Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Note: The images used above are purely for the aesthetic and mood of the story, or to represent aspects of the reader's role, style, or the chapter itself. They are not intended to depict the reader's physical appearance or ethnicity.

December 1980

John catches you just as you're reaching for your coat.

"Perfect timing," he says, holding out a folder thick with paper. "I need these contract amendments at Hayvenhurst today. He has to sign all three copies and don't let him put it off, he'll try to do it later and later means next week."

You look at the clock on the wall, then at the folder. It's nearly the end of the day and you’re looking forward to getting home. Still, you obey.

"Got it,” you say as you take the documents from his hands.

"You're a lifesaver." He's already turning back to his office as the phone on his desk starts ringing, and that's that.

You look down at the folder in your hands. Michael J. Jackson, printed on the tab in neat block letters. Great.

You've been at the firm almost a year now. Fresh out of university, hired at exactly the moment John Branca needed an assistant, because his newest client was turning out to be a full-time job on his own.

The timing was perfect, your father made sure of that. He'd made a call, mentioned your name, said good things that were definitely not earned yet, and doors that usually stay shut for everyone else swung open for you the way they always had.

You're not proud of it.

You work twice as hard as anyone in the building because you're not proud of it. You’re the first one in, the last one out, don’t complain and don’t say no.

You live alone, you pay your own rent, you do your absolute best at everything, and still some mornings you look at your desk and think: Daddy made this possible because daddy has connections. The truth of that follows you everywhere like an annoying splinter in your finger that you can’t get out.

The taxi ride to Encino takes forty minutes because of the end-of-day traffic. You have plenty of time to think.

You met Michael in March at John’s house. They had been there for hours, and when you arrived to drop off files the two of them were deep in talking, heads put together over a table covered in papers.

You caught pieces of their conversation.

Joseph getting fired from being his manager. Something about the next album, about doing it differently this time. It sounded serious and you should have just brough the files and left. But you'd never met him before that day, and you thought it would be strange to work this closely on his legal matters without at least introducing yourself, so you walked up to the two men, put out your hand toward Michael, and gave him your name.

“Nice to meet you”, you said and smiled.

He looked up briefly and nodded. "Nice to meet you too."

And then he turned back to John and continued talking. That was it. Five words and then the top of his head.

You stood there for a secnd too long with your hand still held out to him. Then you put it back down as your smile slipped off your face and something in your mind went cold.

You knew that move, you'd seen it your whole life. All the famous people who came through your father's world did that move too, the actors, the singers, the ones who could turn the charm on for cameras and off for staff.

You are staff. He'd understood it in half a second and decided you weren't worth the interruption.

Fine.

You never asked yourself if there was another way to read his reaction. You were twenty-three and proud. You'd always been too proud, your mother said so and your friends said so too.

And proud people don’t ask follow-up questions or give second chances. You had him figured out by the time you reached the door of John’s house.

The gate at Hayvenhurst opens for you now without much waiting because by now they know your face here. The taxi drops you at the curb and you tell yourself you'll flag another one down after, there's always something moving at the main street.

You take the folder and walk the path around the side of the house and toward the studio, because that's where he always is.

Today is the coldest day of December so far and the light is going amber and long across the yard. The sun sits low in the sky, probably only a few more minutes left in it. You wish you could go home before dark.

You knock.

The door opens and he’s standing there and immediately, you notice how he reacts to seeing you. You see how he tries to keep his expression neutral. He’s like a child who doesn’t know if he can approach an animal or not.

"Hi," he says.

You don’t greet him back.

"Mr. Branca needs these signed. All three copies." You hold the folder out. "Today, if possible."

"Oh. Sure, okay." He takes it and goes back inside the studio, searching for a pen among the tapes and notepads. You stay by the door.

The room seems warm and there's music paused on the machines, probably a part of a new demo he’s working on.

He finds a pen. He reads faster than you expect him to, flipping the pages, then signs all three copies carefully, his tongue pressed to his upper lip in concentration.

