Sweet Romance17 min read
The Underwear Thief, the TV Show, and the Pink Helmet
ButterPicks13 views
"I think my cat is a thief."
"I said that out loud?" I laughed at myself, but the laugh turned small when Felix Lombardi blinked at me from the sofa and trotted over with something bright in his mouth.
"Felix!" I hissed, but my voice had more fondness than anger. He dropped the cloth at my feet—yellow, ridiculous, printed with bananas—and sat looking proud.
"I already told you, he is not a regular cat," I said. "He is a criminal mastermind."
Felix rubbed his head against my shin like he owned me. I bent, picked up the banana underwear, and held it between my fingers.
"This is number seven," I told the empty room, because talking to the cat was easier than facing my own embarrassment. "Seven."
"You're dramatic," Dirk Cline said from the hallway. "Or you're very popular with the neighborhood."
"Shh," I said. "Do not tell anyone."
Dirk chuckled. "You should make flyers. 'Wanted: Cat With a Taste for Bananas.'"
"I already had a flyer!" I said, and the words jumped out of me because I could still see it in my head: the printed sheet tacked to the community board, Felix's photo taken sideways, his black eye markings perfect like a mask. Under it someone had written, in a friendly tone, "Please keep your cat inside, it's stealing my socks!" On the back, a scrawl that stopped my heart: "If that stupid cat steals my underwear again, I'll cut off its balls and throw it to the wild cats. Let it know hell."
"I burned that," I told Dirk. "I tore it down. I put it in my pocket and ran home."
"You did what?" Dirk paused mid-bite of toast and blinked. "You can't just—"
"I couldn't leave it there," I said. "Who writes that about an animal? Who says those things?"
"People who forget they're seen," Dirk said. "People who say cruel words and think it stays paper. Come on. Feed him. I have a meeting."
I washed the banana underwear and put it in the box with the others. Seven pieces, colors unrelated, pattern choices worse than taste, all the same small size, the same faint laundry scent. I held the cloth up to my face and frowned.
"Felix," I said, "who are you bringing these for?"
Felix blinked. "Meow."
It was a joke between me and my own heart. A joke that kept me awake at night.
Two days later I ran into him.
"I almost choked on a grape," I admitted to the convenience store clerk as I picked out a boxed meal. "Cheese lava chicken rice. Two minutes, please."
I felt small and lucky. There was a man at the counter in a charcoal hoodie, tall and steady. The kind of eyes that made me forget to breathe. He hadn't seen me. His friend nudged him, then nodded at me, and his eyes came to me like a soft tide.
"Hi," I wanted to say. "Hi, you're the man whose clothes my cat steals."
He looked at me once and then at the staple on his boxers peeking out from his pocket and I froze. He was buying underwear. Again.
"Do you want me to pay?" I blurted, ridiculous bravery because it was the only small thing my hands could do. I pushed my tray forward. "I'll buy it."
He smiled politely. "No, thank you. I can—"
"Let me," I said, and scanned my code like an idiot. He took the box and smiled and said, "Thank you," like it was nothing. Like he didn't know I was thirty-two and a wreck over his face.
We stepped out together, and he walked me partway home. We added each other on the phone. His name in the app read "Glen Komarov." When I saw "Glen Komarov," my chest did a thing that made me want to translate the letters into fireworks.
"Which building?" he asked.
"12," I said, and then asked him back.
"10," he said. "302."
Two buildings apart. Not the same staircase, not the same floor, but close enough for my hands to do dumb things.
"Careful!" he said, and his hand—warm, large—covered the back of my head and turned me just as a baseball flew into the shrubs beside us. The boy who had hit it ran over and apologized profusely.
"Are you okay?" Glen asked me.
"My head feels full of cotton," I said.
"Hold on," he said, and he steadying me had the side effect of giving me a view of a small, red mole right below his collarbone. A red dot on pale skin like a deliberate punctuation.
"That's—" I forgot to breathe.
"What's your name?" he asked like a proper neighbor.
"Madison," I said, and a small, stupid grin ballooned across my face when his friend left and he reached out to steady his bag.
After that, every chance encounter was a small festival inside me. A wink at the lobby. A minor rescue from a stray ball. A message to say thanks. He sent me forty dollars back for the underwear. He added: "Take the money." I typed, "I will," and my thumbs shook.
Felix knocked another piece of laundry onto the windowsill that day, a white sock that made me frown. White socks meant something; they had a small character, a certain precise wearer. My cat brought wild things: jungle prints, animal faces, fruit prints. But always small. Always the same size.
I tried to keep Felix inside.
I failed.
