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The last cardboard box fell on the floor with a loud thud as I breathed out a sigh. Placing my hands on my hips, my gaze wandered around the room. The walls were painted eggshell white with boxes piled up in every corner. On the left wall, a window faced the quiet street of my new neighborhood. I approached it, dropping my elbows on the sill, and placed my chin in my hands. The sun shone brightly in the cloudless sky and every yard on the street was perfectly green. No dandelion in sight.
I had met a few neighbors before moving in. Most of them were young parents, and the rest were old couples. They all had welcomed me with open arms and a lot of food, saying it was nice to see a new face around. Sometimes, I wondered if I was the only single person on the block.
I was still lost in thought when I felt something brush up against my ankle. I gasped, convinced a wild animal had somehow found its way inside the house. But when I looked down, it was just my cat.
“Gosh, you scared me, Grim,” I reprimanded. “You know I always jump when you come up behind me.” The grey tabby jumped on the box next to me and curled his tail around his paw, his golden eyes never leaving my face. I frowned. “Are you hungry?” He meowed a single time and I took it as a yes.
I made my way to the kitchen with the cat hot on my trail. A couple of boxes on the counter were already opened. I searched through them for a minute or two until I found what I was looking for. I pulled the bag of cat food out of the carton and shook it above Grim’s head.
“Is that what you want?” I asked him. He meowed again. “Fine. I don’t know where your bowl is, though. I hope you don’t mind eating on the floor.” I scooped out a handful of the food and placed it on the floor in front of him. “Please don’t make a mess.”
Grim didn’t like being watched when he was eating, so I left him alone in the kitchen. If we’re being honest, Grim never likes being watched. Unless he asks for it. Then he loves being watched.
A few hours later, I woke up to the sound of something tapping softly on glass. Groaning, I turned on my air mattress and tried to ignore it but the knocking would not stop. A ton of horror movies came to my mind as I tried to explain what was the cause of the noise. I waited with my head under the pillow for what felt like an eternity before it finally ceased. When I was sure the sound wouldn’t start again, I removed the pillow. Just as I was falling asleep, I heard the door to my room creak. Oh god, the monster got in, I thought. It’s going to eat me.
Then, a meow came from next to me.
Grimalkin sat there, looking at me with his head slightly cocked to one side. A sigh of relief escaped me as I sat up, making the mattress wiggle under the weight shift. I grabbed my cat under his arms and brought him to my chest like a big baby, ignoring his reluctant shrieks.
“You’re a horrible little creature, you know that?” I told him. “ Horrible ,” I repeated. He quickly squirmed out of my grasp and ran out of the room. I chuckled for a few seconds before the tapping resumed. I swung my legs out of bed and followed the cat.
I found him in front of the sliding glass door. Zigzagging between the cardboard boxes, I reached Grim who was busy pawing at the glass. “Do you want to go out?” Grimalkin had been a stray cat before my mom had found him. She had adopted him but even as a domestic cat, he liked going outside. Grim looked up at me and blinked slowly. I unlocked the door and pushed it open just wide enough for him to pass through, then waved my hand to the darkness outside.
“If you’re not back in fifteen minutes, I’m closing the door.” The cat jumped over the threshold and disappeared within a few seconds. I sat down with my back against the nearest box. There was a cat flap in my mom’s house so Grim never woke us up to go out. My mind wandered a bit, thinking about how I should get a flap for the door and what my new home might look like once I was done unboxing everything.
I must have fallen asleep at some point because I woke up with the sun shining directly in my eyes. My hand rose to shield my eyes and I turned away. It took me a few seconds to remember where I was. The white kitchen was still full of boxes, with only a few opened. The glass door in front of me was still cracked open. I shot up, suddenly awake. Had the door stayed like that all night? What if someone had gotten inside the house. And what if Grim wasn’t home. What if he was lost somewhere in this new neighborhood. I quickly closed the door and hoped I hadn’t locked myself in with a murderer. The house was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. I made my way from room to room with my fists close to my chest, like boxers do, in case I would need to punch any intruder.
