Chloe
“Your house is like the circus Daddy took me to,” Ava said, standing just inside the front door of my small home with her Tampa Bay Ospreys backpack still strapped to her shoulders.
She didn’t seem particularly excited about the observation.
Then again, this kid was rarely excited about anything.
Her curly hair — which was almost as long as her father’s — had completely fallen out of her hair tie at this point, and she swept it out of her eyes as she looked around at the organized clutter.
I couldn’t fault her for her assessment. Between my current knitting project, my half-sewn skirt I was working on, the paint-by-numbers craft I’d started and then abandoned after three glasses of wine, and the array of colorful cat toys strewn throughout the house — it kind of did look like a circus.
“A circus, huh?” I asked, taking her backpack and hanging it by my door. “Well, we better be on the lookout for acrobats and tigers.”
“There’s one!”
Ava pointed at Nacho just as he came scampering over from somewhere in the back hallway, his fluffy orange tail flicking back and forth. The cat wasn’t scared of anything, not even a kindergartner, and he trotted right up to Ava and arched against her leg.
“This is Nacho,” I told her as she bent to pet him. She didn’t smile like most kids would when having their fingers running through silky fur. She didn’t say awww or giggle, either. No, she wore the same look of indifference I was used to her showing in class.
Now that I’d been around her father a few times, it was easy to see the apple didn’t fall far from the tall, thick, muscular tree.
Still, even this was an improvement over where she’d been at the beginning of the school year. Will had hired me to work with her after school in the first semester, as she had lost her confidence to speak once she was in a class with twenty other students.
I learned quickly that Ava just needed a little patience, and, honestly? Indifference. She didn’t want the baby talk and the nonstop attention. She didn’t need cookies for a job well done or an over-the-top celebration.
“He’s soft, isn’t he?” I asked.
Ava nodded, and it wasn’t long before my other two fur children joined us.
“This one is Pepper, and that one is Coconut,” I told her, signaling to each of them.
Pepper was a gray striped tabby and the skinniest of the three, no doubt the runt of his litter. He had more energy than any five-year-old I’d ever taught.
Coconut, on the other hand, was standoffish and untrusting of everyone — even me. She curled her tail underneath her as she sat beneath my sewing table, a full ten feet away from us, her bright blue eyes narrowed and assessing Ava.
I didn’t mean to become the stray cat mom. It just sort of… happened.
Pepper was the first. I saw him on the side of the road on my way home from work one day, and when I’d taken him to the local animal shelter, they’d told me that if I left him, he’d be put down.
The memory of that still made me angry and upset today, but then again, I understood. They were overrun. They didn’t have space.
And so, he became my first baby.
Nacho showed up at my back porch a few months later, meowing for food with his fur matted and gunk in his eyes.
I’d no sooner taken him in before Coconut appeared in my backyard, although she’d stayed distant for weeks before she’d graced us with her presence inside. I’d left food for her on the porch and made sure she had water, too.
It took two weeks for her to let me close enough to pet her.
Then, when the temperature dipped below sixty one night — a rarity in Tampa — she’d croaked a meow at me when I opened the door and sauntered inside like she already owned the place.
Now, I was a certified cat lady at the ripe old age of twenty-six.
“Do you have any pets?” I asked Ava.
“No. Daddy says cats are assholes and dogs are too much work.”
I slapped a hand over my mouth to stifle my laugh. I was fairly certain her daddy wouldn’t approve of that language, but I was also pretty sure he didn’t know how to filter himself around her. She probably didn’t even know asshole was a “bad word.”
“He’s not wrong,” I told her. “You hungry?”
Ava nodded, standing from where she’d been scratching Nacho behind one ear. The fact that she wasn’t trying to pick him up by the neck told me she had more restraint than most of the children I taught.
“I’ll make us a snack,” I said, nodding toward my abandoned artwork on the coffee table. “Any chance you can help me with that? I started it the other night, but I’m not very good at painting.”
Just as she didn’t like baby talk, I learned early on with Ava that she also didn’t respond to what I referred to as my “teacher voice.” Where I was usually sing-song sweet and peppy with my kids, Ava responded better when I spoke to her like an adult. She liked an even, emotionless tone.
I couldn’t imagine why.
An image of her father crossed my mind as Ava sat on her knees, picking up the paintbrush and wetting it in the cloudy glass of water before she wiped it over one of the dry paints. We’d experimented with watercolor last semester, and I was impressed she remembered just what to do.
She then promptly started painting all over the place, no care for the numbers or lines on the butterfly image.
I just chuckled.
Better for her to make a mess of it than for it to sit unfinished on my table for months.
I turned on my Bluetooth speaker as I rounded into my kitchen, putting on a kid-friendly, but not annoying, playlist. That was literally the name of the playlist on Spotify — Kid Friendly, Not Annoying.
That last part was essential, since I spent most of my day listening to either kids or cartoons singing.
I could keep an eye on Ava through the window cut out in my kitchen, only a bar and a couple of stools between us. Not that I really felt like I needed to. Out of all my students, Ava was the easiest to handle.
