Hello! I wrote this one during a very bad hangover. It practically it wrote itself, honeslty.
I hope you enjoy it.
Grandma Posen always had a cat.
The first one Aubrey remembers was Hector, a Persian, too fat to be healthy and too grumpy to be accepted as a real company. Aubrey absolutely hated him. He was a scratcher, his meowing was too whining, and when Aubrey got home after spending her sweet summers at her Grandma's house in Beaufort, amidst all the stories about baking and walks on the beach she would tell excitedly, she would complain to her mother about how Hector's yellow fur was all over her clothes.
("I'm feeling sick. It must be my allergy."
"You are not allergic to cats, Aubrey.")
The summer before she turned nine, she arrived at the large, cozy, light blue house's porch and frowned when she didn't saw Hector by the armchair her grandmother kept there. Grandma Posen told her in a sad voice one that Hector has passed away a few months ago and that he was now living in the cat's heaven. Aubrey doubted that such a thing existed, but she nodded in understanding anyway. She hated Hector, but he was her grandmother's pet and she loved him, so she couldn't really bring herself to be happy about his death - she had a heart, for God's sake. She felt really sorry for her grandmother's loss, and this made her put a soft smile in her face as she accepted to go to the city by the next morning and help her grandmother pick a new cat at a local pet shop.
Cooper was bearable. He was a Scottish Fold and Aubrey was the one who picked him up from the basket he was sharing with his siblings. He was the only one with the fur entirely in a creamy color and the little blonde girl thought it looked neat. Her grandmother named the kitten, and Aubrey shrugged when she asked if she liked the name. (He doesn't know what a name is, so does it really make difference? Aubrey thought.)
Cooper and Aubrey had a way better relationship than the girl had with Hector, and at the end of the summers, the girl would share with her parents one or two positive comments about him too. So, in her last week of college, when she received a call from Grandma Posen after her finals, telling her that Cooper had passed away that morning, she was genuinely sorry. As a kind of tribute, she kept a picture she had snapped of him the last time she had been to her grandma's as the lock screen of her phone. She never allowed anyone to see it and as soon as her roommate caught a glimpse of it, she switched it for the usual sky picture she always had as background.
("Is that a cat?"
"This is Cooper."
"He is a cat. You like cats! That's new."
"I don't like cats."
"Sure.")
After Cooper's death, Grandma Posen only got a new cat four years after, when Aubrey thought she had already given up on raising lazy fur balls.
Molly was her last cat. The first time Aubrey saw the Siberian cat was when she took a flight from New York when Grandma Posen had been discharged from the hospital after her first heart attack. Her grandmother never looked so weak and it made Aubrey's heart ache. She spent a couple of days there, sitting in an armchair beside her grandmother's bed, trying to make her city life more entertaining than it actually was in the stories Grandma Posen begged her to share, with Molly always laying nearby them, a true guardian.
That day, Grandma Posen didn't ask Aubrey to keep Molly. She knew her grandchild very well to know that having a pet was far from being something she was longing to do. So, she simply asked Aubrey to find Molly a home when she was gone. The blonde dismissed the conversation, telling the old woman she didn't have to worry about it, because she was going to live enough to raise four more cats.
Grandma Posen only lived a few more months, and during the service, Aubrey kept herself from crying as much as she wanted. She felt sore and none of the analgesics in her toiletry bag would take away that pain. Her parents, brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins were all at the house Grandma Posen lived until her last days of life, but the place was empty at the same time.
She excused herself to cry in the porch and she found Molly sitting on the same chair all the cats that lived there before her used to sit. Sometimes alone, sometimes on her grandmother's lap. She allowed Molly to curl up on her own lap as she sat on the armchair, not even bothering about the stray fur sticking onto her black dress. She was sobbing and messing her light make-up with tears and broke down when the cat nudged her head against her arm. Her trembling hands were no use and she wanted her grandmother to hold them and calm her down, like she used to do when she was a kid and Hector would give her a particular bad scratch. The thought of the dead cat made her cry even more. She hoped her grandmother was, too, in the cat's heaven, with her beloved felines.
In a fraction of second she decided that Molly's new home was in New York, in the two-bedroom apartment she was living since law school. That was the only way to thank Grandma Posen for everything.
It was not hard. Aubrey adapted herself well to sharing her apartment with a feline, mostly because Molly was litter box trained. It was kind of nice to have a pet and Molly was a playful, sweet and docile cat, and Aubrey had grown soft for her. When the mourning for her grandmother was gone and the good memories and the affection shined brighter on her mind than the pain of losing her, Molly became a reminder of Grandma Posen and all the love she gave her, and things were well.