I found him on the windowsill with a pair of blue briefs once and stomped to the door to take him down. And the block went nuclear. A van, a camera crew, a reporter's tiny clip said, "Look! The Bat-Cat is back!" and then everyone laughed and some edited Felix's face into a cartoon mask.
"Bat-Cat," the reporter said on television. "Stealing men's underwear. Could this be the next viral star?"
"No, it's my cat," I wanted to yell. "Please don't laugh at him."
Felix trotted about with the underwear and seemed to like the attention. I wanted to look mortified but I also wanted to melt.
Inside the apartment where Glen was, a TV crew had found their way earlier. They were doing local human-interest pieces, and Glen—my tall, quiet neighbor—was being interviewed about their office cat problem. I saw his face on the screen and felt two feelings at once: protectiveness and absolute shame.
"I do not own that cat," I mouthed at the television, because I couldn't tell the crew that Felix had broken into his apartment and taken something belonging to him. Because Felix did break into Glen's apartment. Because Felix was a cat who knew how to be a romantic burglar.
Felix found me again at the studio door, like he had an appointment. He dropped a pair of patterned briefs at my feet in front of a camera lens and meowed with the smugness of a cat who had just performed. People laughed. Glen glanced up. Our eyes met.
"Oh," he said, a small smile. "You have a cat."
"Don't tell anyone," I wanted to say. "I will deny him under oath."
But the poor cover that I tried to weave collapsed like cheap paper. Felix trailed me into a flood of lights and microphones and Glen's room filled with laughter and then pity.
"I'm afraid it's my fault," I heard myself say, voice thin. "I fed him once at the stairs and now he's my fault."
Glen's eyes were kind. He said, "He seems fond of you."
I lied. "No, he loves me."
He watched Felix belly-up and then softened. "I'll look after him," Glen said. "He can be our cat tonight."
"I—" I felt like I had said too much. "I can't take his spotlight."
"You look tired," he said. "Sit."
I sat. I let the camera roll. I let a stranger call my cat "Bat-Cat" and later put clips of him with a cartoon mask across the internet. Felix rose to the fame of being a thief, and the world laughed with him.
Then Jessalyn Robin texted me at midnight like a siren.
"Open," she wrote, "open now. It's on."
I clicked a video link. There it was: "Bat-Cat steals model's underwear." Glen's face enlarged in the video, precise and beautiful; the internet's comments were a tide.
"People think it's cute," Jessalyn said in person when she came over to sit with me. "They don't know it's weird."
"I don't want him to think I'm weird," I whispered. "He is—"
"Madison," Jessalyn said sharply, and her voice had the tone of someone who had been my friend since college. "Madison, do you watch the news? The guy on the show? You saw his face. Did you notice him buying underwear? Did you know that sometimes handsome faces are used to scam people on the internet?"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Remember my friend Xia? She sent me something about a man who had used a model's photos to catfish girls. Several victims. They got bank transfers and gifts. The photos were taken from models and posted. Girls thought they were dating the handsome guy. Turns out it's all fake."
I sat up. "You mean like someone is stealing pictures and scamming?"
"Yes," she said. "And the man in the video? There are photos online that match Glen's exact angles. But also—" she scrolled and pointed at her phone. "The mole. The red mole under the collar. It's the same."
My stomach fell. "No. He can't—"
"Maybe it's not him," Jessalyn said. "Maybe his pictures were stolen by someone else."
"But if they are using him," I said quietly, "then he doesn't have to be guilty. He could be a victim."
We watched the clip in silence. Glen wasn't a criminal. He sat with the TV crew and answered questions about a cat that liked to steal. The world called the cat "cute" and "mischievous" and "a tiny bandit." But comments morphed into something cruder. Someone wrote, "He only steals from pretty men." Another: "He has taste."
That night I couldn't sleep.
A week later, a video went viral for different reasons. A woman had been scammed by a man who used pictures of models to con people. The police arrested someone. A man named Damon Figueroa appeared in an online clip, handcuffed and blustering, and the news said, "Arrest made in online romance scams." His reaction to the cameras was a mix: "I didn't mean to," he parroted. "I needed the money."
Jessalyn called me. "They caught a big one," she said. "He was using different photos. One of the victims said the photos looked like the man on that 'Bat-Cat' show. He was using famous faces."
I felt a cautious hope. "That might clear Glen," I said.
But then a different storm hit. A note appeared on the community board. Someone had printed a picture of Felix—with a giant black mask painted over his face—and written underneath, "Please keep your cat inside. He keeps stealing my underwear." Then on the back, smeared in anger: "If that stupid cat steals my underpants again, I'll cut off his balls and throw him to the stray colony. Let him learn."
