“I’m sorry, Frankie. But it just isn’t healthy. We have to use a bottle,” I told my pug for the seventh time today. He let loose another disgusted harrumph, watching the kitten intently. She lay on her tummy, head and chest resting on Frankie’s paw as she messily feed from the little bottle, her itty bitty paws happily kneading his. 

The last two nights were Tommy’s first shifts back at the hospital since we discovered the tiny beast —two thoroughly sleepless nights— and now my dog was barely talking to me. Frankie was frustrated beyond measure by my desire to nap and the fact that he was unable to feed his kitten himself. He kept gesturing toward my computer every time we fed her. I was so exhausted that I made the mistake of giving in to his demands for an unorthodox solution to our little problem. We did some research on methods of inducing lactation in humans and animals, and there actually were hormones and medications that could possibly make a neutered male dog produce milk. But of course it was extremely dangerous and I loved Frankie too much to let him go through with that when he couldn’t fully comprehend the long-term implications. Unfortunately, I read the articles to him aloud and now my pug was angry with me.

I tried to explain this all to Chance and Xander, but apparently “my dog is angry that I won’t let him breastfeed his kitten” was too much for my wonderful, supportive friends to handle, and they just laughed at me. At least they gave in and agreed to let their pets Skype with Frankie at some point, for his peace of mind.

“There’s nothing wrong with accepting help from people who love you,” I insisted, which earned me some serious side-eye, considering how long I’d gone without accepting help for my own issues. However, I was accepting help now. We’d stayed with Xander and his family after the hospital, after all, and Logan sent tons of recipes for healthy snacks. And then there was Tommy and his stubborn insistence on co-parenting this kitten — I had no idea how we’d get through the next couple of weeks without his help.

How had my sister woken up every two hours for months? This was likely why baby animals were so frakking cute and why poor, deluded people like my sister thought their newborns were adorable even though they all looked like old-man-aliens. Actually, this kitten was barely feline yet and, no matter what anyone said, her tortoiseshell coloring was not at all attractive. But she was an endearing sort of ugly.

When she was done eating, as signaled by the droplets of formula coating her face instead of filling her tummy, I cleaned up the kitten and Frankie licked his paw. We worked together to do the other necessary post-feeding rituals, then I put her in my shirt pocket and brought Frankie and the nest-box to the lecture hall ten minutes early. Of course, the small table that was usually in the room was nowhere to be seen, and Frankie refused to let me place them on the ground or on a seat in the hall nobody used. Resigned, I slipped the kitten in my pocket and Frankie put up a fuss until I donned his ‘doggie bjorn.’ Up until now, students hadn’t noticed them in their box, but my lectures weren’t so fascinating that it would distract them from a dog in a baby sling — I was relatively certain that I couldn’t paraphrase Igor from Mel Brooks’ ‘Young Frankenstein’ and say, “Dog? What dog?” 

I had two classes in a row, and fielded a number of questions about Frankie. I told them he had separation anxiety, which prompted students to offer unsolicited advice that didn’t apply at all to my intelligent pug’s situation. Several of them offered to pet-sit if I gave them an A —or some variation on that tune— and one student went so far as to email me information about a dog psychologist who also did psychic readings. 

Nobody noticed the kitten… until three-quarters of the way through my final lecture of the day. She started to stir and Frankie tried to comfort her, but eventually the little jerk started squeaking and squirming, which then upset Frankie. I tried pleading with her, but to no avail, so I removed her from my pocket, apologized to my students, and tried to give her a bottle, all while attempting to continue the lecture. But she decided a formula bath was more her style. Frustrated, I cleaned her off, swaddled her into a purrito, and put her back in my pocket. At that point, nobody could pay attention. So I told them to start their homework and I went round to answer questions, half of which were about the kitten, and the other half consisted of suggestions for her name.

I eventually announced that there would be a kitten-naming sheet taped onto my door and only stopped briefly in my office before locking up. I was thoroughly destroyed and in no shape to teach, grade, or drive, so I hailed an uber and brought my kooky little family home. The rest of the afternoon was a blur of not-napping and formula-covered-kitten and disapproving-pug-side-eye.

