Sweet Romance14 min read
I Was His Cat — Then I Walked Back Into His Arms
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I woke up under a white ceiling and for a long, dizzy second I only remembered the softness of fur and the smell of flax in the sunlight. I blinked like a cat and then realized my hands were hands — thin, warm, and human.
"Isabel?" a voice echoed in my head and it felt like a memory someone else had given me. I pushed my hair off my face, sat up, and said, "I'm Isabel."
"Isabel Cardoso?" the voice said again, softer, like a name it had worn carefully for years.
I smiled without understanding why the name mattered so much. I had been a long-haired tabby in someone else's book — Flynn Rodriguez's tabby — and that book had ended with the tabby buried under an ugly stone. The last line of that book said something impossible and tender: he would meet his cat again, but as a girl. I was that impossible ending.
"This ceiling is very white," I murmured aloud. "It isn't fur at all."
A boy's voice from outside the room — narrow, steady, not used to trembling — said, "You woke up. That's good."
"Who is 'you'?" I asked, pushing myself up. "Are you my", I hesitated because the word felt too small, "owner?"
He came in like he belonged in composed silence. Flynn Rodriguez had the sort of face people compared to carved marble and the kind of hands that looked more at home handling ledgers than someone else's hair. He looked at me the way someone looks at a long-lost thing that fits perfectly when you hold it.
"Isabel?" he asked, and his mouth bent as if the name had been waiting to be called. "Is that you?"
"I was a cat," I said because there was no shame in the truth.
Flynn sat down on the edge of the bed and his voice went soft. "My cat was named Cleo. I called her Cleo-Cleo. I buried Cleo when I was young."
"That's me," I said, and the room spun with the ridiculous faith that the book's last line had saved me. "You called me Cleo, right? You—"
"I remember," Flynn said, and for a second his polished mask faltered. "You used to jump off the wardrobe like a little cannon."
I could have kissed him for remembering, for keeping. Instead I fluffed the invisible tail of my memory and made a silly, triumphant noise. "Then I'm back. I came back."
"Why are you naked?" Flynn blurted, mortified. "No, wait—"
"I am naked?" I glanced down and felt my face burn with an embarrassed sort of pride. "Oh. Clothes. I need clothes."
We both stared at the pile of clothing on the chair like two conspirators. Flynn handed me a set of simple things — soft, neutral, boring. He watched in a way that made me feel like I was fragile treasure.
"Put these on," he said. "You should sleep. It's been a lot."
"I slept for years," I said, and he smiled like that fixed me in all the wrong, wonderful ways.
"Then sleep more," Flynn said, and when I drifted off again, it was into a world that smelled faintly of fish and linen and a man's care.
"Don't tell anyone," he whispered as if to guard me from the world. "Not yet. Only me."
"Okay." My voice rolled like a purr. "Only you, Flynn."
*
"She ran after my car," Pablo Fletcher the driver said as we stood by the gates of the Flynn-built plaza. "Little tabby was just chasing us. I thought it might get hit."
"Don't flatter me," I said, indignation piling up like fur. "I'm not little. I'm gorgeous."
Flynn watched me like he had learned to study the curve of a sentence. He looked puzzled sometimes, tender at others, and later I learned that the man who had been my boy-guardian had never been able to forget the shape of my fur.
"Isabel," he said once when a mistake in a report required his attention and my head had popped up between his papers, "you'll have to learn how to eat with chopsticks."
"I'll learn," I promised, because whatever else I had to be now, I could be clever.
"Good." He smiled. "Then you will learn other things too."
"Like how to nap on your stomach?" I asked. "That's important."
He laughed and that warm sound was a brand I carried with me. "Because you're my cat."
"Because you're my owner," I corrected in a very serious voice. "And owners must feed cats."
"Deal," he said. "Deal."
