Sweet Romance13 min read
The Cat on My Doorstep and the Boy with Seven
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I found him on the notice board before I found him on the court.
A white cat, all snow and one tiny brown spot below an eye, stared up from a photo and my name was in the comments. The post said "lost cat" and the person who commented had sent me a private message. I had already named the cat in my head—Seven—because the little spot looked like the digit seven, and because I liked numbers that matched my own.
I was sitting on my couch with my own small orange cat curled against my calves. She blinked slow and soft. I blinked back and wondered how in the world a cat had followed me home from the park.
"He's yours?" I said to my orange cat, as if she could answer.
"Meow," the orange cat said politely, as cats do when you ask a question free of consequence.
I had posted a found-cat notice in the neighborhood group. No replies. Two weeks of silence. The white cat didn't seem bothered. He prowled my apartment like he had always lived here, sniffing books, testing the sofa, making a tiny investigation of every shadow.
Then, one week later, the lost-cat poster was pinned on the public board right under a sea of confessions. My friend Marta tagged me. I scrolled the description: "Pure white, a tiny mole below one eye, a Persian with a flat face." The photograph shone at me again—like a marshmallow in the sun.
"That's him," Marta had written in the group chat. "Go get your hero badge."
I left a direct message under the post. A polite, short message. He replied within an hour. He gave a name and a time.
I didn't know what he looked like. His WeChat moments were three-day visible and I couldn't see past that like some locked box. That felt oddly private.
We arranged a time at the university gym where he practiced basketball. I told myself I was going purely to return the cat. I told myself I might see a handsome face, maybe smile—and that would be it. I told myself this over and over as if rehearing a speech would make it true.
When I walked into the gym the air was full of shouts and shoes squeaking. Banners waved. Girls screamed like a stadium had doubled overnight. Two players were the sun everyone shaded around. One wore a seven jersey. The other wore zero. They ran like two halves of a drama.
I cupped the cat carrier on my lap. People split around me as though I had high clearance for the court. I peered through the crowd and caught a glimpse of the seven jersey. The player bent and reached for his shirt, and I noticed the flash of a shoulder—then a tall figure moved and blocked my view with a scent of sweat and citrus.
"Excuse me?" someone said beside me. The voice was clean and soft as a cup of tea.
I stiffened. "I'm here to return the cat," I blurted.
The voice belonged to the right person. He stepped aside and the boy with the seven jersey came into full view. He was taller than I expected. His hair was messy in an oddly handsome way, like he'd just run his hands through it between plays. His face had that crisp, defined look that stars in posters have—sharp jaw, lashes that shaded his eyes. He had the kind of features people point at later and say "classic."
"Is this yours?" I held up the carrier.
He answered quickly and plainly, like speech out of habit: "Yes. Thank you."
We walked to the seats by the track. I watched his profile as he moved. He was one of those people who carry a quiet neatness—no flash, only the right kind of presence. When he turned to look at me, those long eyelashes dropped and a small smile tugged at him.
"Did you find him at the park?" he asked.
"Sort of. He followed me home," I said. I reached for a casualness I didn't have. "He was lost."
"He's lively," he said. He crouched and the white cat slid from the carrier and immediately tested his palm. "Seven," he said. "He remembers me."
"Seven?" I said, surprised by the obvious match.
"Seven's my lucky number," he said. "I wear it at games."
I saw then that everything—seven the cat, seven the jersey—had a rhythm. It made me inexplicably pleased.
"I'm Joyce," I said finally when he looked up.
"Hudson Girard," he answered. He said his name like it belonged to a headline.
We talked for a few minutes. He asked about my orange cat, Xiao Hua. I told him how I nearly cried when Xiao Hua had been tiny and scared in my arms. He listened, looking at me with that clean gaze that made my face hot without any of the usual flirtation.
"I have practice every night," he said after we had traded small stories. "Will you take care of him until I get back from training?"
"I can," I said. I tried to sound casual. "He's very... good."
We arranged small things—keys, feeding routines—and he left like a boy who had made a neat bookmark in my day. He ran back to the court and, for some reason, I felt like I had closed a door on something that I wanted to keep open.
We met again by chance three days later. He had texted to check on Seven. "Does he eat well?" he'd typed with a sleeping-face emoji. I had video-called him once a day for the next week, watching the corner of his face on the screen as the white cat slept across my legs. We talked for minutes that stretched—work, what he'd practiced, what I did in my internship. I liked the way he trusted me with ordinary things.
