Chapter 2
“I don’t know, Darren.” She hisses his name like she does a few select other words—imbecile, cretin, bigot—and scrawls over the pages she’s actually had to print out because the work is so abysmal the words swam, unrecognisable, incomprehensible, in front of her when she’d tried to read it on her screen. Heedless of her sleeve dragging in the mostly mopped-up coffee she’d spilled earlier, she draws a great box around several paragraphs and then, merciless, scribbles the whole thing out in red ink. “Useless. That’s what I asked you to figure out because this is a group. Fucking. Project. And. You. Need. To. Do. Your. Part,” she bites out, dragging the pen over the mess until the tip opens a gash in the page. “Serves you right.” Tossing the pen down onto the table, Cat leans away and shakes her head. “What a waste of a tree. Jesus. What a waste of my time.”
The pages she ends up just swiping off the table and onto the floor. It’s no help at all.
“Where are you, Darren?”
He’s long since logged off messenger and Cat glares at the little grey icon with the years of anger at being forced into group assignments bubbling and seething under the surface of her skin. Pro: she’s awake. Cons: she has to be awake because this idiot fucked up; she’s shaking with fury at his incompetence; her hoodie now has a coffee stain on its sleeve.
“I swear to god, if this drives me to reblogging that insipid meme…”
She’s praying for basically anything or anyone to save her right about now—a god she doesn’t believe in, some kind of oddly named story book character to request her first born in return for three wishes, a superhero she does believe in.
“Superman,” she sighs, craning her head back because her shoulders are aching and she thinks she’s going to cramp up and die here because of some useless white man and that’s not the way she wanted to go out—a plane crash, in a private plane, off the coast of some foreign country, and she’s at the peak of her influence, power, and wealth and no one can be one hundred per cent certain whether she’s alive or dead because that kind of power and ambiguity really appeals to her. “Superman, where are you when people really need you? Burn my eyes out of their sockets, please.”
One minute passes, then two, and then Cat can’t pretend she’s doing anything other than procrastinating and the deadline is imminent and so she rolls her head gently side to side then forwards and back on her neck, shakes out her hands, and returns to the three utterly useless pages—three! only three after two whole weeks of time to research—that Darren had sent her.
But she’s nothing if not exceptional and she’s not about to get less than a seven on this or, god forbid, fail. Checking the time—9:45, that’s not terrible but not ideal either—she has to pick quickly before getting hard at work now and risking getting up later, or taking a break now and then powering through to the end. With an agonisingly long three seconds of deliberation, Cat takes off both pairs of glasses that she’s wearing and stands.
A good cup of coffee would be golden right now but pressing would take far too long, going down to the cafe would take far too long, and instant coffee with its murky taste and equally murky quality—is it really coffee? Is it? Or is it the physical embodiment of late night desperation, the only last-ditch weapon students have against those deadlines that loom and that taste? That taste isn’t coffee grinds, that’s the taste of desperation, of clinging onto your GPA with fingernails and teeth.
She puts the kettle on boil and walks to the balcony. Delaying the inevitable. It’s raining, heavily, and she drums her fingers on the window before pushing outside, just for a second. The cool bite to the air and the threat of the water that can’t quite reach her where she is tucked under the roof helps to wake her up and she takes in a few deep breaths until the kettle whistles and tells her she’s out of time.
“Right. Enough of that.” One scoop of the ground—then a second and then half a spoonful more and it’s going to be disgusting but it’s certainly going to wake her up. “Back to work, back to work fixing what Darren has ruined.”
It’s just her, so she’s not worried about anyone thinking she’s reached the breaking point…and then snapped her own mind for the extra credit.
Only, it isn’t just her anymore, she remembers.
But what she doesn’t remember is whether or not her newest flatmate had come home tonight—she has a habit of ignoring them, it’s not like they end up staying for very long, and Kiera—Karla?—whatever her name is—has been particularly obliging with the whole ‘quiet as a mouse and don’t let me see you ever’ rule that Cat firmly established the second she signed Cat’s contract.