*
Ava Cuevas's name appeared on his phone and my ears pricked. The book had a woman called Gu Qingxue, and in this life she was Ava: a practiced smile, a known face, and a quiet way of making the world lean toward her. Flynn's phone came alive with her voice.
"Flynn, lunch?" she asked.
"No," he said without looking up. "Not today. I'm home."
I leaned forward. "Who is Ava? Can I see her?"
"No," Flynn said. "She's an actress I used to know."
"Do we like actresses?" I asked, because in the book's old logic Ava made everything complicated.
"We are not a complication," Flynn answered, and because his tone made it gentle I felt something like a tether tightened.
"Good," I said. "Then I will be sure to breathe on you for no reason at all."
He took my small hand in his and it felt terribly ordinary and also impossible. "Don't do that in the office," he said. "People will stare."
"Let them stare," I said. "I will flaunt."
He glanced at me with a world-worn patience. "Isabel, are you sure you want to be seen?"
"Only by you," I said.
*
I followed Flynn to the company gate the next morning and strutted like I owned the tile. People glanced and then stared. They whispered as we passed and I pretended they were applauding. Flynn's secretary, Kenneth Kraus, watched us enter with the professional calm of someone who had seen a lot and judged less.
"Isabel will wait here," Flynn told Kenneth, and then watched me with something like hope.
"She looks like Cleo," Kenneth murmured.
"If she is Cleo, then do not tell her that she stares like a cat," I declared. "I have dignity."
Flynn squeezed my hand. "You have many dignities."
"Good," I purred.
The office towers smelled faintly of coffee and polished oak. I explored every corner like an auditor of pleasure until I found the elevator that smelled of dust and rubber. People in suits stared with the curious greed of people who love a good story. I hopped out and wandered.
"Can I help you?" a man asked.
"Yes," I said. "I am the cat. I am looking for the place where Flynn goes to wear serious faces."
"You're in Flynn Rodriguez's building," he said. "Follow the signs."
I followed signs like a detective in a story I half-remembered. I almost made it to a floor where meetings hum like swarms, when a suited man got very close and put his hand on my waist.
"You're lost, sweetie," he said with too much breath. "Let me show you the way."
I did what any creature with claws and no tolerance would do.
I scratched his face — hard enough to mark — and kicked him so he went down in a very undignified heap. People poked their heads out and one by one watchers pressed closer until the smile lines of corporate life became a chorus of gossip. Flynn came down like he had been waiting for exactly this.
"What happened?" he asked, and I said, "I don't like men who grope."
Flynn's mouth went hard for a moment, and then he did something with a professional decisiveness that made my small heart bloom.
"Kenneth," he said, "call security and call the legal team. I want a report."
"I'll handle it," Kenneth said, already moving.
"You okay?" Flynn asked, bending down.
"Amazing," I said. "I did a very good defense."
He tilted my chin up with the flat of his palm and his eyes were entirely my new home. "You were brave."
"I am brave because I'm your cat," I said, very pleased.
He kissed the top of my head as if coronating a queen. The world hummed softer after that.
*
"What if they find out?" Ava asked later. We ran into her in a restaurant that smelled of citrus. I had decided I would let her judge me. She smiled that careful smile.
"Find out what?" Flynn asked the way someone asks about an old wound.
"About the way your...girl insists on calling you her owner," Ava said.
"I'm not her owner," he said, and for a second the two of them measured each other. "She's my friend."
"That's such a comfortable term for a complicated arrangement," Ava said, with that patient annoyance I later learned was her profession.
"I like comfortable words with her," Flynn said. "They sit easier."
"You two know each other so intimately," Ava said. "Flynn, are you sure this is—"
"It is nothing to be sure of yet," he said. "Isabel is learning how to be a human. Let her do that."
"Can a cat be human?" Ava asked with curiosity, not cruelty.
"Yes," I said from where I sat, because I could not resist. "Watch me. I will now demonstrate human politeness. Hello, Ava, how are your contracts?"