He brings the folder back to you with both hands as if it's fragile. "There you go."

"Thank you." You're already turning away from him.

"Thank you," he says quietly. "For bringing it so late. Tell John I said, um… Tell him it's fine, the changes."

"I will."

You don't meet his eyes because you never do and then you're through the gate and out onto the sidewalk before he's even closed the studio door. The streetlights are slowly turned on one by one along the avenue as the sky becomes darker.

He watches you go standing in the doorway with his arms crossed on his chest.

He's given up trying to solve you. At first he told himself it was professionalism, that you were new, fresh out of school, trying so hard to be taken seriously that you'd decided friendliness would make you look unprofessional.

But he's seen you being friendly with John. He's heard you laugh with your colleagues in the office, has seen you bring a coffee for the receptionist and watched you be warm and easy with everyone in the building.

Everyone in the building except him.

You show the coldness to him alone, so it must be personal, and he's gone through every conversation you've ever had looking for what he could have possibly said that started this, and there's nothing. He doesn't know what he did.

But he hates conflict and confrontation, so he's never asked. He just stays out of your way, gives you the space you seem to want, keeps his his voice small and polite and hopes it will somehow end on its own.

He closes the studio door. The tape is still where he left it and in one minute he's back inside the music and you're just another person outside the walls.

–

The walk toward the main street takes some time or maybe it seems that way to you because it’s getting really cold now. You pull your coat tighter and walk fast with the folder pressed to your chest. The sky is now completely dark.

There's a bench up ahead where the residential street gives out onto the boulevard. An old woman sits on it, wearing a coat over another coat and a scarf wound up to her chin.

"Spare some change, dear?"

Your hand is in your pocket before you even think about it. This was one thing you’d never not do. You come up with a few coins and put them into her open palm, and notice that her fingers are cold.

"Thank you," she says. "Bless you."

Then she doesn't let go of your hand. "Let me read your palm for the coins. A fair trade?"

You glance down the boulevard. There are no taxis yet, just some headlights that turn out to be normal cars. You're cold and you want to go home, but there's nowhere to be while you wait to see a taxi, and it seems rude to pull your hand back.

You shrug. "Sure, why not."

She turns your hand over and looks at it closely. She doesn’t say anything for a long time. Her thumb moves over the lines of your palm slowly, back and forth. A few cars go by.

Then she looks up at you, and you notice her eyes are darker than before.

"You have a good heart," she says. "Kindness runs out of you like water when a stranger holds the cup. You give without question. That is rare."

Her thumb presses into the center of your palm. "But you give it only to strangers. The ones who stand closer to you, the ones who would drink too if you poured your kindness for them, those people you weigh and measure first,” she says, shaking her head.

“And your scales with which you weigh them are broken, child. You look upon people through the eyes of pride. You have mistaken silence for arrogance, and distance for disdain, and you have never once asked yourself if you read it wrong. You just assumed.”

The old lady gives you a small smile. “And for that, you will learn what it is to have a heart no voice can defend."

The words hang there in the cold. You don't know what to say about any of it.

You can feel an awkward laugh making its way up your chest, and you're already preparing the sentence, okay, well, thank you, I should really go, when she lifts her free hand.

She holds one finger up between you.

"This is your curse. By day, you shall walk as yourself. By night, you shall wear the shape of a creature that cannot speak. Only when someone comes to know your heart beyond your face, and chooses it still, will you be free."

"I'm sorry?"

"You'll understand," she says gently, "when your pride is gone."

And she taps you once on the forehead.

Everything around you jumps. That's the only way to describe it. The whole street lurches upward, the bench, the woman, the streetlight, all of it shooting into the sky, and there's a sensation like falling without moving, and then it's over and you're looking at the underside of the bench.

The underside of the bench.

You're on the ground, but you don't remember falling to the ground. The pavement is right there against your body, close and cold and the cracks looking enormous somehow. You try to push yourself up and something is wrong with your arms, they don’t move the way you want them to, and you look down.

Paws.

Small, trembling paws, standing where your hands should be.

