Page 54 of Back to You
“Custard!” I shouted, half in outrage and half in fear, because what if we couldn’t find him for real this time? I dropped the pizza box on the couch and grabbed Dane by the arm. “We gotta go after him.” It didn’t matter that it was raining cats and dogs and we were already soaked to the bone. What mattered was that we didn’t abandon our asshole of a cat in the middle of South Carolina. “Dane!”
“I’m right behind you,” he assured me, and we began the hunt. I wasn’t even sure where to look, but we had to start somewhere. “Custard? Kitty-kitty?” we called out, again and again.
“Lose your cat?” asked a hunch-backed old lady with a kindly smile. “Kinda scrawny? Yellow-striped? Saw him run that-a-way, towards the park.”
“Thank you! Kitty-kitty? Kibbles!” Dane shook the metal pet bowl, which he’d brilliantly filled with Custard’s favorite hard treats, rattling the food inside the dish.
“Damn it. He’s not here,” I whined, wiping at my hair with a sopping wet sleeve. “What if he’s gone forever? What if we can’t find him? Dane, what if—” I gasped when Dane stepped into my space, silencing me with a firm kiss.
“We aren’t giving up,” he promised me. “We’ll keep looking. Cats don’t like to be wet, right? Maybe he’s found someplace dry to hang out. In a tree? Maybe? Or under someone’s camper? We’ll find him.”
Rain poured down around us. We probably looked a hot mess, soaked to the skin, our clothes heavy with water and our hair plastered to our scalps. Dane grabbed my hand. We kept looking, kept calling his name, untilfinallywe heard a very disgruntled meow.
“Hollister!” Dane cried, pointing up. Sure enough, a bedraggled Custard clung to a low-hanging tree limb, his ears pinned flat and his tail lashing. He was wet and he wasnothappy. I reached for him, but Dane pulled me back. “He loves me, remember?”
Somehow, he managed to get ahold of the cat. Pinning him tight to his chest despite Custard’s yowling and yammering, we ran back to our RV. I grabbed a couple of towels. Dane started rubbing the water out of Custard’s fur. He looked pissed when Dane finally let him go. He glared at us both, then sulked off to lick himself dry.
“Strip,” Dane said, and we both got naked. I threw a towel at him, then began to ring water out of my hair. Our squishy clothes lay in a puddle of water in the middle of the kitchenette, but fuck it. We were going to eat cold pizza and then we were going to bed.
Lying there together, with Custard snoozing at the end of the bed, Dane smiled. “I like this old grump,” he said, pointing down at the cat with his toes. “There’s something about Custard that makes me smile.”
I nibbled on my lip for a moment, then said, “When we get back home and figure things out, maybe we could adopt a kitten together? It could be our first kid.”
Dane liked this idea, I could tell. He leaned over and captured my lips in a kiss, pulling back only enough so that he could gaze into my eyes. My heartbeat stumbled over itself as I realized just how in love with this man I was.
His blue eyes were soulful. “Wanna know what I think?”
“Mmm?”
“I think us running into each other again was fate, plain and simple. We were meant to happen,” he said.
“Then you should thank Custard,” I told him. “If it wasn’t for him stealing the chicken Gran had painstakingly cooked us for dinner, I never would’ve been at the store that night. I never would’ve seen you, and this,” I gestured between us. “Never would’ve happened, but I’m so glad it did.”
“Me too, Hols. Me too.”