"You're bold," Ava said with a laugh. "You really are his cat, aren't you?"
"I am his," I said, utterly pleased, and Flynn reached for my hand the way someone anchors themselves.
"Good," Ava said, and left us without rancor because she had the kind of self-preservation that meant never crossing a man in public who had both money and wrath.
*
Time passed like a slow purr. I learned to use chopsticks in the morning and to type with both thumbs in the afternoon. I learned that shoes with straps hurt until you break them in and that the world had a place for small, loud people like me.
"You're learning fast," Flynn said one evening. "Your head is not empty."
"Of course it's not empty," I said. "It has twenty years of someone else's fake memories and one very real urgency to find you."
He smiled the sort of smile that made an accountant look like an artist. "Do you remember before the book?"
"No," I said. "My memories are stitched together like a child's quilt. Useful, warm, but not mine."
He nodded and stroked my hair. "Then take mine and make it your own."
"I will," I promised, and in that promise I was older than my odd history.
*
The film audition came like a gust. Fabien Vorobyov, a director with tired eyes and the kind of bluntness that could be cruel, needed a princess for his period piece. Flynn brought me because he thought it would be funny and because some part of him wanted me to be seen.
"You're here to watch," he said. "Not to interfere."
"I will just peek," I said. "And maybe practice my regal indignation."
"Don't," he warned.
"Watch," I said.
Inside the freezing room where actors tried to make themselves important, my heart felt like a drum. Practice became reality when Fabien pointed to me and said, "You go first."
"Me?" I whispered.
"You go," he said. "The one who looks like she belongs."
I went.
"Action."
I walked in like I had done it all my life and remembered how my small, living chest had felt the day Flynn had come to get me off a rain-slick curb. I remembered the wet of a tear that had never been mine and practiced grief until it had shape.
"Cut," Fabien said, and his breath seemed to catch.
"You were born for this," Flynn told me after. He was standing in the doorway with the light behind him like some ridiculous myth. "It is yours."
"Because I am your cat," I answered, and then the world cracked open in applause and papered faces of people who made careers out of noticing when something real stepped through.
*
Not everyone liked real.
Ava's softness frayed into strategy. A rumor fed with the hungry chemicals of the internet. Someone inside sent a script out. Someone traded secrets. The noise became vicious. Headlines asked about favoritism and whether a billionaire's influence had purchased me a role.
"That is not the truth," Flynn said without hiding anything. "I did not buy you this."
"Then show them," I asked.
He did more than show. He announced to his company, to the investors, to the director, that no deals or money had been used to put me on a screen. He posted photographs of my early rehearsals, of the lines I had learned, of the director praising me.
"But people wanted a face to blame," I said. "And they chose a woman who had been on top for longer."
Ava's team tried to push. They chose headlines and crafted a narrative. But the company moved like a machine Flynn built to defend what it loved. The internet roared, then it paused, and then it turned.
"This will not become about her," Flynn told me.
"It is about me," I said, and we both knew the world was complicated like a glass stair.
*
Then came the thing I had vowed would happen: the punishment.
Denise Burks walked a room like she owned every shadow. She had been Flynn's stepmother in the sense that she had married for power and kept a son, Dax Ricci, padded with bad habits and worse debts. Dax had been cruel when I had been fur — his hands had scarred me, and later I had been forced into a small death that smelled of iron and paper money. Flynn had never forgiven them.
They had become smaller because Flynn had chosen otherwise, had scraped to create more than what they thought they deserved. The old wound hid and festered. When the internet trouble started, Denise tried to leverage it into sympathy — to show up to board meetings and claim suffering and the need for support. Dax threatened people he believed owed him money. They behaved like people who could not understand the concept of consequence.
I did not want to see them suffer. I wanted them to see what suffering looks like when you have deprived someone else of a life.
