A Cat Called Cupid: A Romantic Comedy Novella Read Free

of his bathroom mirror.
    Whatever unflattering light these images shed on Cat Hater’s narcissistic tendencies, they hardly told me anything I, or Ann, didn’t already know.
    I moved on to perusing his text messages. The sheer volume of data was overwhelming: 8,765 messages. It would take me weeks, possibly months—unless either Ann or Cat Hater’s libido kicked in at a heretofore unforeseen level—to sift through them all.
    Nevertheless, I had to start somewhere, so I began to read. The first few held nothing of interest. Things like: “Your pizza is now ready to be picked up,” and “Your car is due for an oil change on—”
    I’d finally come across something interesting—“Dude!!! Whrs my muny???”—when my spying activities were curtailed by the emergence of My Lady and Cat Hater from the bedroom. They certainly hadn’t been in there long, but they both looked happier than they had in weeks, so who was I to unfairly critique the fleeting nature of the procreant proclivities of another species?
    By the time they reached the living room, I was posed innocently on a window sill pretending to be in the midst of my midmorning nap. I miss those midmorning naps—generally followed by a mid-day siesta and an afternoon snooze. Alas, they are no more. Those napping days are behind me. I’m a working cat now.
    After exiting My Lady’s boudoir , Cat Hater immediately threw himself down on the couch, flipped on the TV and picked up his phone. One screen at a time is never enough for Cat Hater. It takes two or three to satisfy his need for stimulus.
    Before I relay what happened next, I should probably mention that up until that morning , My Lady and Cat Hater had never engaged in a full-fledged fight.
    With cats, of course, the preamble to a fight is always marked by a lot of aggressive posturing and low-register growling. It’s much the same with humans. It began with My Lady circling the couch and Cat Hater determinedly ignoring her circumnavigations.
    “Why don’t you want to go , Jimmy?” My Lady demanded.
    I think she was referring to her proposed trip to the Botanical Garden s. She’d floated the idea last night, in between delivering Cat Hater a plate of spaghetti and loading the dirty laundry he’d brought over into the washing machine.
    “Why would I wanna go spend hours walking around and smelling a bunch of dumb### flowers and ####?”
    It ’s my understanding that Cat Hater works in Customer Relations—whatever that is—but with such a gift for erudite expression, he really should be on the public speaking circuit. He could go on tour with his collection of shirtless selfies. His keynote speech? “Uhh-these are like some ####### awesome pics I took of myself. I’m so ####### hot and stuff. That’s it. Any ####### questions?”
    It’s cruel to mock the foolish, I know, so I try not to indulge in it to o often, even when the object of my derision clearly deserves it. To that end, I turned my attention back to the present and found that the argument was still going strong.
    “But we never do anything together anymore !” Ann was saying.
    “ The #### we don’t! I’m over here every ####### evening.”
    That was absolutely true. Cat Hater was there every evening. And most weekends.
    “By doing things together, I don’t mean you hanging out here watching TV.”
    “We do lots of other #### together.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like what we just did.”
    It was the wrong thing to say, but Cat Hater has very little intelligence. This reasoning, as I anticipated, did not go over well.
    “That’s about all we do.”
    “Oh, come on! Ya gotta be ####### kidding me! It’s been three ####### weeks!”
    It had been three weeks and two days. I’d been keeping track. However, I could have told him that pointing out the facts never does any good in cases like these. It only encourages the other side to come back with facts of their own.
    “You think cooking supper for you every night, doing your