Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Aqua Storm

Temple felt as if she were being trailed by an oversolicitous seal. “Forget the ice cream. What I really need is help getting out of these clothes.” Temple plucked at her knit top and turned her back to the landlady.

“You poor little thing,” Electra clucked warmly while she undid the zipper and bra. Temple gritted her teeth against pain both physical and psychic. Electra was only trying to help. “Where’s your nightdress?”

“That’s it.”

“The Garfield T-shirt on the hook? Oh, cute.”

Temple regarded the image of the self-satisfied tiger-striped cartoon feline regarding himself in a mirror under text that announced, “Gemini: Your double-edged nature means there’s more for everybody, but you can never get enough of yourself.” Cute didn’t seem to describe it.

Lifting both arms to don the shirt was harder than it looked. “Electra, you’re a Florence Nightingale to help me out. I’m sorry to be such a bother.”

“I’ve been called a rare old bird before, but never a nightingale.” Still, she blushed.

Temple plodded in slow motion into the tiled bathroom and glimpsed herself in the mirror. Not flattering, but at least she didn’t look like Dracula’s daughter with dried blood clinging to her lips. In fact, she looked remarkably normal, except for a subtle swelling in her face and an overall smudging of her makeup. No wonder so many battered women managed to conceal the ugly secret.

She ran the hot water tap, waiting for the warmth to rise up the elderly pipes, and finally dampened a washcloth. Wringing it out defeated her right arm, and she turned. Electra hovered behind her like a hotel maid.

“I can do that, dear!”

“Thanks.” Temple waited for the cloth, then wiped her face one-handed. When she turned again, Electra was poised right there with the vintage blue aluminum tumbler and the pharmacy bag.

“Run a little cold water in this glass, and you can take your first pill.”

The tiny bathroom, exquisitely tiled in a white and silver-gray pattern, was not up to a bumbling owner and a bustling landlady. They do-si-doed around each other and the pedestal sink, until Temple swallowed the pill and headed for the bed. Electra turned the ceiling fan on low and tucked her in.

Just in time. A knock on the ajar door announced the return of Matt, bearing an armful of plastic packs loaded with blue goo. In moments he and Electra had mounded bath towels along Temple’s right side. Her arm and shoulder soon were growing numb against a long, lumpy ski jump of frozen packs.

After installing her and turning off the lights, the pair decamped to the living room, from which Temple heard soft conversational tones—discussing her disaster, no doubt.

Alone at last.

Everything throbbed when nothing distracted her from the pain. She was supposed to sleep, but she didn’t feel like it.

A soft thump bounded atop the bed.

“Louie! Where did you come from?”

He stalked across the bed linens, wallowing over the swells of sheet and coverlet, and padded along her left side, stopping only when he would have to walk on her shoulder to continue.

Louie’s big, furry feline face extended as he brought his jet black nose to hers, sniffing cautiously.

“You smell hospital.” Or was it blood he noticed?

Louie turned his attention—and his head—to her body and arm, which he also honored with a thorough sniffing. Then he bent to paw the sheets and settled beside her, curling up like a kitten in the vee of her arm and body.

Midnight Louie had never permitted such a cozy position in their association. Temple gingerly patted the glossy back dome of his head, at which he laid his nose on his curled paws, seemed to sigh, and closed his eyes.

Great. Maybe he’d gotten into the potent Tylenol Threes.

Temple awoke in alarm.

She couldn’t quite remember why her arm was propped on tepid plastic baggies, or why she felt like Midnight Louie’s nigh-twenty pounds had been pussyfooting all over her in the night. The cat no longer lay next to her.

Moonlight leached through the fretwork of the French doors, throwing a pale plaid on the parquet tile.

Then it all came back to her. She sat up, panicked, heedless of the pain rapid movement brought. Her blood was battering at all her pulse points as if for exit. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t catch her breath—maybe that’s why her pulse was pounding, she’d been running in her dreams to catch her breath....

A light sweat dappled her entire skin in an instant, chilling her in the relentless spin of the ceiling fan’s Plexiglas blades. Hot flashes at her age? Well, she was pushing thirty, she thought glumly. Combine that with recent shocks and it could happen. Wait. The pills! Strong, Electra had said. Maybe she was having a bad reaction.

Temple forced herself out of bed, hearing herself gasp for air in the tranquil silence.

Her bare feet stuck to the wooden floor as she skated for the door. It opened onto her living room. Moonlight from the bank of the French doors drenched that end of the room and bleached the walnut floor to white pine.

It also silvered the huge, alien form crouching low in front of the doors like an albino tiger. Temple skittered away into the living room proper—and found herself knocking into a larger, whiter unexpected shape.

“Temple?” a man’s voice asked from the dark.

Max!

And then all the alien elements in the room—the two misplaced hunks, the man’s voice—spun a little in her senses as she recognized them for familiar things out of place... her cocktail table turned stumbling block, her sofa turned bed, her neighbor turned watchdog-cum-counselor.

“Yes,” she answered shakily. “I woke up suddenly. I couldn’t remember at first.”

“That was probably the Tylenol wearing off. Time to take another pill.”

“Yes. No! Not just yet. I want to feel like myself for a while.” She sat on the misplaced bed’s foot. “Did you see Louie leave?”

“Was he here?”

She nodded, then remembered that the room was dark and Matt wasn’t used to its nighttime shapes. “Decidedly here, keeping me company in the bedroom. Maybe he went out.”

“How? I never opened the French doors.”

“The spare bathroom window is always cracked open.”

“But that’s two floors!”

“That’s Louie’s private exit and entry. Don’t ask me how. Oh,” Temple said despite herself, still feeling rocky.

“Are you all right?” Matt shifted in the bed.

Temple finally realized why she had such trouble making out his figure in the dim room. He was wearing his martial-arts outfit as pajamas. The pale material blended with the ivory-colored sheets. She had to credit him with coming up with a neat answer to the awkwardness of sleeping over. She wondered what he wore—or didn’t wear—when he didn’t have to be prepared for strange women barging into his sleeping area.

“Are you all right?” he repeated.

“I’m woozy from the pill, I guess.” Matt waited. “And I think I just had a panic attack.”

She could see the moonlight-gilded sheen of his hair nodding.

“That’s why I’m here. Your body knows better than your mind what it’s been through. You’ll be extra jumpy for a while.”

“Maybe I’ll have reason to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just realized something else. I’m afraid I was in mental as well as physical shock last night. I haven’t been honest with you.”

After a silence, Matt said, “How?”

“I didn’t want to make it common knowledge, or maybe I didn’t want to face facts. Those weren’t two strangers that attacked me—I mean, they were strangers, to me. But they weren’t to someone I know. Knew.”