The situation reached its peak at a shareholders' luncheon that Flynn refused to let be ordinary. He had asked that the company's quarterly review be held in public with media present, an unusual move to be sure. People rearranged their ties and adjusted lenses because they had expected nothing but the bland ritual of numbers and smiling.
Flynn stood at the podium and did something I had not seen him do before: he chose to strip the room of pretense and let consequences be visible.
"Good afternoon," he said, his voice clean and deliberate. "Today I will address something personal and something corporate."
Denise's face tightened in the first row. Dax leaned back as if the air could soften the words to come.
"Some of you," Flynn continued, "have had questions about how we select investments, and how the company conducts itself. That is fair. What is not fair is when private grievances are used to damage people." He paused. "I have evidence that, over many years, my stepmother and her son have profited from exploiting my family's trust and cruelty toward someone I loved."
A murmur rippled through the hall. Denise's eyes flashed.
"Flynn, you can't—" she started.
"I can," he said. "And I will."
He gestured and Kenneth brought forward a black folder. The screen behind him lit up. The first clip was grainy and short: Dax shouting in a courtyard, a small animal screaming in the background. The next was worse: a video of a younger Flynn finding an injured creature, a fading frame of a small brown body left under a weighty stone.
Denise stood as if stabbed. "That's not—"
"It's the truth," Flynn said. "You denied us safety. You denied compassion. You called cruelty a lesson. You taught someone to think the weak could be discarded."
"That's a lie," Denise spat.
"Is it?" Flynn asked, and then he cued another file. This one was a recorded testimony — a neighbor, an old maid, a person who had worked in their house, speaking with steady voice about money lent and threats made, about the way Dax had been allowed to play with living things as practice for power.
The room changed. People who had been sippers of white wine were now leaning forward. Cameras clicked. The board shuffled papers.
Denise's mouth found air and words in panic. "This is slander. You are making a show."
"Call it what you want," Flynn said. He sounded smaller then, heard only by those within a heartbeat of him. "We could sue. We could hide this. But I wanted them to see your face when the truth comes down. You taught a boy cruelty. You taught him he could buy absolution with money."
Dax's jaw trembled. "Flynn, we've paid debts—"
"For what?" Flynn said. "To buy silence? To buy the loyalty of vendors who should have refused? To ransom your conscience?"
There was a long, awful pause as the microphones hummed.
"Call the press," Flynn said quietly. "Let them hear every word."
The microphones picked up the press conference's cacophony. Phones recorded. A man with a heavy tie who owed his job to Flynn's company looked ill. Denise's supporters — a slim handful in the room — looked like prickled hedgehogs.
Denise began to crumble in the way that shocked people love to watch: first furious, then flinging out insults, then grasping at pity, then bargaining, then small and trembling. She shrieked that she had been the one who had held the household together; she demanded Flynn stop twisting facts; she called lawyers.
"You're done," Flynn said. "You cannot hide this any longer."
The crowd reacted in waves. Some clapped quietly, stunned at the slowness and the legal righteousness of the reveal. Some whispered like strings stretched thin. A few people took out their phones and filmed Denise's face as she leaned forward and suddenly, in the middle of the room, yanked the microphone and blurted apologies that came like tears in a sieve.
Flynn walked down the stage and stopped in front of her. "Apologize to the people you hurt," he said.
"To you?" She choked. "To me?"
"No," Flynn said. "To her."
He waited, and the room held its breath. The cameras found me, and I stepped forward with a quality of calm someone who had been dead and come back must have. The room felt like a belly of an enormous animal, and the daylight filtering through the windows made every face seem more raw.
"Denise Burks," I said. My voice was a soft, measured thing. "You broke a life. You taught a boy to harm. You sold forgiveness like cloth to be burned. You cannot hide behind pity. Look at what you taught."
She looked at me as if at a mirror she had not expected to see saffron.
"I'm sorry," she said, and the word bent and tasted like nothing. "I'm sorry for what happened."
"Say it in public," I said. "Say it like you mean it."