In the end, no one else was home. Grim was sleeping on the partially deflated mattress with his nose under his tail. A few hours later, after a coffee and two Ikea bookshelves, I went back to my room to check my phone. The cat wasn’t on the bed anymore. I scrolled through social media for a while, catching up on what had happened in the past 12 hours. It was only after I was done that I noticed the black glove where the cat had previously been.
I frowned, unsure of how it could have gotten there. The glove was made of thin leather and had a silver clasp around the wrist. It looked expensive. I slipped it on carefully. The fingers were slightly too long for me but otherwise, the glove fitted my hand perfectly. The inside was lined with soft cashmere. It felt like my hand was coated by a cloud.
Right then, Grimalkin walked in nonchalantly, his head held high. I waited for him to sit in front of me before waving the glove in front of his face. “Are you the one who brought this here, mister?” I questioned him, knowing damn well I would get no answer. As expected, he was calmly licking his paw when I lowered the glove. “I’m sure you did it, you little devil.” The alternative would be that someone had sneaked into the house when the door was open and left the glove there, and I didn’t want to think about that.
“I’ll have to find the owner because of you,” I said, and then it hit me. I will have to find the owner. I couldn’t just keep the glove forever. If Grim had brought the pair, I might have given it a thought, but what would I do with a single glove? I placed it next to the bed where the nightstand would usually be and went back to unboxing my furniture.
A few days passed and I still hadn’t found the owner. I had asked around the neighborhood, but no one had ever seen that glove.
For now, I worked as a receptionist at the local library. What was nice about it is that I had access to a computer and a printer. Even though I wasn’t technically allowed to use it for personal use unless I paid, I wasn’t about to snitch on myself. And that’s how, when I wasn’t helping visitors, the LOST GLOVE posters got made. I hesitated to put the criminal on it, but finally gave in and inserted the least flattering picture of Grim I could find on my phone. That way, he might feel an ounce of shame.
The printer spewed a few dozen copies then shut down with a little tune. Grabbing the scissors out of the desk drawer, I set out to cut vertical lines at the bottom of the sheet to separate the phone numbers. It was a long and boring task, but time flew and soon enough, I was finished and the library was about to close for the night.
“The library is closing in five minutes,” I announced over the speaker. “All customers please head to the front desk to borrow your books. Thank you.”
Once I was home, I made my way in the dark house to the kitchen counter where I dropped my bag. Finally, the weekend was here. It was too late to put up the posters tonight and the weather app said it would rain tomorrow, so Sunday would be the d-day. I searched blindly for the light switch and blinked several times when the light flooded the room.
A meow came from behind me, making me jump. I turned swiftly towards the source to see Grimalkin sitting on the counter next to my bag, looking at me with his pretentious eyes. He always appeared out of nowhere when I least expected it. “What is it, Grim? Did you steal another glove? Or is it underwear this time?” I hoped I wasn’t giving him any ideas for future crimes, but he simply meowed again and cocked his head. I did the same, trying to decode his request. His bowl had been full of food this morning and Grim rarely ate that much that quickly. Then, my cat jumped off the counter and ran off somewhere in the house, too fast for me to follow after him. “Crazy kitty,” I muttered.
***
It had nearly been a week that I had hung up the posters around the neighborhood, and I still hadn’t had a single phone call. Theories were popping up in my head every now and then. Maybe Grimalkin had killed the glove’s owner. I turned my head toward him, squinting my eyes suspiciously.
The cat was laying on the arm of the couch, busy licking his back paw. That big ball of fur couldn’t be a killer. He was way too snob for that. Also, he was a cat. Cats can’t be killers, right? Their size would be a major flaw for that career. Though their teeth are sharp…
The ringing of my phone made me jump a foot in the air. I was so scared I dropped it to the ground and a curse came out of my mouth. Quickly, I picked the phone back up and scanned the screen for any new crack. It wasn’t exactly new, but my bank account would benefit from not having to let go of more money. I cleared my throat and answered the call.