Kettle hissing, steam blowing up above it, the fridge open a crack, she stares into it for far too long, hesitating between whole and skim milk.
“Don’t beep at me,” she grumbles, slamming the fridge. Waits a moment. Heaves the door open again. On the one hand, her ass and thighs do not need whole milk. On the other hand, Darren is the most useless human to have ever been born—or, as she assumes, wandered out of a swamp after a particularly exceptional yet ultimately underwhelming experiment of evolution that happened there in the murk and muck. “I hate you,” she says as she picks out the skim milk, “I loathe you, Darren, but there’s no way I’m letting you ruin my diet. You’re not that important.”
Slamming the fridge is therapeutic too, and she settles back behind her computer renewed, refreshed, and, after another read through of what Darren had sent her, re-enraged.
“What the fuck is this, Darren?”
She’s rescued the pages from under her chair. They’re torn and practically dripping red, and it paints a visceral picture of what she’d love—god, love—to do to this mewling pissant.
“I have more to worry about than this—what the fuck? Is this, are these question marks? Do you not know your source for this?” Cat slams the pages down on the table and smoothes them out. Unsalvageable, she has to print out a new copy and she sends the first of what she suspects is going to be many texts to him.
—you owe me four dollars for printing this worthless shit
She waits for a minute, hoping that he’s awake, but no bites.
“Fine.” Only one pair of glasses on her nose, she settles into work. “Give me strength, this is garbage.”
In a separate window, she drafts a particularly devastating, scathing—somewhat cruel, perhaps—email for her group partners. Not Lucy, though she does get cc’d in, but for the rest of them absolutely. Lucy is almost as talented and intelligent and driven as she is. Equally so, Cat might admit if pressed. But the rest of them? Cat could frankly get a restraining order at this point for all the grief they’ve caused her.
When the rain starts pelting down against her balcony and window, the wind driving it almost sideways, Cat turns her music down and then off. It’s a soothing accompaniment, and she enjoys interrupting it with her more creatively lurid swears. It’s all about balance. Man versus nature. Chaos and control.
She’s collected most of the information Darren should have and, peeking at the clock, glowers at the numbers there. It’ll be close—the deadline is 11:59PM and not a second later.
And sure, she knows now that she should have been on their asses way sooner to get organised and get all their research to her so that she could put it together but it’s the first assignment of the semester and she’d honestly thought they’d be more prepared than they clearly are.
Her mistake, really.
She won’t make it again.
//
The sharp pain behind her eyes makes her stop and her night turns from terrible to dreadful in the time it takes for her to shake and then, horrified, upturn her Advil bottle into her hand and confirm that it’s empty.
“You’re got to be kidding me.” The container makes an unsatisfying clatter where she throws it against the wall. “I’m going to murder the next person who so much as mildly inconveniences me, I swear to god.”
Some small, whimsy part of her appreciates dramatic irony. The rest of her, exhausted, burning with fury and rising anxiety, does not. So when there comes a timid knock at the door, a sound barely more than someone tapping their finger against it, she whirls and glares at it.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Cat?”
Of course it’s her. Cat pours herself a glass of water and eyes the door, then her watch. Ten to eleven.
“I…I left my key inside. Can you let me in please?”
Pretending that she can’t hear the girl is appealing. Just leaving her to find somewhere else to stay for the night, since she really does need to finish this assignment and any distraction feels like too much. Also, perhaps she tends to lash out on people undeserving of her cruelty because they’re easy targets and not because she’s truly upset with them.
But that is something that her therapist would tell her, and she isn’t here right now.
So Cat purses her lips and sips slowly from her glass and glares some more at the door.
“Please open the door, Cat?”
She sounds so pitiful. God.
Cat tosses the remaining inch of water into the sink and leaves the glass on the bench. Karla will stack that into the dishwasher when she goes to clean up. Then, with a great sigh, she crosses the room. Karen doesn’t ask her or call out to her again, which Cat finds odd, but maybe the girl is just blessed with some new level of patience Cat hadn’t known even existed.
