gabolange

Margo stared.

The orange kitten didn’t even glance at her—she was far too occupied with the pressing task of attempting to climb inside Sergei’s shirt collar. 

“You can’t be serious—”

“She was hiding under a car,” he explained, clearly having spent the entire walk home preparing for exactly this. 

“Sergei.”

“It is raining.”

Margo turned and looked through the window. The night sky was perfectly clear. The street was perfectly dry. A couple walked past without umbrellas. A child was eating an ice cream cone. 

“She is very small,” Sergei stressed, as though this were a compelling legal argument.

The kitten punctuated this statement with a pitiful squeak.

Margo crossed her arms. “No.”

“She would have died, Margo.”

“She seems perfectly healthy.”

“She is approximately the size of a potato.”

This was not an exaggeration. The kitten, apparently sensing that she was the subject of negotiation, chose this moment to abandon her expedition into Sergei’s collar and instead fix Margo with a gaze of enormous, unblinking yellow eyes. The effect was somewhere between accusation and appeal. It was deeply unfair. 

“You already have a cat,” Margo reasoned, addressing this to Sergei rather than the kitten, because she refused to be manipulated by something that weighed less than a pound. 

“We have a cat.” He paused. “And we have another cat now.”

The kitten sneezed—a tiny, catastrophic thing that nearly toppled her sideways.

Margo closed her eyes. Opened them. Sighed the sigh of someone watching the next several months rearrange themselves around a decision that had, apparently, already been made.

“You already named her, didn’t you?”

Sergei’s shoulders relaxed and the pause answered before he did.

“Semyorka.”

“Of course.” Because apparently that was the naming convention now. Margo was living with a man who had looked at two small, soft, entirely unrocketlike animals and thought: yes, these should be named after Soviet missles and spacecraft.

They agreed, after a conversation that was mostly Margo talking and Sergei nodding with such transparent sincerity that she didn’t entirely trust it, that Semyorka was temporary. A foster arrangement only. They would keep her until she was old enough and healthy enough to be adopted properly, and then she would go to someone with the space and the intention for a second animal. 

For the next week, Margo asked everyone she encountered at the office – colleagues, the receptionist, an intern she had spoken to perhaps once – whether they were, by any chance, looking for a cat.

Two weeks later, she was sitting at one end of the couch with a stack of reports balanced on her knees, making notes in the margins. Sergei occupied the other end in his usual evening posture – reclined, one arm resting along the back of the cushions – with Semyorka asleep on his chest, rising and falling with his breathing like a small, furry buoy.

From the armchair, Sputnik observed all of this with the expression of a firstborn who had not been consulted.

Then, Margo heard Sergei say: “Мой котик.”

She raised her head. Sergei’s gaze was somewhere else entirely.

“What?”

A brief silence passed between them, weighted in a way that made Margo lower her reports slowly. 

“What?” she asked again.

The kitten had woken up and was now engaged in what she clearly considered a life-or-death battle with one of Sergei’s fingers, her hind legs braced against his palm, her whole miniature body committed to the struggle.

Sergei wasn’t looking at Margo.

He was looking at the cat. Realization arrived slowly and painfully.

“Oh.”

Sergei furrowed his brows and it was his turn to ask “What?” now.

For perhaps three seconds, Margo considered lying.

“I thought you were talking to me.”

The silence that followed was absolute. Even Semyorka paused her assault for a moment, one tiny paw suspended in the air, before resuming with renewed purpose. And then, to Margo’s horror, she watched the corners of his mouth start to twitch.

“No.”

His shoulders shook once.

Margo pointed at him.

“Don’t.”

That only made it worse. He actually laughed, the kind of laugh she still didn’t hear often enough to be immune to it. Which made the whole thing significantly worse.

Enough that Margo felt personally attacked.

“It was a reasonable assumption.” She averted her eyes, chin lifted, with as much dignity as the situation allowed.

“Was it?” he teased, still recovering, amusement still caught in the corners of his face. “I have never called you котик.”

He had called her many things. Солнышко in the mornings, low and unhurried, before either of them had properly woken up. Любимая моя when she came home in a bad mood and he was trying to soften the edges of it. Милая exactly once, which Margo had pretended to dislike, and which she thought about more often than was strictly reasonable.

Sergei glanced down at Semyorka, who had abandoned the battle in favor of simply lying flat across his arm with all four legs in the air. His eyes moved back to Margo. Then, with a complete and total absence of remorse, he reached over and deposited the kitten directly into her lap. He must’ve thought that if it had worked with Sputnik, it would work again this time.

Semyorka landed, turned a precise half-circle, and curled into a ball. Then she began to purr—a sound disproportionately large for her size, mechanical and steady as a small engine.

Margo looked down. The kitten looked up at Margo with drowsy, half-closed eyes.

Traitor.

Across from her, Sergei smiled.

Entirely too pleased with himself, he settled back against the couch. “You can both be мой котик.”