As we left the parking lot, I did something I’d never done before. I reached across the seat and put my hand on her inner thigh, like dudes in trucks had been doing with their girls since the first time a dude owned a truck. For a second, she just stared at my hand, with her lips slightly parted. I gripped her tighter, her bare leg under my palm, so fucking soft and silky. Mine, all fucking mine, I told her with my hand. I pulled on her thigh a little to show her what I wanted, that even though I was touching her, she was still way too far away. She got the message and unbuckled her belt, scooting over to the middle, where she buckled in again. I was living in a country song, and it was the most awesome thing ever.

We drove home like that, and I took the old King’s Highway—the long scenic route. It wound through the forest; I took the curves slow and held her close. I kept one hand on the wheel and one hand on her the whole fucking way. I’d driven that road a million times in my life, but it had never looked so clear or so right. I’d never been aware of how fucking beautiful it was. How beautiful life could be.

It was because of her. Because for the first time, things were starting to make sense. My place in everything made sense. She made sense of the world for me. She gave me somewhere to belong, something to protect. The meaning of life? I’d found it.

A chirp from her phone yanked me out of my haze. “Is it okay if I check it?” she asked, putting one of her hands to her purse but not reaching in.

“God, yeah, of course it is.”

“Okay, but don’t move,” she said, smiling. “Keep your hand there.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I told her and turned my eyes to the road, taking a gentle left deeper into the forest, so that she slid even closer on the bench seat.

But within a moment, she groaned, dropped her phone in her lap, and put her fingers to her eyebrows like she was getting a headache.

“Bad news?”

She dug her fingertips into her eyebrows hard. “This author, the one with the snails and the balloons? There’s a plot change. I need to do some work.”

She really was the fucking cutest. If there was one thing Rosie Madden hated, it was a change in plans. “And that’s a bad thing?”

“Obviously!” She was wide-eyed and incredulous. “I promised I’d be your foreman or right-hand woman or whatever. I promised I’d help. We never agreed for you to fix my falling-down house while I drew snails flying to the moon.”

I gave her leg an even more possessive squeeze. “All I want to do is take care of you. Starting right now.”

* * *

When we arrived back at her house and I parked my truck, I didn’t just offer my hand to help her out. As she dangled her feet out the driver’s side, I decided to go the whole nine yards and did yet another thing I’d never done: I put both my hands to her waist, pulled her close, and lifted her out of the cab.

“Oooh! I could get used to this,” she said as she blinked hard in the sun, looking up at me and shading her eyes with one hand.

“You better,” I said, with a pat on her ass.

A thumping from the dormer above the driveway distracted us both. It was Julia, whacking the glass with her tail. Rosie sighed and scrunched up her nose. “I feel bad. She used to roam around, and now all she has to do is stare at my books and try to pull apart my pillows. Hardly seems fair for a lady like her.”

“On the plus side, SPAM consumption is down by like eighty percent, right?”

Rosie lifted her shoulders. “Yeah, but it’s like those cat food ads say, Inside every cat is a hunter. I don’t feel like I’m being a good cat person. Lady. Whatever.”

I grabbed a bag of stuff from the truck bed and tucked the garbage disposal box under my arm. “Want to try to introduce them?”

Rosie sucked in a breath from between gritted teeth. “But we’ve had such a nice day.”

“Have to do it sometime.”

She grabbed my hand. “Do you think it’ll be awful?”

A small cluster of birds took off together as Julia swatted the glass, this time with her paw. My first thought was, Yeah, it’s gonna be terrible, but I didn’t want to rain on her parade. “Maybe, maybe not.” I unbolted the door and put down the stuff from the Depot on the counter. Rosie knelt down to open Cupcake’s crate and greet her. She wedged her tiny head between Rosie’s knees and wiggled her back end like crazy. Wiggled so hard that she flipped herself over, and she bit the air with a big smile.

“So good to seeeee youuuuu!” Rosie cooed softly. “Who’s a good girl? You’re a good girl!” Rosie lay down on the rug and let Cupcake launch the full-scale love attack. I pulled my phone from my pocket and grabbed a whole bunch of awesomely blurry shots.

As Rosie squealed and Cupcake tried to kiss the inside of her ears, I heard the thump of Julia jumping off her window perch one floor up. I considered how to do this—this interspecies territory negotiation or whatever. I actually wasn’t sure at all, so I opened up my phone and asked what Rosie called The Source of All Knowledge. “Okay, Google. How do you introduce a cat and a dog?”

A whole bunch of different ideas came back, but the one on top, the one bolded and in bigger font, seemed the most reasonable, “Instead of having them meet face-to-face, consider introducing an object or toy to each other. If your cat has a favorite toy, let the dog sniff that, and vice versa. It’s a good first step.”

While Rosie made Cupcake’s arms dance around like a puppet’s, I dug through Julia’s toy box. “Which one of these does she play with the most?” I asked. In my hands were a whole array of mangled stuffed mice. It was like a recast horror-film version of Watership Down.

