My Best Friend Bought Me a Cursed Life novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Six Weeks

I didn't say anything back.

I stepped up onto my toes on the courthouse sidewalk and kissed him.

A man with a briefcase had to walk around us.

"I'm paying you back," I said against his mouth. "Tomorrow. With interest."

"Fine."

"With a lot of interest."

"Don't push it," Ben said, and kissed me again.

His sister came out of the courthouse doors behind us, saw us, and turned right around and went back in.

We took the subway downtown, because Ben didn't believe in cabs and I didn't care.

I fell asleep on his shoulder somewhere under Union Square.

He woke me at Delancey with his thumb on my cheek.

The reporters were gone from Clinton Street. A sign on the clinic door said CLOSED SUNDAY, LIKE ALWAYS.

Ben unlocked the side door and we went up the narrow stairs to his apartment.

I knew every step.

The third one creaked. The light on the landing flickered unless you hit the switch twice.

He hit it twice.

The apartment was one long room over the clinic, with a kitchen at one end and a bedroom behind a door at the other.

The couch was the same brown couch, sagging in the middle.

The radiator was the same radiator, with a folded towel on top.

And there were cats everywhere.

A one-eyed black cat on the windowsill.

A huge white cat with no tail asleep in a fruit bowl.

A gray tabby kitten who came running across the floor and climbed my jeans like a tree.

"Those are the unadoptables," Ben said. "Nobody wanted them, so they pay rent in hair."

"What are their names?"

"Captain, Snowball, and the small one hasn't earned one yet."

"You named a one-eyed cat Captain."

"He looks like he's seen things."

I went into the bathroom and stood under his shower until the cell washed off me.

When I came out, he'd left a folded gray T-shirt on the sink.

It said CORNELL VETERINARY across the front and had a hole in the collar.

I put it on with my jeans.

It came halfway to my knees.

His sister came up at seven with a foil pan and her coat still on.

She set the lasagna on the stove.

She looked at me in Ben's T-shirt.

She looked at Ben.

"There's a whole pan," she said. "Eat all of it. I'm not coming back for the dish."

"You always come back for the dish," Ben said.

"Not tonight."

She hugged me on her way out, quick and hard.

"Knife girl," she muttered into my hair. "Unbelievable."

Then she was gone, and the door clicked, and it was just us and three cats and a lasagna.

We ate it on the couch out of the pan with two forks.

Spinach. Too much nutmeg.

Ben cut me the corner piece without saying anything about it.

I looked at it for a long time.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing," I said. "You always take the corner."

"How do you know that?"

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