I found the flyer and had reacted the same as before: I tore it down and stashed it under my coat. I couldn't go on letting the neighborhood write such things. But someone had seen the note. Someone had photographed the threat. The image traveled faster than I could breathe.
"Who would write that?" I asked Glen later, when he knocked on my door with a sack of fresh groceries and a face like a worried poem.
"I don't know," he said, soft as wind. "I think some people are mean when they hide behind paper."
"Someone is willing to threaten an animal with violence in public," I said, because the words were true and horrid.
"We'll go to the board together tomorrow," Glen said. "We'll ask the management to check the cameras."
"I already—" I started. "I took it down. I burned it almost. I couldn't—"
"You did the right thing," Glen said. "But we should find out who wrote that."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because someone talks like that, they might talk like that to a person next," he said.
The next day, we went to the apartment management office. Dirk came too, and Jessalyn, and a few neighbors. The manager, Blaise Duffy, showed us the camera footage. It was late. It was a shadow leaning. It was a man who walked with a cane, who paused at the board and then scribbled and then left hurriedly. The face was clear enough for a neighbor to call and say, "We think that man is Mikhail Roussel."
"Where did he live?" Glen asked.
"Third floor," the manager said. "He comes down to the mailboxes a lot. He complains about noise."
We knocked. Mikhail answered, red-faced. He crossed his arms like a judge.
"You wrote that?" I asked.
He sputtered. "It's a joke. It's a warning. Keep your pets!"
"You threatened to cut off my cat's testicles," I said. I had never felt so small and so large at once.
"It was a figure of speech," he said. "It was—"
"We have footage," Glen said, and his voice had a steel thread in it. "We have a video of you posting it."
Mikhail's face changed. He went from smug to annoyed to suddenly afraid. He said, "I am community safety-minded. That cat—it's a thief." He laughed, empty like a broken bell. "He stole my laundry—"
"Stealing is not a reason to wish violent harm," Jessalyn said. "And you didn't leave a normal note. You threatened violence."
Neighbors began to gather. Doors opened. Someone filmed on their phone. "Is this about the cat?" a woman asked from the stairs. "I saw the flyer. It was awful."
Mikhail turned to the crowd, desperate. "It's just a joke!" he snapped. "They made fun of me with that stupid video. I was angry."
"Angry doesn't give you the right to threaten," I said. "You wrote those words on paper in our public space."
He looked around and saw cameras lifting. He saw Glen's face, calm and close. For the first time his laughter drained.
"I'm sorry," he said, but the apology had no weight.
The building's manager told him, "We can fine you for harassment. We can call the police if we need to." Someone behind me whispered: "He's done this before. He complains about everything."
Mikhail shouted, "They make everything into a show!"
"Exactly," the neighbor replied. "But your show threatened an animal. That is not okay."
I watched Mikhail's face crumple in stages.
"First he was smug," I said aloud later, because I wanted to mark the change. "Then shocked. Then denial. Then he tried to laugh it off. Then he begged."
That afternoon, in front of a circle of neighbors and phones recording, Mikhail tried every face. He tried anger, he tried rationalization, he tried to minimize. He tried to put the blame on "kids leaving things" and on "the camera people." Then he began to cry, which was a new move.
"I'm sorry," he said into a microphone of a phone and to every neighbor. "I didn't mean it. I was lonely. He stole my pride and I—I shouldn't have."
People reacted. "We don't want your apology if you meant it for cameras," someone snapped. "We want you to stop being cruel."
He was asked to put his name on a public apology letter attached to the board. The manager asked him to take down his posts and to write an apology in the building newsletter. People filmed his voice as he rehearsed and then faltered. A neighbor put the recording online with the caption, "Cowardly threats meet neighbors." Comments on the video called him out. The watchful neighbors who wanted safety clapped when he agreed to attend community anger-management classes. They wanted the threat to be followed by action, not by lip service.
"It was a public scene," I said afterward to Glen. "He went from anger to fear to begging. People were—"
"Watching?" Glen finished with a small smile. "Good. People will not threaten in private and hide in public."
It was small justice. He had to face the hall, face the phones, face neighbors who he had been ready to hurt with his words. He was humiliated. He was not physically punished. He was made to own his shame.
But the other villain—the scammer—was to be punished in a way that would have to satisfy a very different craving for closure.
Damon Figueroa had been arresting in a sting. The police had found a motel room with a wall full of photos. The victims came forward and said what they had lost. The press called a press conference at the square near the city hall.
"They're gathering the victims," Jessalyn told me. "They're letting people speak."