Rosie rolled up to sitting, still with Cupcake in her lap. “The one that’s missing its face.” I held up a possible contender. “No, the other one.” I held up the double-amputee, faceless, skinless shell of a stuffed mouse. Rosie snapped. “That’s the fellow.”

I held it out for Cupcake to have a sniff. “What do you think of that?” I asked.

“It’s okay, right? That’s Julia. Juuuuulia,” Rosie explained, like Cupcake might pick up on English any moment.

Cupcake took a tentative sniff, her shiny black nose wiggling but the rest of her holding stock-still.

Until she let loose with a small, wet, and very violent sneeze.

Rosie dissolved into giggles, scooping her up in her arms and nuzzling the top of her head. “My thoughts exactly,” she whispered, with a kiss to Cupcake’s blondish fur.

I left the disfigured mouse there and grabbed a long-armed monkey in striped socks, no bigger than a stalk of celery, to take up to Julia. Even in the few days we’d had her, Cupcake had already unstuffed one arm and was working on its tail. Definitely one of her favorites.

Rosie raised Cupcake’s paw. “Ever in your favor, so on and so forth.”

Up the steps I went, two at a time. In front of Rosie’s bedroom door, I put my hand on the doorknob and braced for some quick defensive moves. “Hang on to Cupcake. Just in case,” I hollered down the steps.

“On it!” Rosie called back.

I cracked my neck side to side, braced for disaster, and made my entrance. As I opened the door, Julia tried to make another mad-dash carpet-fiber-wrecking escape. I was too quick for her, though, and she ground to a stop inches from the door with her claws extended into the carpet. She let out low rawwwwwwwwwr of protest and then turned her back on me. She sashayed off toward a basket of clean laundry and ran her shoulder along it, making her fur ripple through the holes in the plastic.

“Listen,” I said as calmly as I could, “I’m going to show you something.” I palmed the little monkey behind my back. I sat down on the edge of the bed, to let Julia come to me. She slowly stalked the perimeter of the room, eventually circling around to the bed as if by accident. She walked back and forth along the bed skirt, and I placed the monkey at my feet.

“That belongs to a dog. I don’t think you’ve ever met a dog.”

She looked at it, leaned in slightly, and jerked her head back, and then made another pass at the bed skirt.

Her reaction reminded me a little of Rosie’s reaction to expired dairy—“Oh my God, how can it be whatever date already!”—but unlike Rosie encountering spoiled milk, Julia was on the defensive. One step at time, I figured, and reached out for the monkey.

However.

At that moment, I heard the staccato patters of a very small creature moving very quickly up the steps, followed immediately by Rosie running up the steps, too, and whisper-yelling, “Cupcake! Cupcake!”

I didn’t panic at first because I was sure I’d closed the door, but then it became very clear—as Cupcake burst in like someone walking into a surprise party—that I hadn’t. The shit was officially about to hit the fan. Cupcake galloped toward Julia in pure canine joy. Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!

Julia raised the hair on her spine, arched into a half circle, and hissed. How dare you defile my personal bubble, you savage.

Uh-oh.

“It’s all good,” I told Julia. “Seriously. Everything is fine.”

It wasn’t. Like a very small-scale version of a lion stalking a tiny deer, Julia backed Cupcake up against the laundry basket and puffed up her fur so she looked twice as big.

Cupcake flattened her ears and slinked back, Julia began hissing, even louder now, arching her back up like a Halloween decoration. Rosie made a lunge to break them up, but instinctively, I put myself between them. There was no fucking way I was letting Julia sink her claws into my dog or my girlfriend. I scooped Cupcake out of harm’s way, and Rosie grabbed her from me.

And then Julia became airborne.

She hung in suspended animation somehow, legs out like a starfish, furious in the eyes, wild and insane.

The door slammed shut, and Julia made contact. Her claws went straight in, like ten fishing hooks, spread out along my arm. It was like I’d been shot or something—I didn’t feel any pain, only total astonishment. I stared at her claws, sunk deep into my arm, and thought, Holy fucking shit. There is a cat dangling from my body.

“You okay?” Rosie squeaked from outside.

Now, I felt the pain. “Totally!” I said, trying so hard not to let my voice crack with the agony. “You go downstairs. She can probably smell your fear.”

Which Rosie answered with a frustrated, “Grrrrrrr!”

When I was sure Rosie was gone, and gritting my teeth through the pain, I disengaged one claw after another. For a brief and horrible second, Julia swung from me, attached by a single toenail, and I thought I might pass out. I finally understood how those guys felt who got nabbed by a stray hook when they were out fly fishing. Shock. Total fucking shock. But at last, she dropped down onto the bed, eyeing me…and licking small droplets of my blood from her claws.

Yet at that moment, it wasn’t the flesh wounds that shocked me. Or the fact that I finally understood why Rosie’s grandma had named her cat after a tyrant. Or that possibly I’d just given her the taste for human blood, and we were all fucked. Nope. Only one thing mattered then.

I’d thought of Rosie as my girlfriend.

Holy, holy fuck.