Finding Emma

by K. Ryan

  “I’m kidding! Shit, I’m sorry. That sounded really bad, didn’t it?” he burst out a quick snort of laughter and his shoulders shook.

  I didn’t really see what was so funny. There was absolutely some sort of inside joke revolving around his nickname, but that didn’t make me want to know what it was any more than before. I just wanted to get all the niceties over with.

  “Well, look, I just wanted to introduce myself. That’s all. Not trying to be a weird creeper or anything. Oh, and I also wanted to let you know we’re having a little tailgate/housewarming thing tomorrow for the game. You should stop by and grab a brat and some beers or something. We’d be happy to have ya since we’re neighbors now and all.”

  I nodded slowly. Right. The Packer game tomorrow. I might live under a rock, but that rock wasn’t wide enough to drown out football season in Wisconsin. It was like some kind of unofficial state holiday that ran from the end of August all the way through January, if the team did well enough to make it into the playoffs. Even Mrs. Johannsen blared the games at defcon levels and that was really saying something.

  You couldn’t go anywhere on a Sunday, no matter where you lived, without seeing various green and gold jerseys, T-shirts that read 52 Shades of Clay and Drink Wisconsibly, obese men walking around in nothing but green and gold striped overalls and face paint in 30 degree weather, not to mention assorted paraphernalia like Donald Driver bobbleheads, G-shaped spatulas, cowbells, and buttons that said things like Da Bears Still Suck, Superman Wears Clay Matthews’s PJs, and Got Rodgers?

  I’d seen green and gold cars, full basements decked out as a shrine to former greats like Brett Favre, Ray Nitschke, Bart Starr, and Reggie White, people painting their fences with various cheesy—pun intended—phrases of encouragement like Bleed Green and In Coach McCarthy We Trust; hell, I’d even seen a green and gold house and someone walking around in a St. Vince—as in Vince Lombardi—pope get-up on game day.

  You get the idea. Pandemonium. Epic, die-hard, I-gotta-own-a-piece-of-that-Frozen-Tundra frenzied obsession with professional athletes running around a field in tight pants.

  I mean, come on, people went to those games wearing foam cheese on their heads without a hint of irony.

  I just didn’t get it, but I also knew well enough to never, ever breathe a word of that out loud.

  “I, uh…”

  Just as I was about to throw an excuse his way, Slinger glanced conspiratorially over his shoulder, leaned in closer, and cupped a hand around his mouth to stage-whisper, “I tried to get Finn—that’s my roommate, by the way—to come out here with me, but he pussed out. He’s kinda shy around pretty girls, just so you know.”

  I frowned. “Okay.”

  Why he’d chosen to share that information was beyond me.

  Slinger seemed to sense this conversation was pretty much over, so he leaned away again to shove both hands deep into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Okay, then. Well, you know where we live. Feel free to pop over whenever and stay for as long as you want. It’s not like you have to go very far to get home, right?”

  He paused, like he was waiting for me to laugh and punch his arm like we were old friends. “Anyway, well, it was nice meeting you. Hopefully we’ll see you around.”

  I pressed a quick smile on my face, my hand already gripping the edge of my door so I could close it. “Nice meeting you too. Thanks for the offer, by the way.”

  That brightened up the dejected smile on his face and he waved goodbye. “No problem. Have a good night!”

  “You too.”

  With that, I immediately shut the door and locked it behind me. It wasn’t that I felt unsafe now with these strange guys living so close. The motion of locking the door, of flipping that barrier into place, had become a compulsive habit that a therapist would probably have a field day over.

  And seriously, was it a full moon or something? First Noah was on my case yesterday about coming home for dinner, then Mara giving me the puppy-dog sad eyes, and now my new neighbors—the scrawny ginger and his hot-as-shit roommate? Was I walking around with a sign plastered to my forehead that said: Invite me places, yo?

  When I stalked back to the screen door, the cat was still sitting right where I’d left him, his ears flicking and his ink-dipped tail slapping down on the chair like he’d gotten impatient sitting here waiting for me to come back.