You look for the woman. The bench is empty. There's no one on the street at all, just the buzzing light and the folder, John's folder, lying on the pavement beside you, huge and impossible to carry.

You scream. What comes out is a meow.

You scream again, louder, and it's just meowing, high-pitched and useless. Your own voice is gone and this small animal sound has taken its place, and the panic that floods you then is not like any fear you've had before.

You start moving. Your legs wobble like they belong to a newborn deer, you have four of them, four legs, and you can't coordinate them and you stumble against the bench leg. You keep going anyway, toward the shops on the corner.

When you reach the closest shop’s window you stop in front of it. You make yourself look.

A cat looks back. Small and furry, with huge eyes that have your own eye color. You lift a paw. It lifts a paw. You open your mouth and the cat opens its mouth and you let out a tiny cry.

You run.

You run down the boulevard, low to the ground with the cold air over you, passing shut stores, past a man walking who says whoa, past a couple waiting at a crosswalk. You stop near them.

You try to speak, please, help me, something has happened to me, and it only comes out as meowing, and the woman crouches down with her hands out and says oh, hello, sweetheart, are you lost?, and scratches you under the chin with one finger.

She pets you. You are a thing that gets petted now.

You back away from her hand and she laughs a little, and the two of them walk on when the light changes to green, and you stand there on the corner shaking.

There's an alley behind the shops. You wedge yourself into the gap behind the trash bins where the smell of rotten fruit and grease and wet cardboard reaches your tiny nose, and you press your back against the brick and make yourself small.

The cold comes up through the ground all night. You shiver so much you think your insides are frozen. And then hunger arrives at some point.

You keep crying out into the dark because it's all you have, and every time it comes out as the same small meow.

The sky stays black for a very long time.

–

You sleep curled into yourself behind the bins with your tail wrapped over your nose, a position your body somehow just knows, and that frightens you too, but then...

You wake up falling.

That's what it feels like, the world dropping away underneath you.

Everything is shrinking, and then your cheek is on wet pavement and your legs are sprawled in the trash around you.

Legs. Arms. Fingers with dirt under the nails, and you lie there breathing heavily in the gray light while a thin line of sun comes over the rooftops across the street.

Your clothes are on. Coat, shoes, all of it. You don't understand it and you’re too exhausted to try to understand it. You sit up behind the trash bins of an alley in Encino, a grown woman in yesterday's clothes shaking on the ground, and the first thought that forms in your head is the folder.

The folder. John's contracts. Your purse.

You're up and running before your legs are fully ready. The street is empty, shops still shut, one car sliding by with its lights on.

The bench is where you remember it. You look under it and there is your purse and beside it the folder, damp along one edge.

You snatch it up and go through all three copies right there on your knees. Signatures are still intact, pages a little cold and wavy from the night air, but all of it is there and untouched. Nobody took anything. Nobody even came.

You press the folder to your chest and something between a laugh and a sob comes out of you, and you thank God, luck, whatever is listening.

A taxi comes down the boulevard with its light on. Before your mind can catch up, your body is already up with your arm in the air.

The driver looks at you for a second too long in the mirror, but you don’t blame it. You can imagine what he sees.

You give him your address and watch the streets slide past, people opening shops, a man hosing down a sidewalk, the whole world carrying on like the night never happened. You sit very still in the back seat with your hands in your lap, watching the sun rise and praying it won’t go down again too soon.

The moment you get home, you immediately collapse on the couch. Your body stops resisting the exhaustion and you lie face down in your coat for a long time, and when you finally move again it's because the shivering has come back and won't stop. You know you’re sick and you can feel it deep in your bones, your throat is raw and your skin is hot and cold at the same time from a whole night on cold ground.

You force yourself to take a hot shower, as hot as you can possibly bear it. You eat whatever you find closest to you because you feel like you're dying and food feels like the only thing that might help. Then you call the office and you tell them you've caught something and you won't be in. It’s not even a lie.

You're sick for seven days. Fever, cough, body aching, the whole package.