So, with her occupied and my hands mindlessly working to make us a snack tray, I let my thoughts drift to Will Perry.
The man was a magnetic force.
Tall as a tree, muscles like a bull, and the saddest golden-brown eyes I’d ever seen.
The first time I’d met him, I’d had to actively work to keep myself from drooling. He was an exact replica of the cover model for one of the Harlequin romances I’d snuck into our house when I was fourteen — one I’d kept hidden from my mother and grandmother and re-read more times than I could count.
His chestnut hair was long and unruly, flowing to his shoulders and highlighted by the sun with strands of gold like he was Hercules. He had the kind of jaw that could cut glass, it was so sharp, and though his pouty lips never did curve into a smile, that didn’t make it any less difficult to not stare at his mouth.
He was just… beautiful. Achingly so. The way the last sunset on a beach vacation is.
I didn’t have to hear his life story to see that he’d been through pain. He wore it like armor, his lips in a thin line, brows furrowed, hand tight around his daughter’s like he didn’t trust anyone to properly care for her.
Judging by how fast he’d gone through a half-dozen nannies since Ava started school, he had reason to feel that way.
Today, that severe gaze of his had been tinted with anxiety.
And so, without even thinking twice, I’d offered to help.
Not that I wouldn’t have helped even if I did stop to think before opening my mouth. I was so desperate for something to do with my spare time that I’d jump at practically any opportunity. There were only so many nights I could spend sewing a new outfit, knitting a scarf that I’d never wear because it’s too damn hot in Florida anyway, or bingeing the latest true crime podcast.
You could go on a date, a voice whispered in my brain, but it was snuffed out by the louder voice that reminded me all the reasons that wasn’t a good idea.
The most prevalent being that my matriarchy would likely disown me.
I grew up in a house ruled by scorned women. My mother was a single mom, raising me to be independent from the time I could walk in some sort of effort to spite my father and every other man on Earth. She was brought up by a single mom, too — my grandmother, who was not too shy to remind her daughter what a constant disappointment she was for following in her footsteps despite my grandmother’s warnings.
After my father left, Grandma moved in with us. And between the two of them, I was surrounded by an ever-present reminder that all men were trash.
And after the one experience of my own with the opposite sex in college? I had to agree.
I didn’t think of boys much when I was younger, but when I turned thirteen, something inside me just… clicked. I was instantly boy crazy, hyperaware of every time a boy so much as looked at me, let alone brushed past.
By the time I was in high school, I was sneakily watching romance movies on my laptop and hiding books in my room like they were paraphernalia. I spent multiple nights a week under my comforter with my eyes wide as I read Wattpad stories. I listened to the few friends I had tell me stories of dating and going to first, second, or third base with my phone in hand, feverishly taking notes.
But I knew better than to even try to date in my household.
It wasn’t until I left for college that I had enough guts to kiss a boy. It was slimy and gross and didn’t do much for me, but I didn’t want to be a virgin my entire life, so I let the guy have his way with me in the back bedroom of a house party.
My head hung off the bed the whole time, and he had an old Chingy song playing on his speaker.
It hurt at first. Then it was just uncomfortable.
It lasted approximately forty-eight seconds, and to this day, I still counted them as the worst of my life.
Add in the fact that the jerk bragged to his friends the next day before promptly making me out to be some kind of Stage 5 Clinger, as he’d put it, and it was then that you could say my appetite for romance was snuffed out like a match flame.
It had devastated me that my mom and grandma were right.
I’d wanted so desperately to have the kind of love I’d seen in The Notebook. I’d even dreamed about something as hilariously inevitable as the stubborn, helplessly love-sick situations in No Strings Attached or Friends with Benefits.
I wanted to be the average girl who turned the head of the billionaire, or the shy bookworm who got the quarterback, or the cool advertising account manager who fell for her childhood best friend.
But I didn’t have a childhood best friend.
I was the furthest thing from cool.
And my only experience with a boy had left a taste in my mouth so sour, I still wasn’t rid of it even seven years later.
So, here I was, twenty-six and devoted to my life as a teacher. I didn’t watch romance movies anymore, but instead indulged in crime documentaries. I didn’t listen to love songs, but to podcasts about how cool ants are. I didn’t go on dates, but instead spent my evenings with my three cats and my current project — be it sewing, knitting, painting, or some other craft I saw on social media.
To some, I knew it seemed an unfathomable existence. It sounded lonely and pathetic.
But I liked being alone. I liked throwing my all into my classroom, into the students whom I had the chance to plant seeds with at the perfect age for them to sprout. I never felt lonely, not with my cats, my mom, and my grandma.
I did, however, feel stuck sometimes — like I wasn’t living life, but rather that life was living me.
“Oops!”
I blinked out of my thoughts as Ava sent the glass of murky water toppling, and instead of moving to clean it, she just looked over her shoulder at me.
I smirked, grabbing the tray of fruits, veggies, and crackers I’d put together and bringing it with me into the living room — along with a towel.
“Don’t worry, my little angel bug,” I said, pressing the towel into the wet carpet. “Life’s no fun without making a mess once in a while.”