  It was also then that I realized Slinger, or whatever his name was, hadn’t really given me a chance to turn him down. That probably did not bode well for me come tomorrow.

  I put my hands on my hips and glanced down at the cat exasperatedly.

  “I don’t think I’m going to like the new neighbors.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  On any other day, somebody blasting The Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” at full throttle would’ve been awesome. It probably would’ve been coming right from my own speakers, too, if I didn’t have at least a little consideration for the people around me.

  My new neighbors, on the other hand, were too busy engaging in tailgate festivities to really give a shit about anyone else.

  Their screen door slapped open and closed every few minutes and wave after wave of party-goers poured in and out from the apartment. Pre-game radio interviews were blaring in between songs, some guys were throwing a football around right in front of my patio and making the cat nervous, bottles were clanging, the smell of smoky, greasy brats and charcoal wafted through my screen door, people spilled out from the patio onto the grass, flooding out towards the tree line and taking over pretty much half the apartment building like they’d just started a new frat or something.

  Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration, but they were still wreaking havoc on what should’ve been a peaceful day off. Who had a party right after moving anyway? Didn’t they have things to unpack? Organize? Make presentable? Then again, my new neighbors were two guys, so they’d probably didn’t care—

  And then it happened.

  Someone starting playing “Green and Yellow”, a Packer-themed knock-off of “Black and Yellow” by Lil’ Wayne and something dark and sinister twisted all the way down to my stomach. My head turned, glaring at the wall, for all the good it would do, and my lips curled back into a snarl.

  I’d been turned into the demon from The Exorcist by my new neighbors and Lil’ Wayne.

  “Hey, Sling!” a deep muffled voice yelled from the other side of the wall. “Jesus Christ, man, turn that shitty song off.”

  “Hey, step off, Finn,” was Slinger’s equally muffled response. “I can do whatever I want. You wanna know why? It’s GAME DAY, BITCH!”

  “Oh yeah? Do you want my foot up your ass?”

  “No.”

  “Then turn it off.”

  “Fine...shit.”

  Two seconds later, the music switched to “Mama Said Knock You Out”, which was only slightly more pleasing to the ears, but not by much. It might have been a passive-aggressive response to the foot-in-your-ass threat, but I didn’t need LL Cool J rapping about takin’ the world by storm and makin’ the world go boom through my walls.

  I think I growled. No, I definitely growled. And the worst part of it all was that every time somebody from the other side of the building yelled, screamed, and/or hollered, the cat crouched down on his chair, ears bent back, eyes wide with terror.

  They were scaring the damned cat they were so loud.

  Now, as I hunkered down on my couch, shooting daggers at the wall, I felt like the Grinch on Christmas Eve as he paced on top of his mountain, glaring grumpily down at the Whos down in Whoville.

  If there’s one thing I hate, it’s all the noise, noise, noise!

  Right about now, these last two months or so of peace and quiet seemed like paradise. A blissful dream. A figment of my imagination.

  I know, I know. I really should’ve just shut my screen door. Or at the very least put my earbuds in and listened to some actual good music. But the problem was that if I shut the door, which would effecti
vely drown out a good chunk of the current bane of my existence, I worried I would also be shutting out the cat. The only other times I’d shut the heavy sliding door was when I left the apartment or went to bed.

  If I shut the door and just went back to pouting angrily on my couch, two things could happen: he could either paw and maawhr at the door with those wide, sea foam-grey eyes of his, making me feel like a pile of crap for doing that to him, or he could just say enough was enough, hop off the patio chair, and disappear into the tree line, never to be seen again.

  But I wasn’t going to be that neighbor either, the one with a stick up her ass that stomped her foot until the people who were actually having fun and enjoying life dialed it back a notch. I didn’t think I’d know what fun felt like anymore if it slapped me across the face.

