Tim’rous beastie

The first crash came from the hallway. Something small and not too heavy, by the sound of it—the sharp clatter of something wooden. Sergei turned down the heat on the pan, walked to the doorway, and found Semyorka sitting beside a fallen picture frame with alert eyes, ears forward, awaiting applause.

“Проказница,” he reprimanded, pointing a finger at her.

The kitten blinked.

Sergei put the frame back in its place, returned to the kitchen, turned the heat back up.

The second crash came four minutes later. Different weight this time—the flat sound of a book. Sergei stood at the stove for a moment, exhaling through his nose. The kitten produced a small, thin sound from the hallway; inquiring. He turned the heat off entirely and covered the pan with a lid – because Sputnik had been sitting at a suspicious distance from the counter for the last several minutes – and went to investigate.

He was gone for perhaps forty-five seconds.

He came back to find Sputnik on the far side of the kitchen, sitting with his back to the counter, as if he had not recently moved at all. The pan was slightly closer to the edge than Sergei had left it and the lid was only halfway covering the Estrogonofe de Frango simmering in it. There was a small wet mark on the counter that had not been there before.

Sergei looked from the pan to Sputnik.

Sputnik licked his face, unbothered.

From the hallway, something else fell.

Sergei sighed, set down the spatula, and walked to the living room doorway.

“Margo.”

She was on the couch, absorbed in her reading.

Some evenings she came and stood beside him in the kitchen, not cooking so much as keeping him company—leaning against the counter with a glass of something, asking questions about what he was making or offering opinions. Sergei didn’t mind, of course. He liked her there, very much.

Other evenings Margo disappeared into whatever she was reading and didn’t surface until he called her for dinner, and he liked that too, in a different way—the sense of the house settling around both of them doing separate things under the same roof. What he noticed, lately, was that the things she was reading were different. She was reading for pleasure more than she had when they’d first arrived, staying up past midnight sometimes with something she couldn’t put down. She was relaxing into their life here, slowly and in her own way.

“I need a favor,” he said.

Margo looked up, and Sergei could see her studying his expression for a moment. Something in it made her set her book down properly rather than just lowering it.

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened.” Sergei paused, then drew a breath. “I need you to sit with the kitten.”

Margo waited.

“She keeps knocking things over,” he explained, “and when I go to look, Sputnik—” He stopped, considering how to phrase the next part. “He takes advantage of the situation.”

There was a brief silence.

“Is he getting into the food again?” Margo asked.

“It is possible,” Sergei conceded. “He is opportunistic.”

Margo looked past him toward the hallway, where Semyorka had appeared in the doorway and was now sitting with her tail curled around her feet, looking from one of them to the other with wide and innocent eyes.

She looked back at Sergei.

“Please, Margo,” he needled, shoulders sagging.

“Y’know,” she said, standing and walking up to him, “most people would just lock her in another room.”

“She cries.”

“You could ignore it,” she offered, patting his apron-covered chest.

Margo picked up Semyorka on her way past, which the kitten accepted immediately and without complaint, settling against her shoulder like she’d been waiting for exactly this. She stopped at the kitchen island, slid onto a stool, and resettled Semyorka in her lap with practiced ease. The kitten kneaded twice and settled.

Then Margo looked at Sputnik, who was now on top of the same kitchen island, settled and serene. A piece of chicken sat beside him, apparently beneath his interest now that the work was done.

“You,” she told him, “are not as subtle as you think you are.”

Sputnik’s ear rotated toward her, then back. He did not otherwise respond.

Margo looked back down at Semyorka, who had discovered the little star-shaped pendant on her necklace and was doing her level best to detach it.

Sergei turned the stove back on, then reached for the wine, the same bottle he’d been cooking with, pouring a glass. Margo glanced up when he set the glass down, and he took the opportunity—leaning in, one hand finding the back of her neck the way it always did, her hair soft against his fingers. She tilted toward him, easy and familiar, the way things were between them now.

The kiss that had started as a brief thing became two, and then a third that had no real excuse, Semyorka shifting in Margo’s lap with indignation, not having consented to being part of this.

Then Sergei straightened, looking – for just a moment – like someone who had entirely forgotten there was dinner to be getting on with. He was still smiling when Margo said, without looking up from Semyorka, who had apparently decided the disruption was behind her and was now batting idly at the pendant again: