She has a book tonight instead of the little light. I noticed the difference right away because a book weighs on her differently than the phone does — heavier in her lap, held with two paws instead of balanced in one, and it makes a specific sound when she opens it that the phone never makes, a kind of dry crack followed by a soft settling, like something exhaling.
I arranged myself across her thighs the way I always do, tucked my front paws under my chest, and prepared for the usual arrangement of things, which is that she reads or watches or scrolls and I am the base layer underneath all of it, present and necessary and warm. This has worked for a long time. Tonight it mostly still worked.
What I had not accounted for was the pages. The phone she can hold still for long stretches, her thumb doing small quiet movements at the edge that barely disturb me. The book requires her to actually move an entire limb every few minutes, lifting a page and turning it and pressing it flat again, and each time she does this there’s a shift through her whole lower half that I feel through my ribs. It isn’t painful. It isn’t even really an interruption. It’s just a fact I now have to live with every few minutes, this small seismic event that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with whatever’s happening on the paper.
I tried at one point to get a look at the book itself, craning up over the top edge of it the way I do with the laptop, and she tilted it back gently so I couldn’t see the words, which felt unnecessary. I wasn’t going to do anything to it. I only wanted to know what kind of thing could make her hold this still, this long, without once glancing over to check on me.
Because that’s the part I keep circling back to. Usually there’s a rhythm to her attention — she’ll do a thing, and then some minutes later she’ll look down, sometimes without even meaning to, just a reflex check to see if I’m still there, still fine, still exactly where she left me. Tonight the checking-down happened much less. Twice, maybe. Once when I shifted my weight and dug a claw slightly too far into her leg by accident, and once for no reason I could identify at all, just a glance and then straight back to the page like she’d remembered something and then un-remembered it.
At one point she laughed. Not a big laugh, just a short one through her nose, the kind that barely moves her shoulders, and I lifted my head because usually a laugh like that comes with an explanation, some noise from the kitchen or something on the phone she wants to read out loud to me even though I can’t do anything with the information. This laugh came with nothing. She just kept reading, still smiling slightly, and I understood that whatever had caused it was going to stay entirely inside the book, unavailable to me forever, which is a strange thing to feel bitter about but I did, a little, for about as long as it takes to blink.
I considered getting up. I want to say I considered it seriously, weighed the dignity of removing myself from a lap that clearly had competing interests, but the truth is I didn’t move an inch, because the lap itself was still doing everything a lap is supposed to do — it was warm, and it had the particular give to it that means she’s settled in for a while and isn’t about to stand up without warning, and her free paw did eventually come down and rest along my back, fingers loose in my fur, not moving much, just present, the way a hand rests on something it isn’t thinking about but hasn’t forgotten either.
That paw made up for a great deal. I put my head back down against her leg and let the page-turning happen without further complaint, because the sound had stopped being an intrusion sometime in the last several minutes and started being something closer to a schedule I didn’t mind keeping — crack, settle, quiet, crack, settle, quiet, her breathing going slow and even underneath it, occasionally catching a little on something, and I stopped trying to guess what.
Later — I couldn’t tell you how much later, only that the room had gone that particular dim where the lamp is the only real light left — she set the book face-down on the arm of the couch, spine up, open to wherever she’d stopped, and both paws came down onto me at once, which is the actual good part, the part I’d been waiting for the whole time underneath my complaining. She scratched behind my ear with one hand and left the other flat against my side, and I did the thing where I make the sound in my chest without deciding to make it.
The book stayed there on the arm of the couch, face-down, holding its place, for the rest of the night. I looked at it a few times. It never did anything. It just sat there being a book, taking up no attention at all now that it wasn’t in her hands, and I found I could tolerate it completely once it wasn’t the thing between us anymore, just a flat closed shape a few inches from my tail, patient in a way that almost impressed me.