And every evening, you transform into a cat.

The first time it happens at home you're standing at the window watching the sun go down over the buildings. You tell yourself maybe it was a dream, maybe it was something you can explain? But the moment the sun is gone the world shoots upward like the night before, and you're on the carpet on four legs with your heart going like a drum. You spend the entire night pacing your own apartment at ankle height. Your furniture is enormous and you have to jump to reach your bed. You start crying at some point and it comes out as meowing, and you stop, because hearing it is worse than the crying.

In the morning when the first rays of sunshine come through your blinds you turn back into yourself. The change happens every time.

You don't leave the apartment at all. You're too scared that if it catches you outside again you'll be lost for good, so you order takeout during the day and pay through the cracked door. You eat soup as a woman and, once, when the transformation catches you before you've finished your meal, finish it as a cat, face down in the bowl on the kitchen floor.

But you're observing now. You’re still sick, but you’re watching the trnasformations, and by the third day you know it, and by the fifth day you could swear on what you observed.

It doesn’t happen at any time of the night. It starts and ends with the sun. The moment the sun is fully down, when there’s not even a sliver left, you turn into a cat. The moment the first ray of sunshine comes back, you turn back into your human form.

You test it out, because you want to be sure of it. Even if the sky is cloudy int he morning and doesn’t let in any light, you still turn human at exactly the same time. And even if you leave your lamps open at night, standing in a blaze of every light you could find in your apartment when the sun goes down, you still turn into a cat.

You remember the old lady’s words.

By day, you shall walk as yourself. By night, you shall wear the shape of a creature that cannot speak.

She meant that literally, because you realize it’s an actual schedule.

So you do the math while sitting on your couch with a cup of tea and a notepad.

Your work hours are day hours. Winter days are short, but you can manage them from sunrise to sunset, and if you're careful and never get caught out at the wrong hour, you can keep your job. You can keep your life, or at least the daylight half of your life.

When you finally go back to work, you go to John directly before even taking your coat off. You tell him you're better (which is true), and then you tell him the lie you rehearsed on the way to work: your grandmother is ill and she's relying on you now because you live closest to her, so your evenings are hers. You'll give the firm everything between sunrise and sundown, you'll come in early, you'll work through lunch if needed, but once the sun is down you're unreachable, no exceptions, and you're sorry, and you understand if it's a problem.

John waves it off before you even finish your speech.

"Family's family," he says. "We'll work around it. Just arrive on time and do your job well and we're fine."

You let out a breath of relief. He's a fair man and you feel a little sorry for lying to him because of how easily he takes the lie and how kind everyone is at the office, genuinely concerned for you being sick for a whole week. You thank John and go to your desk and when you sit down, you notice the sunlight coming through from the window behind you. You check your watch because this is your life now. You, the sun, your watch.

Today, sunset is at 5:13.

–

Two weeks pass and it’s now close to the end of the year. You learn to live with it. Human by day, cat by night.

You stop waiting for it to end on its own. Your hope slowly dies each time you turn into a cat at night. You keep going to work and keep watching the sun.

Every day without exception you're back home with the door locked before the sunlight disappears. You’re thankful you live rather close to the office as it makes getting home in time easier. Your evenings now belong to a small animal that paces your apartment and sleeps on your own pillow.

Your friends take the damage. Drinks after work, dinner on Friday, a birthday of a friend at a bar next week. You decline and decline and decline, tell them grandmother, grandmother, grandmother, but you know they’re getting irritated with you, so you give them your lunches instead.

You meet whoever can make it at noon for sandwiches or a diner near the office, forty-five minutes of being a normal person with normal friends. You laugh at their stories and say you're so sorry you couldn’t make it the other day. They don't stay mad and it makes you feel worse because they’re so forgiving.

Michael comes by the office once in those weeks. John’s running behind on something and Michael is told he’ll be with him in five minutes. You’re unaware of his presence because you're at your desk with two of your colleagues, deep in some office gossip and you're laughing loudly, and then the door opens and he’s standing there.