“Please shut up,” I whined at the kitten, walking back and forth in the living room in an attempt to soothe her. My sister said it worked with her babies. But the kitten’s shouts just became more strident. I had no idea what she wanted from me. I looked to Frankie, but he was no help; my canine companion clearly agreed with his daughter that I was an idiot. 

“I don’t think saying ‘please’ helped,” Tommy said from the kitchen, as he poured himself a glass of Fresca. I hadn’t even known they still made Fresca before I met him, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed the grapefruit-flavored, oddly cloudy, diet soda. 

“How long have you been standing there?” I asked. Usually every nerve in my body came alive when he came into a room, but exhaustion must have desensitized me to all but the most obnoxious stimuli; it was entirely possible that he’d been in that doorway for an hour without my noticing. 

“I came in about five minutes ago, but my hands were full of groceries and you were busy cleaning her up. Everything’s away now — I can take her,” he said, rounding the corner to sit next to me on the couch. I handed her over and she calmed. For a moment, I thought he had the magic touch, but she started squealing again a moment later when he didn’t immediately do whatever it was she wanted us to do. He grabbed the toothbrush and rubbed it over her head and back and that seemed to help calm her down.   

As soon as we agreed to enslaving ourselves to the feline terror, I gave Tommy a key. I told myself it was out of practicality, but the reality was that I loved having him here. I loved that he made himself at home. I loved that he was here, with me, every single day. I loved that I had a partner in the overwhelming endeavor that was battling to keep this tiny creature alive and happy.  

Until now, the line between friendship and relationship had always been very clear to me, but Tommy and I had entered this peculiar gray area and I couldn’t put a finger on why this felt so different from my friendships with Xander and Chance. We Three Math-keteers had sleepovers all the time (although it happened a lot less often now that they each had started a family with Greg’s little brothers), came and went from each other’s homes as though they were our own, and our dogs had formed their own little community…

I wasn’t sure how to behave with Tommy, other than to follow Xander’s example and see where it led. I had seen this happen to my friend when Julian Moore had become his roommate and dog-manny; they had immediately turned into a platonic married couple. Luckily, there was one key difference between Xander’s situation last year and my situation now: Tommy and I both knew that we couldn’t have a relationship. He deserved better than any life he could have with me. Even if I actually told Tommy all the details behind my decision and he disagreed with them, he now had his own reasons for wanting to stay apart.

“Does our little girl have a name yet?” Tommy asked, dragging me out of my thoughts. 

“No. I proposed Little Squeaky Jerk-face this afternoon, but Frankie dismissed it out of hand.”

“This is ‘Yes to the Dress’ all over again!” He sighed dramatically and gave my pug a hard look. “Frankie, you don’t have to love it. It just has to be the right one for her.”

Frankie huffed in stubborn disagreement and I couldn’t help but laugh. I hadn’t been there to witness it, but I had heard the story from Xander. As each of my friends began planning their weddings, they started watching every wedding reality show they could find. One day, my friend had come home early from work to find his fiancé —now, his husband— in a heated argument with Tommy and Frankie about some poor woman’s wedding gown selection. According to Xander, every time they tried to change the channel, my pug would get upset, but he also grumbled at the television whenever someone chose something tacky or they hated something he liked. Julian usually agreed with my judgmental dog, but Tommy was far more concerned with the bride’s happiness and how supportive her entourage was.

“We can keep throwing names around, but I don’t think her personality will emerge until she’s at least six weeks old,” I told them both. 

“So we just keep calling her ‘The Kitty?’” Tommy asked. “Because you have to admit, Little Squeaky Jerk-face isn’t one of your better suggestions.”

I wanted to disagree, considering how squeaky she was being right now, but that was probably exhaustion talking, so I changed the topic. I’d wanted to save this milestone as a surprise, so I hadn’t messaged Tommy this morning with the news. “Since she isn’t going to sleep, how about we sit on the floor and I show you something awe-inspiring?”

“I’ve seen it before, remember? It’s impressive, but ‘awe-inspiring’ is a bit much,” he teased and I gasped and clutched my chest in mock-hurt at the blow to my manhood.

We moved our party onto the floor and I set down a few tiny blankets on top of each other. Frankie was a helicopter parent and a clean, semi-padded surface was the only way to convince him to give his little girl room to move around. She was barely a quarter-inch from the floor, but he still worried obsessively. Tommy placed Little Squeaky Jerk-face in the center of the blanket and, finally, she stopped shouting. We watched with bated breath as she got up on all four legs and took six very deliberate steps before falling. 

