My Best Friend Bought Me a Cursed Life novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Lap
At seven o'clock I flipped the sign on the front door to CLOSED.
I fed the boarders.
Then I went into the old kennel room and stopped in the doorway.
Ben had turned off the overhead lights.
The heat lamp was on.
Somebody had strung little white lights across the steel kennels, the cheap kind from the dollar store on Delancey.
The window over the sink, my window, had a folded towel on the sill.
Ben was standing beside it in the green cardigan, with the hole in the left elbow.
"Sit," he said. "Please. There."
"In the window?"
"You used to like it."
I climbed up onto the sill and sat with my back against the frame, my sneakers dangling.
The glass was cold behind me. The radiator underneath ticked.
Ben opened the top kennel.
The tabby looked at him with deep suspicion.
Then she climbed down, crossed the floor, jumped up onto the sill and settled into my lap.
She was wearing her old collar again.
The brass locket hung from it, dented at the hinge.
"Ben," I said. "What did you do?"
"Open it," he said.
My hands were not steady.
The clasp opened with a fingernail, the way it had in the elevator on Central Park South.
This time it wasn't empty.
There was a ring inside it.
A thin gold band, with a small round pearl set into it.
A gray pearl.
I looked up at him.
He'd gone down on one knee on the clean kennel floor, right where I'd sat with bleach in my hair.
"I don't remember nine years with you," he said. "I've stopped minding. I'd rather have the next fifty and remember all of them."
He pushed his glasses up.
"Annie Price," he said. "Will you marry me? You can keep the window."
The tabby yawned, enormously, in my lap.
"Yes," I said. "Obviously. Get up here."
He got up and kissed me in the window with the cat squashed between us.
The tabby bit him on the wrist, not hard, just enough.
"She approves," I said.
"She's never once approved of me."
"That's how she shows it."
We got married on the first warm Saturday of May, in the garden behind the clinic.
Where the dumpster had been, there were tomato beds now, and a crooked bench.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of My Best Friend Bought Me a Cursed Life are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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