"Do you like hotpot?" he asked one night when he had returned for Seven and stayed to eat. "My favorite place is right beside campus."
"I was going to pick the three-spice broth," I said, playing small and safe. Marta had warned me that he might be a heartbreaker. "Be careful. There are wolves in basketball jerseys."
Hudson laughed. "Then we'll be careful predators, not wolves," he said. The line made me smile like an idiot.
We ate. I watched him light up under steam like a photograph made warm. He noticed small things—my choice of vegetable, the way my hands moved, the little tremor in my laugh when I tried to be clever. He learned the things that make me myself and kept them.
"Do you always know what people want?" I asked between tugs at noodles.
"No," he said. "But I try."
He kept trying. He lent me a tissue the night I cried at a movie. He tied my shoelace when I didn't notice it was untied, fingers quick and confident.
"Your shoelace is open," he said once, and bent with the absolute earnestness of someone who believes in small kindnesses. I watched how his lips moved as if chewing each action over twice.
One night I planned to be intentionally seductive. I dressed in a little black dress and painted my lips red. I poured a glass of wine. When Hudson came in with Seven on his shoulder, the practiced part of me did its job. I pretended to be tipsy. I leaned in and hoped for a line, a reach, a move.
"I think I'm in trouble," I said, lowering my voice.
His face softened. He steadied me, but not how I expected. He checked my eyes, made sure I was okay, and then, quietly and endlessly careful, he started to take off my heavy make-up—not in a sexy way, but like a mother wiping ash from a child's face. He removed my fake eyelashes. He peeled my adhesive carefully.
"What are you doing?" I asked, half-mortified and half-melted.
"Sleeping with make-up is bad for the skin," he said simply.
He moved like warmth and sense. I wanted the bold movie crush, but he gave me something warmer: his steady, patient hands instead of a dramatic kiss. I fell a little.
We spent days that smelled the same—wash, talk, feed the cats, repeat. Hudson was not flashy. He didn't send rainstorms of text or dramatic confessions. He did small things: he made a point of replying to my messages, he remembered how I liked my coffee, and he came when I needed him.
"Will you be at the game tomorrow?" I asked him on impulse.
"Yes," he said. "Come cheer."
So I went. I cheered. I sat near the court and shouted his name louder than common sense allowed. Kids shrieked as three-pointers went through the net and my voice lost tone. He caught my eye once and smiled the smallest smile. I felt like I could float on that half-line.
After the game he and his teammate Leon Hansen—tall, shaved hair, quiet in a different way—came over to say hello. Leon had an ease that made people whisper. When he turned to me and said, "Hi, I'm Leon," I felt a ripple pass through the girls around us. Leon was handsome in a kind of stormy, dramatic way.
"Long time no see," Leon said lightly, and the world hummed.
Hudson introduced me with a casual hand on my shoulder. "This is Joyce. She's the one who saved Seven."
"Saved him?" Leon asked, amusement in his voice. "He ran away from home?"
I told them the story and Hudson watched me with a look I couldn't read. He seemed proud as if I had passed some inspection.
We kept meeting. We started spending ordinary time together outside the highlights. We learned each other's small details. My friend Marta teased me in messages.
"Are you sure he's not a player?" she asked. "You better have backup."
"He's not," I replied. "He's more of a... comforting pillow."
"Comforting pillow," she typed back like she had eaten a joke.
"Don't laugh," I said. I felt like laughing myself.
Hudson moved sleepily into my life in the way a good season settles in. He came over and ate my cereal, he warmed my hands on cold days, he hummed while he washed the dishes. I felt the quiet erotic charge of company—the way his cheek brushed mine when we reached for the same plate, the way his fingers accidentally touched mine when he passed salt.
"Do you like movies?" he asked one night, and bought two tickets. We sat in the back, and at zero-dark he wiped my tears. He handed me popcorn from his side of the bucket. I slipped my hand into his.
"Are you always this careful?" I asked once.
"Only with people I like," he said, and the room tilted.
Once, when the rain came down, he pulled out an umbrella and insisted I stand under it. We walked in a rain-swept glow, close enough that his jacket brushed my shoulder.
"Can I carry you home?" he asked then, and for a second it felt like handing him the keys to my heart.
We had small confessions that did not need to be declared with fireworks. He showed me the messages on a few posts where strangers declared crushes on him. He typed replies under each, "Sorry, I already have someone." He didn't shout it as a boast. He said it like he was making a fact true.
"Why are you so proud to say that?" I asked, treasuring the smallness of his manner.
