nodded. “Tea would be...good. There’s a lavender blend next to the electric kettle. Could you?—”

“Of course,” she agreed, and rushed off toward the kitchen. I wandered into the living room, sinking down onto the lumpy sofa, the only piece of real, non-particle-board furniture in the room. There was a quilt thrown over the back of it.

A quilt Mom had made me.

I tugged it out from behind me and wrapped it around my own shoulders without getting up. Bee didn’t budge from myarms, snuggling as close as she could get and purring like a tiny black motorboat.

For a moment, all I could do was stare off into space.

There was a stranger in my kitchen making me tea. A stranger who’d clearly been sleeping with my girlfriend. A stranger who’d shown me more humanity than that girlfriend.

“ ’Cause you know, my weekend is wide open,” Tanya continued the previous conversation with the stranger, coming down the hallway.

To her credit, she froze when she saw me sitting there with Bee in my arms.

Bee was the only one with violence on her mind. She hissed at Tanya and lunged toward her, only stopped in her quest to draw blood by me holding her tight.

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