  Then, the unthinkable happened: someone, probably that red-haired, apple-cheeked guy with the weird nickname, gave Luke Bryan permission to sing about country girls shakin’ it for him by blasting his song through the speakers.

  That was it. I’d had it.

  I didn’t really know how to deal with this kind of crowd anymore. I was used to the hustle and bustle of the city now, where I could weave in and out and then leave it behind me in my apartment, but this was different. This was the kind of crowd I’d thrived on in college. Even before the bomb dropped, I’d enjoyed the random tailgate party or night out at one of the three bars in downtown Hickory. Now, I was lost. Anxiety-riddled and practically shaking with frustration and antisocial grumblings.

  This was my life now. Always on the outside looking in. No interest in joining the party.

  A loud crash of breaking bottles rattled and split through the walls and I’d barely had time to recover from the abrupt smashing when the cat scurried off the chair and darted right for the tree line, bypassing the patio on the other side of us and sprinting on all four white paws away from me.

  Then the panic came, a feeling I was well-acquainted with, and now, the abandonment sent this sharp spike of adrenaline through my body and had me taking off after him.

  “Oh no! Wait!” I cried out and scrambled for the screen door. I made it all the way to the edge of my patio before skidding to a stop.

  The cat ran right past my new neighbors’ patio. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. They were just people. It was just a party. But I still stood frozen to the concrete like the coward I was. After peeking around the corner to see if I could catch at least a glimpse of where the cat had scampered off to but coming up empty, I swallowed a hard breath and retreated back into the safety of my apartment.

  Maybe he’d come back. After the party died down and everything went back to normal, he’d—

  “Hey, miss?”

  It was the same deep voice I’d heard muffled through the front seat of the truck yesterday and through the walls about 10 minutes ago. On reflex, I turned on my heel to find the same scruffy, scarily beautiful guy I’d seen yesterday, wearing a forest green Aaron Rodgers jersey to boot, smiling back at me from where he stood on my patio. I might’ve been completely slack-jawed by his presence alone, but it was what he had tucked underneath his arm that stole all the words right from my lips.

  The cat.

  The same cat I’d been nervous would try to bite me, scratch me, or anything else a cat could do to attack me. He was just happily nestled in this stranger’s arms like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “I think this is your cat, right?” My neighbor grinned back at me a little sheepishly as he held the cat up. One side of his mouth pulled up more to the side in the kind of crooked smile that hit me right in the knees.

  I opened my mouth to respond, but nothing came out. My mind had gone completely blank.

  “I saw him out here on your patio yesterday,” he told me. Then his light eyes widened as he seemed to realize what that must have sounded like to me and jumped to explain. “I, uh, needed to hook up our hose so I could wash off our patio. The tap’s over on your side of the building, so...”

  He shuffled a little closer and gingerly set the cat down on the chair that held his makeshift bed, glancing up at me with his teeth sawing across his bottom lip.

  “Sorry about my dumbass friends,” my neighbor went on...and was his voice shaking a little? I was too busy staring at his lips to nail that one down. “I swear we’re not gonna be those neighbors that have loud parties every weekend. This one just...got a little out of hand, you know?”

  I swallowed tightly and nodded, pressing a quick smile on my face more for my own benefit than his. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

  That smile widened just a hair, but it was enough to propel me closer until I was just inches away from the screen door.

  “My name’s Finn, by the way.”

  I found myself smiling back at him. “I’m Emma. It’s nice to meet you.”

  That smile widened until it seemed to stretch all the way across his face, crinkling his eyes and radiating something I couldn’t quite place.

  “Nice to meet you, too, Emma.”

  Those eyes...they might as well have been a clear sky reflected back at me. They just about knocked me sideways. And then Finn reached out to scratch the cat behind his ears, making him nuzzle his head against Finn’s hand like he was nudging him to keep going. Oh yeah, right there. That’s the spot.

  “He’s pretty friendly,” Finn was telling me now as the cat purred away underneath his ministrations. “He came right over to me and everything when I went running after him before. Most cats aren’t like that, you know?”