The laugh immediately dies in your throat. Your whole demeanor changes and you become stiff, the warmth with which you spoke to your colleagues just seconds ago completely gone as you turn back to your desk and organize a stack of papers that was already organized.

Your colleagues go back to their own corners of the office as he stands there by the door, waiting for John, hands in his pockets, and you can feel him trying not to look at you.

"Cat got your tongue?"

He says it lightly as a small joke to cover the awkwardness in the room, but it hits you hard and you go completely still. Of every phrase in the English language, of everything this man could have picked to tease you with.

You stare at the papers in your hands and try to answer him with something normal like “Of course not”, but the truth in his words, even if he meant it as a joke, sits heavily inside you. Because the cat does get your tongue every night.

"John should be out in a minute," you manage to say finally, but it’s not an answer to his joke.

"Okay," he says quietly and doesn’t speak to you again, keeping his eyes down.

And suddenly, annoyance comes over you like a wave. You know in this instance it's not fair, he just made a small joke and he can't know what that joke means to you, nobody on earth can know what it means to you, but somehow that makes it worse instead of better.

He walked in here and said the one exact thing that summed up the struggles of your past week and because of that, you can hear your own heartbeat in your ears, and he’s the reason why. Without knowing or trying to piss you off, he still managed to do it.

You feel your dislike of him doubling and spreading out inside you because it never needed a reason anyway, it just came naturally ever since your first encounter with him. Some small part of you might know there's no logic in any of it, but you always ignore that part. Instead, you hate him a little more anyway.

Finally, John’s door opens and Michael stands up to enter. You still sit there with your ears ringing and your face hot from anger. You stand up to go to the bathroom and when you splash water on your face, you try to think clearly.

He wasn't really rude, you know that. He made a small joke into a cold room which you had made cold because of how you reacted to his presence. But without knowing it, he came too close to your pain and you couldn’t look past it.

Maybe that's what finally pushes you to act. Because that same week, you start looking for the old lady.

You have to plan it, because you never do anything unplanned. You sit at your desk and write down everything you’ve observed about your transformation.

Your clothes come with you through the change, but your purse doesn't. You learned that in the alley, so the purse has to stay home when you go out looking for the lady. The house key is the problem, because what if you can’t make it home by the time the sun is up and you become human again? There are no pockets on a cat, so you hide a spare key in the flower pot with the dead geranium by your entrance. And you leave your window open a crack, just enough for you to fit through when you return home as a cat.

The first night of your plan you test it out, coming back in through the fire escape and wriggling through the gap. Once you drop to the carpet inside your apartment, you sit there in the dark feeling almost proud, and then you catch yourself feeling proud of being a competent cat and you don't feel proud anymore.

You go back to the bench. She's not there.

The first night she's not there, and the second, and the fifth.

You curl under the bench and you watch the boulevard. Old women come and go at bus stops all up and down the street but none of them is her. You know you'd recognize her if you saw her.

You decide to widen your search circle. Night after night, you walk through the streets of Encino as a small shadow, checking benches and alleys and checking the faces of everyone who passes you and you can’t find her. She's gone like she was never even there.

Some nights you cry about it in the only voice you have, but when your meowing attracts curious people who want to help a kitten in need, you run away scared. Every night you return home through the window and wake up as a woman and go to work.

It's maybe the eighth night, or maybe the tenth (you've stopped counting), when your legs act on their own. You've finished the same streets all over again, and there's nothing left to check and you should turn back, but you don't. You just keep walking. Only when you see that big familiar wall do you understand where you've taken yourself.

Hayvenhurst.

You've come here so many times with folders and messages that the route is so familiar to you now. And here you are at the gate at an hour you have no business being anywhere. The gap under the gate is small, but your even smaller body fits through easily without having to duck. It frightens you just how easily you can squeeze in anywhere as a cat.

The garden, which you already thought was extremely vast as a human, now seems like a whole new country as a cat. The plants tower over you, the flower beds envelop you and you freeze when you see a cricket which, with your body being so small now, looks like a huge monster. You’re just about to turn back and leave because this is trespassing, when you hear it.

