Page 24 of At the Heart of It
Jossy frowned. “So what does she want you to do?”
Jonah shrugged. “Show up and throw out one-liners and straight talk, I assume. Stuff like, “Dude, you’ve gotta go down on her first if you want regular BJs. And keep the hedge trimmed. No woman wants to feel like she’s licking a dog.”
Jossy made a gagging sound. “So you’re going to do the Average Joe shtick again?”
“No. Did you miss the part where I said I told her I wasn’t interested?”
“I heard it. I just know Viv has a way of talking you into things.”
Jonah felt a stab of annoyance. At Jossy, at Viv, at himself—he wasn’t quite sure. He stuck a finger through the bars of the eyebrow cat’s cage to scratch under her chin, and was rewarded by a gravelly purr that brought his blood pressure back to normal.
“Trust me,” Jonah said. “If I were going to change my mind, it wouldn’t be because of anything Viv said.”
His brain flashed on a memory of Kate huffing along beside him, asking real questions instead of firing crap at him about how great the show was going to be or baiting him with reasons he owed it to people to do it. Had Viv told her to try the money angle?
Unlikely. True, Viv knew about Jossy’s special needs and about the animal shelter. But she had no way of knowing how badly the money might be needed. Not small amounts either. Not the few thousand dollars here and there that Jonah persuaded Jossy to take as donations to the shelter. The amounts Kate had shown him on those forms, those were different. Not keep-things-afloat amounts. Those were life-changing amounts.
While Jonah might like his life just fine, he’d give almost anything to improve his sister’s.
“What are you looking at, dork?” Jossy asked.
He’d been staring at her, but there was no way he’d admit that. “What’s the story with this cat, anyway?” he asked.
“Owner surrender.”
“What the hell for?”
Jossy shrugged and slipped a finger through the bars to scratch at the base of cat’s fluffy black tail. The cat boosted her butt in the air and purred harder. “They tried to give some bullshit reason about her being, ‘not the right fit’ for the family, but that’s code for ‘I liked the idea of having a cat more than I like actually having a cat and now I don’t want to scoop the litter box.’”
“Poor girl.” Empathy tugged Jonah’s gut, and he thought back to his conversation with Kate.
“We liked the idea of each other, but not the day-to-day drudgery of it.”
Beside him, Jossy sighed. “It’s okay. We’ll find her the right home.”
The cat opened her eyes and looked at Jonah. Her eyebrows lifted, shifting her expression from mild disdain to “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
A damn fine question.
“That reminds me, Beth called,” Jossy said.
“Why is my store manager calling you now instead of me?”
“Because I’m nicer,” she said. “And I’m the one who keeps your cat café full of adoptable felines, moron.”
“Can you repeat the part about you being nicer?”
“She said they adopted out two more cats yesterday,” Jossy continued, ignoring him. “So I need to send you with a couple more. You want this one?”
“This one?” Jonah looked at the eyebrow cat. The cat twitched her nose, lifting the beauty mark on her upper lip.
“Her vaccines are up-to-date and I’d just as soon get her into a social situation instead of having her stuck here in a cage.”
Jonah looked back at the cat and felt something shift in the center of his chest. A cat-shaped hole, maybe. He grunted.
“Sure. Go ahead and stuff her in a box.”
“What do you think about this giraffe sculpture?”
