She did not go to the desk today. I want that noted, because the desk is where the working happens, and the working happening somewhere else is the sort of thing a cat is entitled to have opinions about.
Instead she came into the front room with a mug of tea and a stack of papers so tall she had to steady it with her chin, and she sat down on the couch, and I understood immediately that my afternoon had been rezoned without my consent.
I got there first. I want that on the record too. I was already in the good spot, the dip in the middle cushion where the couch has learned the exact shape of me, and I had been there since well before the papers arrived, minding my own business, doing absolutely nothing wrong. She sat down next to me, which was fine, that part I approved of. Then she put her feet up and spread the papers across her lap in a great white fan, and one corner of that fan landed directly on my tail.
I moved my tail. This should have been the end of it.
It was not the end of it. Every few minutes she would lean forward to reach the mug on the side table, and each time she leaned, the whole landscape shifted, papers sliding, a folder corner poking me somewhere new, her knee rising up under me like a small unstable hill. I adjusted my position eleven times. I am prepared to say that number with total confidence even though I did not actually count, because it felt like eleven, and I trust my feelings about my own tail more than I would trust an actual count.
There was a pen. A red one, clicked open and shut, open and shut, while she read, a small hard sound right near my ear every time she found something on the page she didn’t like. I have strong opinions about clicking sounds near my ear. I gave the pen several long looks. The pen did not care. Neither did she, which was somehow worse, because usually when I give something a long look she at least glances over to ask what’s wrong.
At one point she muttered something to herself, not to me, just out into the room, the way she does sometimes when the papers are being difficult, and set the whole stack down on the couch arm so she could rub her eyes with both hands. This was my opening. I climbed directly onto the space where the papers had just been, because a cat does not wait for an engraved invitation, a cat simply relocates to wherever the warm flat surface currently is. She laughed, said my name, and put me back down on the cushion next to her instead of on top of her important documents, which I considered a technicality I would be revisiting later.
The tea went cold. I know this because at some point she picked up the mug, drank from it, made a face, and set it back down without finishing it, and I spent a genuinely long stretch of time afterward staring at that mug wondering if the smell coming off it now was different from the smell that had been coming off it an hour ago, and deciding that it was, and deciding that this mattered, though I could not have told you why.
The papers kept moving. Some went from the top of the stack to the bottom. Some got a small tick mark from the red pen and were set aside entirely, face down, like they’d been dismissed from a room. I found this whole process deeply undignified to watch, honestly, papers being sorted by importance right there in front of me with no explanation offered, no consultation, nothing. I have sat through enough of her phone calls and enough of her keyboard sounds to have developed a general theory that whatever she does with these things is very serious and also completely uninteresting to look at directly, which is a strange combination for something that takes up so much of the couch.
Eventually the fan of papers narrowed down to just one folder, and she stopped leaning forward every few minutes, and the pen stopped clicking, and I felt the whole couch settle the way it does when she’s actually finished with something instead of just pausing in the middle of it. She set the folder on the side table next to the cold mug, and stretched her arms up over her head with a groan, and then — finally, properly, without a single sheet of paper anywhere near either of us — she put her hand flat on the cushion between us, palm up, which is the specific gesture that means come here if you’re going to.
I went there. I curled into the space her arm made, the good tight curve of it, and she rested her hand along my back without saying anything, and I could feel how tired her fingers were, heavier than usual, barely moving.
I let the whole business of the papers go. I even let the pen go, though I still don’t love it and I don’t expect that to change. What I did not let go of was my spot in the middle of her, the one I’d held onto through eleven repositionings and a cold mug of tea and a folder full of things I’ll never understand, and I settled my whole weight into her side and put my chin down and stayed exactly where I was for the rest of the afternoon.