Well, they watched her while I watched Tommy; his eyes widened and his mouth formed an O as he watched. I wasn’t sure whether that was her walking limit or if she fell asleep mid-step, because she passed out the moment her belly touched the ground.

“She’s not doing the swimmy crawl!” Tommy whispered with delight, scooping her up and bringing his hands to his chest in an approximation of a hug. “I’m so proud of you!” He swaddled her in a blanket and placed her in the nest-box, and she was so deeply asleep that her eyelids barely fluttered. Then he picked up my pug and opened his mouth before he stopped himself. “Her ears are too sensitive. Come on! We’ve got to celebrate!”

I wasn’t sure where this was going, especially once Tommy led us into my bedroom and closed the door saying, “Sorry, I can’t help myself.”

Then he began a bouncy sway with Frankie in his arms, while singing, “Our kitten wobbles, trying to walk…”

Frankie woofed in counterpoint and I said, “Wait one second!” I ran into the living room, peeked at the innocent sleeping kitten, and grabbed a pair of maracas my sister brought back from her honeymoon in Puerto Rico. When I returned to the bedroom, I explained, “I can’t sing as well as you two, but I can accompany you with these!”

Tommy grinned and began again, with Frankie harmonizing and me as their rhythm section. To the tune of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel,’ they sang:

The kitten wobbles, trying to walk

She lunges, weaves, and stumbles,

Our Frankie follows closely behind.

Whoops! There she tumbles.

That transitioned to a rousing rendition of ‘What Will We Do With a Drunken Kitty.’ It was the kind of fun nonsense that my other friends rarely initiated, or even took part in; they would just smile at me in bemusement. This was why I could actually tackle the task of caring for such a fragile creature, without breaking under fear of that hideous mortality rate. When I was too stressed and exhausted to find my silly side, Tommy could take the helm. Of course, this was also why Tommy and I fit seamlessly together the moment we met, and why cutting him out of my life had been like cutting off my own arm. No, not my arm — it was like carving out a lung, because I hadn’t breathed easily for months, until we reconnected.

We laughed and adjourned to the living room again, and I handed Tommy the shirt he borrowed every time he visited. 

“You did laundry, too?” he asked.

“A load or two of laundry is no big deal…” I trailed off at the smirk on Tommy’s face; he must have remembered my preferred method of laundering. I was the only one of my friends without a washing machine of my own, so I always took my laundry to one of their places and hung out while it was running. “Okay, I dropped it off at Xander’s on the way to work yesterday, and picked it up on the way back. Frankie got to say hello to Cassius and they got to feel special as the first people to meet our little girl. She was asleep in my pocket both times, so they just looked and cooed.”

Tommy put the shirt on and tucked the kitten in his pocket, and I helped him make lasagna. Shortly after he slid it into the oven, my laptop began to chime with bloopy music and Frankie ran to it eagerly, with more enthusiasm than he evinced when I set his food bowl on the ground.

“It’s Roger!” I cried, relieved that Chance had acted so quickly.

“Where? Who? What’s going on?” Tommy asked as I dragged him by the arm to the couch, as if he was the one who hadn’t slept in days.

“Chance’s greyhound! She’s calling Frankie!” I sat on the couch and woke my laptop while Frankie woofed at me to hurry up. “Skype is awesome. I mean, more than half of animal communication is non-verbal so we couldn’t have done this so easily ten, fifteen years ago.”

“I… didn’t know Roger had a compu– Ooof!” A tug of my arm and Tommy nearly fell in my lap.

“You’re wearing the kitten, remember?” We couldn’t leave the kitten out of this.

Tommy’s incoherent confused mutter was interrupted by the vision of Chance’s fourteen-year-old little brothers excitedly waving at the camera with their greyhound Roger. Frankie’s bark hello was enough to excite their little Luna to hop up and down in the background yapping, as if to say, ‘Is that Frankie? Lemme see! Hi, Frankie! Hi, hi, hiiiiii! Tell him I say hi! Tell him, tell him!’

“We get to call you because Chance and Logan have homework they need to do!” the red-clad twin said.