“What the fuck? What did you do? Swim the English Channel?”
The girl is drenched, from head to toe and further, spreading out into a pool at her feet. And she smiles at Cat.
“No. It’s been raining.” She slicks back her hair with a hand, laughs when her hand comes away wetter, and shakes it dry. When Cat keep gaping at her, she shuffles her feet and flushes—her shoes squelch. “I’ll take these off.”
“Yes. You will. Socks too.”
It would be weird to demand all of it come off—even if she’s pretty sure that with her luck the second Karmen steps into the apartment, everything in the apartment will become simultaneously drenched—so Cat just sighs and steps aside, holding the door open for her if impatiently. Katie watches that hand, that door, anxiously and hurries to toe her shoes off.
When she trips—catches herself, barely—and glances at Cat like she’s wondering if she saw, like she could possibly miss it, Cat leaves her to it. There are some spare towels in the linen cupboard and she carries two back to her flatmate. The gesture earns her a pleased, shy smile that drops at the same moment the towels hit the floor.
“Do not get water on my floor. You can’t afford to replace them if the water warps them. Understood?”
Kanken nods quickly, making Cat retreat in quick, annoyed steps when water flies from the ends of her hair. “Sorry, oh gosh, did I wet you, I’m—”
“I have an assignment due tonight. Just,” Cat flicks her fingers toward the bedrooms. “Go away.”
“I’ll be quiet as a mouse,” Kirstie agrees. “Although, mice can be quite loud so it’s not a hugely helpful or apt saying.” She gulps when Cat sends her a particularly withering look and nods. “Not a sound,” she whispers. “Got it.”
She disappears down the hall into her room and when she returns to put her groceries away, in clean, dry clothes, hair twisted up into a bun, Cat makes uncomfortably direct eye contact with her—uncomfortable for Kiera, anyway—and places her headphones on as obviously as she can manage before she turns back to her computer.
Sinking into her work, she stops being aware of anything more than the clock, the screen, and her body. Primarily fingertips.
At eleven forty-one, she peels herself away from her computer with a relieved sigh. Inbox pinging to tell her that the assignment has been received, she pulls her glasses off her face and takes a sip of hot coffee. Savours it for a moment before the haze clears and the confusion sets in. Hot? The cup she recognises, the label is from the late night cafe just down the road. But…
KARA, the looping writing on the lid reads, and Cat rolls her eyes. She hopes the second trip out into the rain didn’t get the floors destroyed this time.
“At least she remembered to take her keys this time,” Cat grumbles, and she takes her headphones off and stretches and looks around to make sure her home still stands.
Annoyingly, it looks impeccable. Kansas has managed to neaten the living room, clean the kitchen, tidy the books on the table and pin together her disparate papers, all in addition to going out of her way to fetch her a coffee as well as—she touches a finger to the crumbs on the plate next to her and realises that she’d apparently inhaled a cookie at some point without noticing. And all of this without Kristie distracting her.
It’s so nice of her and Cat sighs. “I’m such an asshole.” Rolls her head lazily to the side to eye the dark hallway—should she? But no, it’s not quite midnight but her flatmate is the epitome of an actual good girl and she has a strict bedtime of which the big city with its lights and life hasn’t quite stripped her. Instead, she prints out the readings for the next two weeks and sends another slew of texts to Darren, and one to Lucy after a moment of thought.
—you’re the only one I’m willing to work with again
She knows she’s picked correctly when she gets a reply a few seconds later.
—for projects?
Cat huffs. It’s such a waste of time having to explain herself. So what if she’s being vague—they should know.
—no, for construction
—??
—yes, lane. for projects.
—cat. thats the nicest thing u have EVER said to me
—to anyone?