"Because I like saying the truth," he said. "It feels right."
One week he surprised me with a bouquet. But when I expected flowers, my breath froze because Hudson handed me not petals but a cluster of lipsticks arranged like a bunch of flowers. "Other people have flowers," he explained, "I thought you'd like something that doesn't wilt."
The lipstick bouquet was absurd and earnest. My chest expanded. People stared. I felt ridiculous and loved at once.
"Don't show this to Marta," I said, laughing weakly.
"Why?" he asked, very serious.
"She will make enough scheming to last three lifetimes," I said.
"Then we'll just keep her busy together," he said, and somehow that included me in a future plan I hadn't yet imagined.
He became part of my day-to-day like toast and coffee. He stayed over, he learned my shampoo, he put his clothes in my closet. He was not dramatic. He was a steadying, everyday kind of love—and I had to learn to notice how quickly those things add up.
I had my doubts still. Once, after a basketball match when Leon had thumped an off-handed joke at Hudson's expense, my stupid old caution flooded me. I wanted to see if Hudson would get jealous. I handed another player a bottle of water mid-game as a test. The other player accepted. The bottle came back with a clumsy joke. Leon laughed and shrugged.
Hudson's jaw went still for the first time that season. He walked further onto the court and took the bottle from me as if it belonged. He drank fast like a man correcting a small wrong, and then he looked at me as if I had committed a crime for doubting him. His face said, "Why would you even imagine that?"
"I don't like sharing you," he said later, quietly, with an honesty so raw I forgot how to breathe.
"I was being childish," I admitted. "I'm sorry."
He squeezed my hand like he was anchoring a ship. "Don't pretend to be someone you're not," he said. "Be your messy, noisy self. I like that version."
That night, he asked me to come to a holiday festival with him. I said yes and planned to wear something daring. But work clobbered me on the day—an internship emergency pinned my shift under fluorescent lights. I was stuck at a milk tea shop counting puddings as couples kissed outside in the rain. I didn't dare expect him to come.
Then he walked into the shop like a bookmark turned up in the middle of a page. He leaned over the counter and called out on display for a solo item: "One cup of your neighbor's best, please."
The whole staff looked up. He raised an eyebrow. "Do you have a minute?" he asked me.
"I do," I lied, and left the counter to follow him. He had a small pride in his face that made me blind with happiness. He handed me a lipstick bouquet in front of a crowd and said out loud, "This is for my girl."
That night I let him kiss me under the soft streetlight of the university park. He asked me to close my eyes. "Do you want to be my girlfriend?" he asked between the breath that smelled faintly of mint.
"Yes," I said without thinking. I felt ridiculous and proud and open like winter sunlight.
He answered me in a way that made my knees melt a little: "Then I'm yours."
From then on, daily life spread like a map with new markings. He stayed. He left notes with schedules. He turned up with snacks. He learned to read the exact squeak of my apartment door that meant I'd had a bad day.
Two weeks passed with us steadying into a pattern. He left his jacket on my couch. He moved slowly but surely into the empty places I had in my life. Sometimes he'd look at me in a way that made me feel like the center of a compass.
One night, while doing my graduation thesis, a pop message buzzed my phone. "I have training," he wrote. "Can you keep Seven for a few days?"
I typed "Sure" back, smiling at the ease of a tiny favor. He left the key under the mat and left a voice message that ended with, "Thanks, Joyce. You make my home safer."
He came back a few days later with a small box of late-night snacks. He set seven by the couch and watched the cats whirl. "You take good care of them," he said.
"I take good care of you," I said, half proud, half shy.
Then, in that easy, ordinary way he had, Hudson did something that shook my world in the smallest, most perfect way: he told me he loved me.
"Joyce," he said, small and certain like the weight of a book. "I love you."
It felt enormous. I felt it in my ribs like a sound. "I love you too," I said. His face split into a grin that made the whole room warm.
Time kept going and we kept going with it. He learned the exact pattern my cat liked to sleep in. I learned the exact temperature he liked his tea. We built a life of small comfortable things.
"Will you help me move next month?" he asked one afternoon, scratching Seven behind the ears. "Into a place that's a little closer to yours."
"Yes," I said, and I meant it in the full way you mean something when you want to keep it.
The last thing I remember that summer was him falling asleep with his head on my lap. The cats were tangled around our feet. I looked down and thought: this is the sort of thing poems are made of—the small, obvious, ordinary kind that everyone misses until it's gone.