  No, I really didn’t know. I’d never been around a cat, let alone multiple cats, long enough to know.

  Luckily, I found my voice. “He’s, um...he’s not my cat.”

  Finn frowned at me, perching one hand on his hip and scratching his beard with the other in thought as his eyes roamed from the cat, the chair, the towels, and the little bowls of food and water underneath the chair. As if on cue, the cat glanced at Finn and then his wide eyes shifted back to me, letting out a high-pitched maaw. Finn chuckled a little in response and started sawing on that bottom lip again.

  “Fair enough,” he laughed. “For contraband, I guess he’s pretty cute. I promise I won’t rat you out, okay? If our landlord shows up asking questions, I know nothing. You should probably get him a collar, though, if you’re gonna keep him out here like this. A tag or something like that—just saying.”

  I guess him thinking my flat-out denial was more about our lease agreement than my actual relationship to the cat wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

  Finn ran a hand through his hair, pushing the long, droopy pieces of chestnut away from his face, and he blew out a quick breath. “I know things seem pretty crazy over on our side of the wall, but do you wanna grab a beer or something on us? We almost scared your cat away, so it’s the least we can do—we’ve got brats, chips and dip...all that stuff.”

  I probably should’ve expected the offer, but I was still unprepared for the hope creeping into his eyes. It was almost a shame to have to extinguish all that hope just as quickly.

  “Thanks, but I actually already ate and I’ve got a lot of work to do today.”

  His lips curled up again, but this time the smile didn’t quite reach up far enough to crinkle his eyes. Despite the hope, I had a sneaking suspicion he’d fully expected me to turn him down.

  He shoved his hands deep inside his pockets and now, his lips pulled tightly across his face in a grimace.

  “Okay. No problem,” Finn shrugged, his eyes falling on the cat one last time. “Well, if you change your mind, feel free to stop over whenever you want.”

  “Sure. Thanks for the offer. I appreciate it.”

  I was starting to feel like a robot. Like these excuses were just on auto-loop now. Like I wasn’t fooling anybody but myself. Sooner or later, the more I refused people, the more they’d ignore me completely like what had happened with basically everyone from my old life except for Noah and Cristina.
>
  There was a part of me that felt devastatingly pathetic just thinking that.

  The other part of me knew it was a necessity.

  Finn waved, a pained expression on his face that looked more like a wince than it did a smile, and he shoved both hands in his pockets again with his head down before disappearing around our shared brick patio wall.

  . . .

  Long after the charcoal smoke cleared and the cheers and the jeers from the game faded away, I found myself standing in front of my screen door wearing socks over my hands like the crazy person I’d become.

  Let me back up a bit.

  I don’t know what possessed me to do it. Maybe it was the lingering feelings of unrest surrounding my inevitable fate...you know, the one where the old shut-in dies choking on a piece of chicken because there’s no one around to do the Heimlich on her and her body isn’t found until the landlord finally investigates the stench? That was my fate. And for a long time, I’d made peace with that fate, or as much peace as a person could muster for something like that.

  Maybe I’d decided I didn’t want to walk around with a heart two sizes too small.

  Maybe I just felt guilty that, even after seeing him tucked under Finn’s arm, I was still afraid of a stray cat.

  Maybe I’d begun to let myself hope that I could actually keep him, as crazy and idiotic as it was, and even though I had no business entertaining the idea for a second.

  Maybe I just wanted to see what he’d do.

  Which led me to where I currently stood now with long, wool socks pulled up past my forearms. Between allergies, whatever monstrosities could be lurking on his fur, and the fact that he could still decide to claw my eyes out, I felt like I needed a little protection if I was going to venture out of the safety of my apartment. I didn’t know how far socks over my hands would really go in terms of armor, but it was all I had, especially since I couldn’t find my winter gloves to save my life.

  The strains of The Cars Greatest Hits album spun around on my turntable and when “Just What I Needed” crooned through my speakers, I cocked a wary eyebrow at the cat.