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“Admit it- you just want to dress it up in tiny sweaters.” Eve Baird considered herself many things: a soldier, a Guardian, a fairly decent judge of character, and at the very last- but not least- a girlfriend with the patience of a saint. The recent years had taught her the addition of flexibility, and as she settled back into the worn but slightly comfortable cushions of the sofa in Flynn Carsen’s library apartment she wondered just how far that flexibility wanted to stretch that day. I was hoping we could catch the last showing of Labyrinth at the Bowie anniversary festival…but clearly fate has other plans.
‘Fate’, as it turned out, had come in the form of a cat at the end of Flynn’s last mission, the Librarian bursting triumphantly through the Back Door from Russia with an artifact in one arm and a squirming, gangly mass of wrinkled skin in the other. He’d somehow managed to escape unscathed- another small miracle Eve added to the list of times he had thus far- and the cat, as it was revealed to be, had been found in the same place that the waterlogged hat he’d been searching for.
“That’s not true.” Flynn perched on the edge of a stepladder, reaching cautiously toward the top of one of his many bookshelves, where the tiny goblin cowered in what Eve considered to be an attack posture but Flynn had insisted was, in fact, simply nerves. The librarian glanced back for a moment, shrugged, and then smiled sheepishly. “Well. Maybe it’s a little true. It does get drafty in here, you know.”
“I do know.” At night- on the nights she’d stay- she’d more often than not be forced to add Flynn’s favorite patchwork quilt to the pile of blankets on his bed, preferring that over the choice of thick flannel pajamas he so often opted for. Of course, there are the times that I’d rather take other options to get warm, Eve thought with a smile. And those were the times she really preferred over any other. “Flynn, he’ll come down when he’s ready. You don’t have to wait for him. Besides, he’s starting to look a lot like the gargoyles they keep at the doors of the real Library- and I don’t think you want to see what happens when he starts to act like a gargoyle.”
“Dostoyevsky can probably tell that you don’t like him.” Shifting a little, Flynn leaned farther in and nudged aside a thick volume of Shakespeare to get a better view of the beady eyes staring him down. “You’re not a true cat lover if you can’t appreciate these little naked and wrinkly goblin cats like I do.”
"If being a true cat lover means I don’t love putting sweaters on my cats then sure, maybe I don’t appreciate them like you do, Flynn.” The tiny hand on her watch ticked forward, and Eve let out a heavy sigh. “We’re going to miss the movie, and you know how much I love the Goblin King.”
“He’ll be down in a minute.”
“All right, fine.” And all that followed seemed in the blink of an eye, though Eve wondered if she shouldn't have seen it coming.
Flynn reached again for the tiny, bald creature and as he did his elbow came in contact with an empty coffee mug- ‘How he manages to leave empty dishes up there is beyond me, Eve recalled wondering- and down it came, tumbling across the braided rug. The cat followed, in a flurry of claws and wrinkled skin, the librarian’s astonished yelp fading into complete and utter silence as Dostoyevsky settled, with a long and rumbling purr, into Eve’s empty lap.
“He chose down,” She smiled then, laughing as Flynn gaped in surprise at the sight beneath him. His girlfriend- the one who had the patience he could never be thankful enough for- gently stroking the spine of their new pet, which seemed as much at home as if he had always been there.
“And I’d say it was the right choice.” Making his way back down the ladder one rickety rung at a time, Flynn Carsen found himself considering the sight before him and realizing that it wasn’t just the Library that was home, anymore. It was Eve, and their cat…and he didn’t need anything more than that.