I went because I couldn't not go. I sat with Glen in the back of a sea of faces. Damon stood in the middle like a small animal in a trap. The police commander read the list of charges, and Damon looked flaky, a man used to sliding out of heat with a joke, now forced into center stage.
Then the victims began to speak.
"That 'man' told me he loved me in a week," a woman said. "He used those words to get money for a dream. Then he left."
"I gave him my life savings," another woman said, voice cut rough. "I saw those photos and I trusted him. I bought a plane ticket and he canceled. He said, 'Trust me' and I trusted him."
Damon's face did something between defiance and boredom. He said, "It was just business."
"Business?" a man shouted. "You took a life."
"They showed his photos," the commander said. "We have evidence he used model images, including ones that were stolen from a modeling agency, in order to lure victims. We have bank transfer records, we have overseas accounts."
Someone in the crowd brought up a stack of printed comments from an old article about Glen. The listeners saw the pattern. The arrested man tried to speak, but the microphone passed by him like a raft.
"Tell them how much you made," one victim demanded. "Tell them how many people you hurt."
Damon tried to laugh, and then he tried to bargain for a softer light. "I needed the money for my sister," he said.
"You sold other people's faces for your lies," someone said. "You sold their names. You sold their time. You sold their trust."
The commander announced restitution would be sought, investigations would follow, and that the public could file claims. But the real punishment that afternoon was a different kind—the showing of faces and the hearing of voices. Damon, standing under a literal sky full of witnesses, had to listen. He went from the cocky man who had cajoled people over messages to a small man in the middle of a thousand eyes.
"I want you to say sorry," one victim said, stepping forward. "Look at us."
Damon looked at each face. At first he kept his eyes to the ground. Then, under the press's light and the people's cameras, he tried to form something that could pass as remorse.
"I'm sorry," he said. It sounded like a sentence he'd learned. People laughed, not kind. "I'm sorry. I was desperate."
"Say their names," someone demanded. "Tell us who you hurt."
The list of names was long. Damon's voice would have to be the anchor of confession to allow the victims their weight.
He stammered through names, and the crowd repeated them, because the crowd wanted to make sure that the world wouldn't forget. Each name pulled a thin thread of grief into daylight.
When Damon tried to make excuses, one woman in a red jacket—her hands shaking—hurled a small packet of hair ties at him. They did not hit, but the act was a punctuation. The crowd hissed and then clapped like a court sentencing him.
A man stepped forward with a photograph. "This was my son's wedding. He had to sell his ring to pay this man," he said. "Do you understand what you did?"
Damon's face changed. "I didn't think—"
"You didn't think how we would lose sleep," the man said. "You didn't think of our faces."
Damon's composure cracked. He went through the stages: first denial, then anger, then a shallow claim of needing help, then shaking hands, and finally a low, broken apology.
"I'm sorry," he said again, and that time his voice held weight because there were tears in the eyes of those he'd stolen from. The cameras captured it, the internet picked it up, and his name trended for the wrong reasons. It was not a perfect justice, but it was public and it was real.
After Damon was led away in cuffs, someone in the crowd shouted, "Shame!"
"Let him pay back," said another. "Let him apologize on every platform."
There was a theater of punishment. The watching city had given him spectacle, and the spectacle had done what paper threats could not: it had shown him his victims' faces. He had to say what he had done in public, to be named and known and to hear no easy laughter. He crumbled and then tried to bargain, but the crowd's judgement held firm.
I looked at Glen during that entire scene. He squeezed my hand. He had been a picture in Damon's lie; he had been a man used for photo scams. He had not been a villain. He had been a person whose image had been stolen.
"Thank you," he said to me in a small voice during the lull. "For telling me."
"I didn't do anything," I said, and then smiled because I could not be sincere about being humble. "You looked like someone I thought was honest."
He kissed my forehead then, a quick, private thing. "Come with me?" he asked later, and I did.
After the public shaming, life did the thing it always does: it stitched itself back together. Glen and I grew quieter together, more certain. He proved himself by small acts: bringing coffee when I worked late, helping me find Felix's missing socks, asking my opinion on a job and listening.
"Do you really want to be in my life?" he asked me once on the street, the evening sky a smear of orange.
"Yes," I said. "But only if you like banana prints."
He laughed. "I like you," he said. "Banana prints are a small price."
We grew happier and less bewildered. I started a new job at a company where Glen happened to be a part-time model for their catalog. Dirk cheered. Jessalyn teased me. Guadalupe—Glen's sister—arrived in her Porsche one evening and announced she approved of me, which was code for "I'm going to fuss over you until you faint."
"You're his girlfriend?" she asked on first meeting. She was tall and direct and said blunt things.
"Not yet," I said.