She tried again, with the shame too late and the hubris gone like a coat.
"I'm sorry," she said, but then her eyes turned to Flynn and sought permission.
Flynn looked at her through something that might have been grief and something that might have been a very sharp mercy. "You are under investigation," he said. "The company will not tolerate your behavior. You will make restitution where it is possible, and beyond that, you will answer for crimes of neglect and cruelty."
The crowd was noisy then. A man I later learned was an investor clapped low at Flynn's control. Someone let out a soft sob. Denise slumped and pulled a hand to her face as if to hide from what she had always expected to be allowed to remain hidden.
Dax tried to speak up and a chorus of voices shut him down. A woman in the back — one of the neighbors who had shared her memory — came forward with a small breath and a stinging dignity.
"I remember the little cat," she said. "I saw one night when they took it. I will speak for it. They cannot buy silence now."
The cameras caught the neighbor's face — not animate with rage, but steady as a document. The press flourished like vultures, and the world began to make sense in a grim but clear way: complicity had been exposed. People made lists in their heads. Contracts were reviewed. Official statements were drafted.
Denise's reaction changed in a movie-quick cascade. First defiance, then the quickness of denial, then bargaining, then public collapse into the smallest of shapes. She was not physically harmed; she was not humiliated with anything lower than the truth. But the truth was a sort of savage exposure — her reputation, currency, and leverage stripped into cold air.
People whispered, "It's too late," and "How could they?" and "He did the right thing." Friends of hers fled like swallows. People like Dax who had built arrogance on a parental shield found themselves bearing the weight of adult choices. There were no melodramatic screams beyond the room; mostly, there were phones and legal memos and the hard hand of corporate governance.
Flynn sat down beside me and put his hand over mine. "You did not have to watch," he murmured.
"I had to," I said. "So they could learn that cruelty is visible."
He nodded and together we left the room while the press filed out behind us like a tide.
*
After the midday storm, the sky looked like a clean page. News outlets ran with it. Denise's public apology was shredded by commentators as hollow. Dax's sponsors dropped him. The company distanced itself, as a good company does, and the legal system did the thing it does when given careful documents: it asked questions, filed motions, and prepared for hearings.
I stood at Flynn's window that evening and watched the plaza below, where a statue of a boy and a cat — uncanny and simple — caught the light. I touched the glass as if to bless the image.
"You took care of me," I said.
"You always were in my head," Flynn said, and his face was made of quiet things.
"Will that always be safe?" I asked.
He took me into his arms like a person does a place that has been lonely for years and found again the deep map hidden inside.
"Not always," he said. "But today it was safe."
"I like that," I said.
He kissed my forehead, the gentlest of everything. "Me too."
Some evenings we simply sat together and let the silence do the talking. I learned the mundane things of human life: how to fold a shirt, how to call a plumber, where the good baker kept the croissants that were still warm. Flynn learned a different kind of kindness — to show up and steady and to speak truth in public.
When I read the old book in my head, I found the final line glowing like a prophecy I had been given accidentally: he would meet his cat again; she would walk into his heart. I walked and sometimes I thought of the cat I had been, of the way fur smells after rain, and of how small the world looked from the top of a wardrobe.
One day, as the golden light slid up the wall, I pulled out the pair of leopard-print leggings I had worn the very first day like armor and put them on beneath a dress. I did it for myself, for the memory of a creature who had loved a man and had wanted to stay. Flynn smiled without comment, and that smiled contained everything unnecessary to say.
"Do not let me be forgotten," I murmured.
"You never were," he said as he tightened the scarf around my neck. "You were waiting in the last line."
I closed my eyes and let my whole life — stitched memory and claimed memory — sit together. Outside the window, the small plaza where he had once waited for me with a heart full of memory glowed blue in evening shade. The world was a patchwork. I was a promising seam in it.
"Stay," Flynn said, and I stayed.
The End
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