I kept the lipstick bouquet in a mug on the counter. I kept a sticky note on my mirror where he had written "Don't forget to smile today." Every now and then I would think about the path that brought us together: a stray cat, a gym, two awkward hands that met over a shoelace. It struck me that love sometimes grows from a series of tiny choices that look foolish from far away but feel inevitable when you are next to them.
"Promise me something," Marta said once over coffee, laughing like she had a secret.
"What?" I asked.
"Promise you'll not let him stop being himself," she said. "I like him, but I like you too."
I smiled. "I'll try."
We learned to be a little selfish and a little generous at the same time. That kind of love is a delicate balance and a kind of math neither of us had been taught in school.
On the day before my graduation, he brought me a small, silly gift: a handmade wallet with two cat-shaped pockets, one for me and one labeled "Hudson." He gave it to me with a straight face, as if handing over a relic.
"I want us to keep things safe," he said.
We both laughed. I kept the wallet on my bedside table. The money inside never mattered. The place for keys, for small tickets, for a love letter—those were the things I kept.
We were quiet in the ways that mattered. We were loud in the ways that mattered too.
One evening, months after the first meeting at the gym, I came home to find Hudson with a small stack of printed posts—confessions and messages pinned from the public board. He had gone through them and beneath each of them, he had typed, "Sorry, I already have someone." He showed them to me with an odd pride, like a child showing a collection of stamps.
"Why do you do this?" I asked, touched and stupidly proud.
"Because it's easier to be honest as you go," he said. "And because you deserve to know."
He kissed my forehead then in a calm way that made my heart steady and quiet.
"I could have gone for the fireworks," I told him once, late at night.
"You did," he said. "You are my quiet fireworks."
We kept our routine. We kept our cats. We kept our small rituals. We kept making jokes with Marta and Brooke at work about our "public romance." We kept being young and complicated and simple at the same time.
Months later, a small moment surprised me. Hudson came to my work with a tiny, ridiculous bag. He leaned in and dropped into my palm a small box of lipsticks arranged like a bouquet. "For you," he said simply. There was a crowd of people staring. Marta clapped in the background. Brooke shouted, "Show me!" like someone at a parade. I held my cheek and laughed, half hysterical.
"You're dramatic," I scolded, but I pressed one of the tubes to my lips and felt very loved.
"Better dramatic than forgetful," he said.
We walked home together that night in the rain and he wrapped his arm around me. It felt like he was building a map out of small things and points and I was willing to learn it by heart.
Sometimes I think about how that whole thing began—a kitten trailing behind me like a small comet. I think about how many things were up to chance. I think about how many chances make a life.
I am not a poet. I am not a person who writes love letters in the margins of notebooks. I fold things in the practical ways people who survive the world do. But love isn't always a spectacle. It is often the warm shoulder at night, the hand that ties a laced shoe, the cat who remembers your scent and curls there without permission.
Hudson became the person who made my ordinary feel sacred. I became the person who kept his spare key in a place he could find. Together, we kept cats, groceries, small arguments and small apologies. We kept toasts and TV nights and the exact arrangement of a couch.
"Will you marry me?" he never asked with fanfare. He asked me in small pieces—"Will you move with me? Will you keep Seven's small tooth? Will you be my person if I am yours?"—and I said yes to all of them.
We didn't need applause. We had each other.
One night, when the city hummed low and the cats were asleep, Hudson put a small box into my hand. Inside was a simple ring, a cheap thing but a precise one. He slid it onto my finger like it had always belonged there.
"Will you?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. I meant it the way a person means something when their voice is unshakeable.
I touched his cheek and thought of all the small things that had added up. The shampoo, the shoelaces, the late-night calls, the lipstick bouquet, the umbrella in the rain, the way Seven would purr when he heard Hudson's voice.
We had built our life from a cat at my door and a boy who liked the number seven. The world around us changed in its loud ways but inside our little map we remained constant and patient.
This is not a story with fireworks and huge declarations, though those have their place. This is a story about how people become each other's home. It is about a white cat who caused trouble and a boy who taught me the value of small truths. It is about the many little acts—sometimes clumsy, often kind—that add up to a love that fits.
And sometimes, when the air is quiet and the clock ticks soft, I hear Seven's little paws on the floor like a punctuation mark. Hudson is asleep on the couch with his head in my lap. The lipstick bouquet sits on the windowsill like a small, silly crown. I trace the outline of his hand and know the answer I would always give.
"Stay," I whisper to the night.
He smiles in his sleep.
We stay.
The End
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