A soft, high-pitched voice coming from around the side of the house.

You follow it carefully and a few feet away under a garden light you see a hutch, and crouched down in front of it, in a thin cardigan, is Michael.

You stop walking.

"There you go," he says with a voice so soft, softer than anything you’ve ever heard from him. It’s not his interview voice or his singing voice.

"I know, I know. You always want more, you're greedy, yes you are."

He's feeding the rabbits something green through the wire, one at a time. He’s patient, like he has nowhere else to be. One of the rabbits takes the leaf from his fingers and he laughs quietly to himself. The gentleness in his voice and his movements is so surprising that you can’t help but stay where you are.

You watch him. You should go home, but you watch him.

He talks to them the whole time about anything and everything, calls them sweet names and endearments, telling one of them it's beautiful and asking another if it’s warm enough. Then he reaches into the hutch and tucks the straw around a rabbit with two fingers like he's tucking in a child.

Twenty-two years old and one of the most famous young men in the country, crouched in the cold at almost midnight making sure a rabbit is comfortable. There's no wall around him. That's why you can’t stop looking.

When he’s around you, he’s distant and closed off, and here he’s soft, unguarded, and easy inside his own skin. You crouch on the grass with your tail wrapped around your feet thinking, so he can be like this. He just isn't like this with you.

You're so busy thinking about it that you miss him turning around.

"Oh," he says.

His eyes are on you. You go stone still, every muscle ready to bolt, and he sinks down slowly onto his heels and gets very quiet.

"Well, hello," he says softly. "Where did you come from?"

You should run for it. There's the hedge, there's the gate, there's the whole garden behind you and he couldn’t possibly chase you through it.

But you don't run.

He comes toward you in a crouched walk slowly, holding out one hand loosely, and he keeps his voice soft the whole way, "It's okay, I'm not gonna hurt you, look at you, out here all by yourself."

Up close his hand is so enormous it fills your whole vision, and he stops a polite distance away and just waits with it open in the cold air. And you don't know why you do it, but you lean in and touch your nose to his skin.

"Hi," he says, delighted, and his fingers slide along your jaw, up behind your ear, and…

Oh.

You didn't know how good that would feel. A scratch behind a cat’s ear. No wonder cats always looked like they lost their minds over it. You lean into his touch with your eyes half closed.

"Did you lose your way in here, hm?" His other hand comes carefully around and he's feeling at your neck, tilting his head. "No collar, no tag."

He pauses for a moment, then speaks in a softer voice than before. "You must be a stray. You got no owners, huh? Nobody's looking for you?"

Nobody's looking for you?

Your heart squeezes at those words.

"You're freezing," he says, and he’s right. Even though your fur helps, you’ve still been feeling the cold seeping up from the ground through your paws the past days.

"Come here, let me get you inside, it's so cold out here for you. Let me warm you up."

And he cradles you up into his arms.

You could jump down as he carries you to his studio. At any moment while he’s walking, you could just twist free and disappear into the night, but you don’t.

You don't know why you don't.

His cardigan smells like clean fabric softener and his heart is going against your ears, calm and even. The cold has been in your bones for weeks, and you just hold still and let yourself be carried across the garden by Michael Jackson like the animal you are. This is the first time since the night you got cursed that someone just took care of you and you let it happen because the last weeks’ exhaustion finally crashes onto you.

The studio is so warm. He sets you down on the couch, then goes searching and comes back with a blanket and wraps you carefully in it, tucking the edges around you the way he tucked the straw around the rabbit.

Your senses are not your old senses when you’re a cat. Everything is more heightened now, and the blanket is so soft and it smells like him, like the cardigan, warm and clean and sweet, and your body curls into it involuntarily. You tuck your paws under your chin.

"There you go," he says smiling. "Better?"

He gets you a saucer of milk from somewhere in the house and sets it down in front of you. And then, surprisingly, he apologizes to you. "I know you're supposed to give cats real food, I don't have any cat food, I'm sorry. Tomorrow, okay? If you're still here."