“Hello?” I started.
“Hello,” said a man’s voice on the other end of the line. “I saw posters about how you found a glove…”
I smiled. So this was the mysterious glove owner.
“I did,” I answered.
“I think it’s mine.”
***
The man and I agreed to meet at a cafe not too far from the library where I worked. When I would be done with my shift, I would go down there and give him back his glove, which was currently waiting in my handbag next to a bottle of pepper spray, just in case the guy was actually a creep. He hadn’t hit me as one when we had talked on the phone the other day, but I didn’t want to take any chance.
The sun had already begun to go down when the library closed. I locked the glass door and waved goodbye to my coworker, a little old lady who was as sweet as honey, before getting in my car. As I said, the cafe wasn’t far, but it was supposed to rain soon. I didn’t want to look like a miserable terrier getting out of a bath.
There weren’t many people in the cafe, despite it being rush hour. A couple or two, a young mother and her son, and… a man, alone, mindlessly toying with the fingers of a black leather glove and watching the street outside the window. This was him.
As I got closer, I couldn’t help but notice how handsome he was. His pitch-black hair was barely long enough to be considered long and his face was young but had a certain sophistication. He was dressed in a casual but elegant manner, his clothes mostly dark. It brought out his silver eyes.
“Ash?” I asked once I was just a few feet away from his table. He turned his head toward me at the mention of his name.
“You’re Meghan?” He asked back. I nodded. He smiled and pointed at the chair on the other side of the table. “Sit down.” I did just that.
We talked for a little while, about the weather and what-not, before he looked down at the glove on the table.
“I brought the other one. To prove it’s really mine.”
“Oh, right.” I pulled the glove Grim had found from my handbag and placed it on the table next to the first one. They were identical. “I didn’t doubt you, you know. I mean, why would you want it, if it wasn’t yours?”
“I could have sold it on the internet,” he shrugged. I shrugged too.
“I guess if it had come to that, it wouldn’t be my problem anymore.”
Ash raised one eyebrow.
“Was my glove that much of a hassle?” A small smile appeared on his face.
“No, I’m just kidding.”
He looked down at the two gloves, reunited in his hands.
“It was your cat who stole it, right?”
“Yeah. The little rascal…” I shook my head. I had never really scolded Grimalkin for his crimes before thievery. Ash laughed. He had a beautiful laugh. I couldn’t help the smile that wiggled its way onto my face.
“I’d accidentally left one of the windows opened that night. That’s how he got in. I hadn’t even noticed I was missing a glove until I noticed gray hairs on the floor in front of my wardrobe.”
“I have pictures of him if you want to see the thief.”
“I absolutely do.”
I pulled my chair around the table so that we sat next to each other, our elbows almost touching. The photos I showed him were mostly the ones where Grim looked like a clown, like the time he got tangled in the Christmas tree a few years back, or the time my mom had to call the firefighters because he’d gotten stuck in the maple in front of our house.
We laughed a lot.
The sky was completely dark when we exited the cafe. Ash put his hand on my arm to stop me from leaving.
“Thanks again for the glove. I know a lot of people wouldn’t have cared that much for a simple glove.”
“Of course, they would have.”
“I don’t think so.”
We stood in silence for a few minutes. Gosh, his eyes truly are mesmerizing. And his hair looks so soft. The black of it melted in the dark sky behind him. He looked like an angel with the warm, golden light from the cafe bouncing on his cheekbones.
“So, um…” I started. “I think I’m gonna go, now.”
He blinked as if he was lost in thought, and my voice had pulled him out.
“Yes…” He hesitated a few seconds before continuing. “We could do that again if you want. Just without me losing a glove.”
“Yeah, definitely.” I smiled. He smiled too.
“Great! I’ll call you, then.”
I nodded enthusiastically.
“I’ll be waiting.”
My cheeks were still warm and rosy when I flopped onto my bed half an hour later.