There were four extra shoes by the door before I even understood what was happening, and that should tell you everything about how prepared I was for this evening. Four shoes means two people, and two people is not nothing. One person arriving is an event. Two people arriving at once, within minutes of each other, ringing the bell twice and laughing in the hallway before they’ve even come inside, is a situation, and I want it on record that I assessed the situation correctly from the very first knock.
I did the only responsible thing, which was retreat partway up the stairs to a spot where I could see the door without being seen, and watch.
The first one through was a woman with a laugh so loud it arrived in the house before the rest of her did, carrying a paper bag with a box inside that smelled like sugar and something dark and bitter underneath it, chocolate probably, though I was kept well away from confirming that. She put the bag down on the kitchen table, hugged my human in the specific tight way that meant they hadn’t seen each other in some time, and then said something about the cold that made both of them laugh again for no reason I could detect. Her coat, when she took it off, smelled like outside air and something sharp and cold that didn’t belong to her, like she’d walked through someone else’s cigarette on the way over. I did not approach. I filed it.
The second one was a man, and men are a smaller category in my experience, so I had less to go on. He had a bottle in each hand and made a joke immediately upon entering that I didn’t understand but that produced the exact same unreasonable amount of laughing as the coat comment. He smelled like cold air too, but a different cold air, metal and pavement rather than smoke, and underneath that, faintly, something warm and yeasty that I associated, with some confusion, with the thing my human makes rise under a towel sometimes. Bread, possibly. Or beer. I am not in a position to say with certainty, only that it was a smell with weight to it.
Both of them sat at the kitchen table, which I was prepared for, and then both of them migrated to the couch with their glasses, which I was not. The couch is understood, by everyone in this house including me, to be shared territory that defaults to me in the evenings. Nobody consulted me about a temporary reallocation. I sat in the doorway to the hall and made my displeasure known by being extremely visible and doing nothing about it, which is the only form of protest available to a cat who also, privately, does not want to be picked up and moved by a stranger.
For a long while nobody addressed me directly, which suited me. I watched from the doorway while plates came out, and the smell of something with garlic and a browned, savory edge filled the whole downstairs, and I positioned myself at a diplomatic distance from the table, close enough to monitor, far enough to maintain the appearance of indifference. My human mentioned my name once, gesturing vaguely toward the doorway, and both guests turned to look at me at the same time, which I did not care for. I have never enjoyed being discussed from across a room while present.
The woman was the first to try. She crouched down — not all the way, just enough to lower her voice and put a hand out flat, palm up, the way people do when they think they’re being clever about it — and said something in a pitch about four notes higher than her normal speaking voice. I stayed exactly where I was and blinked at her very slowly, which I understand is a significant gesture, and watched her try to decide whether that meant something good or nothing at all. She straightened back up, a little defeated, and went back to her glass. Good. That one needed to work for it.
The man didn’t try at all, which I noticed and did not entirely forgive him for, but also didn’t entirely hold against him either. He just talked, mostly to my human, with his hand hanging off the arm of the couch near the floor, not reaching for me, not performing anything, just existing there within range. I circled the living room twice on a wide loop designed to look purposeless, and on the second pass I let my side brush against his knuckles once, just once, testing.
His hand turned over. He scratched behind my ear without looking down, still talking, like it cost him nothing at all, and something in me reorganized slightly in his favor.
By the time the food was down to crumbs and the second bottle was half gone, the conversation had gotten looser and louder, full of names I didn’t know attached to stories I couldn’t follow, somebody’s sister, a car that wouldn’t start, a trip that had apparently gone badly in a way everyone found funny in retrospect. My human was laughing in a different register than her ordinary laugh, lower and more frequent, the kind of laugh that comes out before she’s even finished the sentence that caused it. I stood near her ankle during one long stretch of this and she reached down without pausing her sentence and rested her hand flat on my back for a moment, the way she does, and then kept talking. That was enough. I didn’t need more than that from her tonight. She had other business.
I ended up, eventually, in the bedroom, on the pile of coats they’d left on the bed because the hall closet apparently wasn’t an acceptable option for reasons known only to humans. The woman’s coat still carried that sharp cold-smoke smell, fainter now, and the man’s had the metal-pavement one layered under something warmer that might have been his own skin. I arranged myself across both coats at once, which felt like a reasonable use of the available surface area, and from there I could hear the three voices downstairs rising and falling without being able to make out the words, just the shape of the evening continuing without me in it.
At some point the laughing woman came up to get something from her coat pocket and found me flattened across the pile like I’d always lived there. She didn’t try the high voice again. She just stood in the doorway for a second, looked at me, said, “oh, hi,” in her regular voice, took what she needed without disturbing me, and went back downstairs.
I stayed up there a long while after that, listening to the house be loud in a way it usually isn’t, perfectly comfortable, not at all sure yet whether I approved of either of them, but willing, for tonight, to keep the coats warm.