“Seriously, this wedding planning is a nightmare, let me tell you. Do you know, they haven’t even written their vows yet? It’s like they didn’t know they were getting married!” the yellow-clad twin moaned. “We’re the ones that had to call our florist, because they refuse to work with the party-supply vendor…”

“And don’t get us started on the food.”

“Oh my god, the fooooood!”

“Have Chance and Logan helped you guys at all?” Tommy asked them, grinning at the fact that somehow list-making Logan Moore let his soon-to-be-adopted teenagers take over the wedding planning. He was marrying all three Blevins brothers, in a way, and he’d do anything for them. It was saving both Chance and him a major headache, and I had to admit this comedy routine didn’t get old.

“Ugh! Don’t get us started!” said Red.

“They try so hard, and sometimes people will only talk to them,” Yellow lamented. “But it always just becomes more of a mess.”

“So they’re letting us deal with it all now.”

“Which is fine. I mean, school is easy enough because they won’t let us skip a grade.”

“They don’t want us to give up our childhood.”

They both rolled their eyes. Like Chance, the twins had been kicked out of their father’s house for not being heterosexual, and had spent several months at the local LGBT youth shelter before connecting with their older half-brother. They deserved a childhood, and the eye-rolling and unrestrained complaining was evidence that they were in a happy, safe home with people who loved them. Soon Axle and Diesel Blevins would change the names they loathed to Jackson and Dean Moore.

Frankie whined in frustration and the kitten began to fuss in Tommy’s pocket, and Yellow apologized and let Frankie, Roger, and Luna take over the video-call. We set the kitty within view of the camera and Frankie nuzzled her with paternal pride. Both dogs seemed fascinated and a series of doggy muttering back-and-forth ensued. The greyhound —a female dog, despite her name— had had a litter or two of her own before she was completely retired from the racing lifestyle and adopted out, and I didn’t doubt that she gave him excellent parenting advice. I hoped video-woofing with her would make my pug feel more secure about being thrust into fatherhood so unexpectedly.

Then the kitten began to cry. It was feeding time. Both of Logan’s demon-cats dropped down from who-knew-where to sniff the monitor and yowl angrily. The kitten’s cries became more melodramatic and Frankie nuzzled her protectively, growling under his breath at the Siamese.

The boys pushed all their pets out of the way.

“Sorry about that!” said Red.

“You should bring her over when she gets older so she can learn how to cat.” Ah yes, Yellow must be Dean, the aspiring veterinarian. My pug harrumphed. “Sorry, Frankie. You might not like it, but it’s important to socialize kittens young, with members of their own species. It will help her grow up to become a healthy adult.”

“From the links you sent me, it seems like catteries like Kitten Academy often wait until they’re four weeks old before socializing them with other cats and litters,” I reminded them.

“Aw, come on! We can start a little earlier. Maybe in a week?” Red begged. “You can come by to say hi at least.”

“Sorry, she needs her vaccines before she can come over and play. But as soon as she’s got ‘em, we’ll bring her over,” Tommy promised. The oven timer buzzed. “Sorry, it’s dinner time! It was great talking to you. It looks like Frankie’s feeling a lot better, and meeting the kitten this way will hopefully help their introductions.”

We said our goodbyes and Tommy fed the kitten while I got dinner set up, only slightly burning myself on the pan. But of course Tommy fussed and bandaged me up, muttering about my increased risk of infection and other such nonsense, before we could finally sit down to eat.

I barely made it through dinner before I began to drift off. My blinks became longer and longer …

“John, just go to bed!” 

“That’s ridiculous. It’s barely seven o’clock,” I argued. Tommy sighed and shook his head.

I had a marvelous dream. I was at a county fair with Tommy —just like the one we’d gone to last year— only this time we had matching ‘bjorns.’ Mine held Frankie, and his held a human baby girl with tufts of hair in various shades of brown and orange. Obviously, the human infant represented the kitten, but in the dream we were a family. It was glorious and impossible, but it felt so real. That was the only explanation I could muster for my subsequent actions.

Dream Tommy rubbed my arm and leaned in so close I could smell his vanilla lotion. He whispered to me as if I weren’t right there, “John… John… Come on, Johnny.”

My eyes fluttered open and there he was, my Tommy, smiling softly and leaning over me, his hand warm and real on my arm. I reached up, tangled my fingers in his hair, and leaned forward to close the distance between us.