Molly liked to curl up against the back of her neck at night and to have her fur stroked as Aubrey did some reading on the sofa. She respected – most of time, at least - that Aubrey's desk and bookshelves in her working area were off limits for her, just like the kitchen's counter.
The only problem was that Molly was almost never at home. Where could that cat go? Aubrey herself loved, being at home. If she wasn't at her work, she was at home, baking, watching trashy reality shows or reading a good book. Home was good, outside was chaotic and the neighbors were weirdos.
"Where were you?" Aubrey asked the cat one night when she slipped back into the apartment through the window by the fire scape stairs. She rolled her eyes at herself, feeling foolish for talking to a cat. "You know you can't enter other people's apartments, right?"
But her words felt on death ears – or at least, ears that didn't understand a word of what she said.
Molly's absence became more frequent and they also became longer. If before she spent a few hours away, it turned out to a day, then two. She would always come back, but Aubrey still worried: what if one day, she didn't? She could not lose that cat, it was her dear, beloved, passed away grandmother's cat. Aubrey had made a promise to take care of Molly and a Posen promise is a duty.
In one night, Aubrey noticed, as the cat jumped out the window into the fire scape that Molly's trajectory was very short. Molly did not walk all through New York, as Aubrey initially thought. She wasn't going to Broadway and trying to blend into Cats' cast. She wasn't even crossing the street, actually. Molly was spending most of her time in the apartment upstairs, getting there through the fire scape stairs.
That's how she met Chloe.
Molly made Chloe's apartment her second home, without really asking for permission, like she knew that the ginger wasn't going to deny sharing the place with her. It was almost like the cat knew how open and vivid Chloe was. Maybe Molly was attracted to Chloe because she had the same energy Grandma Posen used to irradiate.
On their first date, as Chloe kissed Aubrey by her apartment's door, Molly came and rubbed herself off against their ankles, making the ginger giggle into their kiss and set free so many butterflies in Aubrey's stomach that she thought she would throw up. Aubrey would be annoyed with the cat if she didn't think it had been kind of meaningful, since she was the reason they met in the first place.
If the blonde believed in spirits or something like that, she would say that Grandma Posen's one had something to do with this. Like, guiding the cat into the apartment upstairs where she knew that a beautiful and sweet and absolute girlfriend material girl lived. She would probably say that to Chloe someday, she liked to listen to her foolish thoughts – the ones her parents always brushed aside, and her grandmother used to beg her to spill to her over a cup of cocoa.
She hoped it wasn't true that the dead are watching you from above, because she could practically see the smirk on the grandmother's face as Aubrey kissed the cat's head after she closed the door when Chloe was gone.
Life after that was awfully sweet, and even the worst of New York City's winters tasted like a summer in Beaufort.
They would hold hands in the streets mostly to keep their fingers from freezing, but enjoying too much the sensation of belonging. Palm against palm. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten fingers together. And Aubrey would feel like shouting (even if this wasn't her thing, not even as a child and her wishes weren't attended) from rooftops that she found someone to call home. She would end up just whispering it against the back of Chloe's neck in the early hours of morning, holding her tight, and feeling Molly's warm fur against their feet. It was enough, she decided.
She loved everything about their new arrangement ("it's called dating, Aubrey") and she felt a lot better about the fact that Molly wasn't breaking into some stranger's apartment. She was just going to Chloe's apartment. A place she was also frequenting often.
"You are not the kind of person who has a cat." Chloe said one day.
"Well, I am." Aubrey motioned to the cat laying nearby.
"But it's hard to believe that you woke up one day and decided to get a cat."
Aubrey scrunched up her nose. Her girlfriend was right. If she had any choice, she wouldn't choose to live the moments that led her to take Molly in.
"Molly was actually my grandmother's." The blonde said like the phrase was not a big deal, but Chloe knew better for the way Aubrey's bottom lip turned into a slight pout and for all the lovely memories she heard about Grandma Posen.
The ginger leaned in and kissed her pout away, slowly and wholesomely, only pulling away when she felt Aubrey's fisted hands relaxing.
Chloe just wanted to hear all those stories. All of them. Maybe during a road trip to Beaufort with Aubrey's hand resting against her tight and
If Molly could talk, she for sure would tell the story about how Aubrey Posen fell in love with Chloe Beale and vice versa way better than this. She saw all the little moments they kept away from the world and the leaded to the day when her two homes became one.