Then he runs the back of his index finger along the top of your head gently and goes to work.

That's the part nobody would believe if you told them. It's midnight and he goes to work, and you lie in a blanket on the couch of his studio and watch Michael Jackson build a song out of nothing.

The tape keeps rolling and rewinding. He sings a line, then stops, shakes his head and sings it again and again. Each time with a tiny change until he finally finds the version he’s satisfied with, and you can see his whole face open the exact moment it happens.

Then he moves on to the next line. He beatboxes rhythms into the microphone, he stacks his own voice on top of itself to try out an idea in his head, he scribbles on a notebook, he stands in the middle of the room with his eyes shut and one hand moving like he's conducting something only he can hear.

You can see he’s dead tired from the yawns he keeps swallowing and from the way he leans on the console between takes. He still pushes through as if he can’t allow himself to take a break.

His voice fills the room for hours. You’ve always admired his work ethic, even though you couldn’t stand him as a person. But those two were different things, you were good at separating the artist from the art. You’ve never watched him work like this before, and you lie there in your blanket thinking about the man who couldn't spare you five words in March, trying to fit him and the man who took care of you tonight together.

They don't fit.

You come to the only conclusion you can think of. He’s only gentle when he’s around animals. Animals and music. It’s probably people he looks down on, especially people who are staff, like you. That’s why he’s distant with you and won’t even spare you a look, always lowering his eyes. You notice his disdain for you constantly.

Still, the thought has a logical gap in it that you conveniently ignore. Because he’s nice to other staff.

Somewhere past three o'clock he finally surrenders. "Okay," he says to nobody, "okay, okay," and he stretches his body until something pops.

Then he comes over to the couch and looks down at you, smiling like you're a present he forgot he had. "You're still here."

He gathers you up, blanket and all, and lies back on the couch with you on his chest.

"What a long day," he murmurs. His hand absent-mindedly finds your ear again. "Long, long day. Everybody wants something, you know? Everybody. All day long."

He stops talking when a yawn makes its way out of him. "You don't want anything. You're just soft." His fingers trail down your back and up again. "You're the best thing that happened today, you know that? You're so adorable. Yes you are."

You start purring involuntarily when he presses a gentle kiss behind your ear, the way he kissed the rabbits.

"Night night," he says.

He's asleep in two minutes. And just like that, the hand on your back goes heavy, his breathing slows down, and you lie on the chest of the man you've hated since March, rising when he inhales, falling when he exhales.

You should leave now. But you decide to stay a while. You tell yourself that moving away would wake him up.

Up close his face has nothing in it but exhaustion, only twenty-two years old and already worn out and you can't help thinking, nobody sees this.

Because this is a private moment you have no right to look into. You, of all people, who hated him since your first meeting, and yet here you are, witnessing his vulnerability without earning it, without him even knowing he's allowing it.

It changes nothing about how you feel about him, you tell yourself. You still can't stand him. But maybe, you think as his heart beats steadily under your ear, there's now a new layer on top of the old hatred, something you can actually respect: the work. You saw it tonight with your own eyes. Nobody can take that away from him, and you're honest enough to admit it.

The fear of sunrise is what finally moves you, because if you fall asleep, you wake up as a woman on his chest, and there's no possible way in which you could explain that to him, so you step off him slowly, one paw at a time and gently jump onto the floor.

He stirs but doesn't wake up, his hand sliding off into the space where you had been moments ago.

He's thankfully left a window open a crack for fresh air, just like you do. You manage to squeeze through the gap and drop into the flowerbed. Immediately you feel the cold again.

At the gate you stop and look back once. The studio light is still on and it’s the only light coming from the estate.

It’s almost 4 o’clock when you arrive home and you jump onto your bed, allowing yourself to sleep a few more hours before you have to go to work.

When you wake up again in your human form, the first thing you do is bring your wrist up to your face.

Your sleeve smells like his blanket.