"You will be," she said. "Don't worry. I tested him. He passed."
We learned each other's small hurts. We learned to read the shape of each other's sleep. Felix became our mutual comic. He still stole things sometimes—nothing bigger than socks and occasional small props—but mostly he stayed home, snoozing on Glen's sweater.
Sometimes, when I passed the community board, I saw Mikhail's posted apology taped up and the manager's note about community rules. People whispered when he passed and sometimes gave him a curt nod. He still lived there, but he had to sit and answer questions at community meetings. He had to be on record. He had to learn the shape of consequences.
Damon went through legal processes. The court took evidence and he pled guilty to a cluster of charges. He was ordered to repay and to attend counseling. But the public confrontation had already done a work that law sometimes takes longer to do: it let the victims speak and be heard. It let Damon feel the weight of each name he'd taken.
My heart had been messy. For a while I had let the story of someone stolen for appearances twist my trust. But the city had a way of forcing clarity. The people who hurt others got shown under light. The people who were hurt got to stand. I could see that like a line drawn across a map.
One day after the storm, Glen came by my apartment with two pink helmets under his arm. "For you," he said, grinning, known mischief at the corner of his mouth.
"For what?" I asked, taking one. It was a soft shade like cherry blossoms.
"For keeping up with my bad driving," he said.
We rode his bike together sometimes after that. Felix sat on the balcony and watched the city like a king. He was still a thief of taste but no longer of safety; he chose where to go and when. People called him "Bat-Cat" sometimes, and the name stuck.
The last time I looked at Felix one evening he had a tiny banana print tucked under his paw. I smiled and shook my head and thought about everything that had happened: the cruelty of an anonymous flyer, the shame of public exposure, the messy arrest at the square, the small kindnesses that stitched us back together.
"You're a thief," I told Felix, and he blinked.
"You're my thief," Glen said from behind me, and when I turned he put his hand on my shoulder like a claim and like a promise, the kind that small quiet people make.
"You're the best kind of thief," I told Felix, and the banana print was a bright small thing between us.
We had a story that everyone in the building knew: a cat, a viral video, a scam, a public shaming that had made wrongs faced and heard. It had brought people to action and shown us the power of speaking up and the danger of hiding behind a screen or a crawled, cruel note.
"I still can't believe he threatened Felix," I said once.
Glen smiled and rubbed my hair. "We won," he said.
"How?" I asked.
"You showed up," he said. "You said no."
Felix, who had been listening, stretched and chose my lap as a place to sleep. The city hummed outside. The community board had fewer threats. People were more careful with words.
"Promise me one thing," I whispered, because the silly fairy tales on television sometimes get to me.
"What's that?" Glen asked.
"That if Felix ever steals underwear again, you'll help me deliver them back with dignity," I said.
He kissed my cheek. "Deal."
We left the banana underwear on Glen's balcony the next day, folded and clean. Felix watched from the windowsill like an accomplice. Glen waved at me with a grin.
"Thanks," he said.
"For returning things?" I asked.
"For being my partner in ridiculousness," he said. "And for bringing out the best, even from a cat thief."
Felix purred. I leaned into Glen and thought how odd it was that life folded in such small moments into a love that was steady and soft. The Bat-Cat had brought chaos and comfort and somehow that had made room for us.
At night, when the city was quiet, Glen would put a hand on my knee and say, "Remember the banana underwear?" and we would both laugh. The memory of a public scolding and a courtyard full of cameras and a man shivering under the weight of names had grown into a story we told with a smile.
"Don't be silly," Glen said one evening as Felix curled like a comma across both our laps. "Nobody cuts a cat's balls."
"No?" I said.
"No," he said. "But if someone ever threatens you, we'll go town square together again."
"I think I like that," I said.
Felix twitched. The city outside had its everyday harms, but also its ways of calling wrongs into the light. The cat that stole underwear had taught me more about courage than I expected. He had forced me to step into light and to take small stands.
I tightened my fingers around Glen's and thought of all the strange little things that had brought us here—a convenience store, a banana print, a red mole under a collarbone, a TV clip, the cat called Felix Lombardi—and felt my heart fold like a warm letter.
"Do you think the world will remember the Bat-Cat?" I asked, smiling.
"Maybe," Glen said. "But more importantly, it remembered us—our truth. And that's enough."
Felix purred louder. The night smelled like noodles and jasmine.
We had our normal, patched and bright, and we had the city, watchful and loud. The people who hurt others had been called to account. The ones who loved held fast.
And every so often when Felix would bring home another ridiculous pattern, we would laugh and fold it into the box and hope the thief had learned nothing but how to keep our life full of small surprises.
The End
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