—im flattered
Cat laughs down to her phone and tosses it onto the table, rubs her eyes. Packing away her things takes quite a while, possibly. She isn’t sure. Now that the deadline is passed, she doesn’t want to look at another clock until absolutely necessary. Out of sheer spite, she may train her body clock to know what the time is at any given moment.
And that, she acknowledges, is the exhaustion talking.
She still has her papers to collect from the printer and her computer is literally one click away from shutting down when Lucy texts her again and her hand moves to it before she can make it finish any other task. She allows it.
—heyy do u have the link that prof glasses mentioned in monday lecture?
Cat traces her mouth with a thoughtful finger. She does, of course. But…
—what will you give me for it?
—nope ur still not getting an interview w lois
—i refuse
“Had to try,” she murmurs, even as her fingers fly over the screen.
—had to try
—yeah whatever.
Cat is perhaps the tiniest bit worried that she’s actually offended her friend, when the typing bubbles pop up on her screen again.
—anyway i might? have smth good for u
—oh? and what might that be?
She watches as Lucy types—and then stops typing. Then starts again. Finally, she gets her reply.
—i'll tell u in person
—suspicious.
—you just want me to buy you coffee, don’t you?
—hey, u gotta keep ur CIs happy, right? ;)
—is olsen aware that you’re flirting with me?
—totally, he’s right here. i’ll say hi for u kitty
She gets a photo of the two of them, James smiling nicely at the screen and Lucy blowing her a kiss and Cat snorts, shakes her head.
—beautiful.
When Lucy sends her several love hearts with the new slam effect, she jumps a little and laughs, glancing around to make sure that no one—in her mostly empty apartment—noticed. Then she locks her phone without replying. Serves Lucy right for scaring her.
Packing up, she thinks about what Lucy had mentioned. Her ‘something good’. The tone of that message had been just…off enough, her gut tells her, for it to be something real. More than just a coffee date. She’s intrigued—but it’s late, and she should sleep. And besides, there might not be any point in collecting any more stories now.
Everything is in its place—computer, readings all tucked into her bag and set aside so when she invariably hits snooze two too many times tomorrow morning everything is ready for her to grab and run. She nods in satisfaction, takes her cup to the bin. Plate in the dishwasher. Buries a yawn in her hand and pads around the place, switching off her charger and the lamps.
She’s almost back to her room when she sees it. It would’ve been easy to miss, the way Kara’s door sits slightly ajar, but she’s looking down the hall. Not for that exactly, but for some kind of sign that the other girl is still away. Guilt, that insistent little bastard of a feeling, itches under her skin and she tries to ignore it, pretend that her shoulders are tense from slumping in front of her computer, but… She did snap at her earlier. And dropped the towels on the floor instead of helping her. And…okay, sure, she also accused the girl of “airing her dirty laundry to the public” when she’d tried to remind Cat that they live together, which she’d only done because Cat had forgotten who she was.
She’ll just go and see if the girl is awake. If she is, she’ll apologise, Cat tells herself. If not, then it’s obvious that she managed to get to sleep without any problems, so she’s not emotionally damaged and an apology won’t be necessary.
The open door sends a shiver up her spine like she’s in some damn horror movie.
She flattens her palm against the door—bad idea? she’ll just have to find out—and a little push guides it gently open.
At first, she doesn’t see Kara. No—first is the rain.
The storm has picked up again and it flattens itself against the glass, the ferocity of it making a grey haze that separates Kara’s room from the rest of the city that can normally be seen out the windows. And the sound of it all—crashing down on the balcony, the tiles, the roof, the window—all those variances mix together inextricably and loudly. Cat can see one window has been cracked open a touch to invite it in and just like that, the rain is softened. Company, not intrusion. A blanket of sound, to hide under, to find comfort in. It’s the kind of heaviness that makes the world a little softer, a little easier to deal with.
She thinks she’s right because Kara, sitting on the floor at the wall of windows, is crying.
Down by her knee are some papers. Photos, maybe, or a letter? Cat can’t quite tell at this distance. Kara lowers one from her hand and places it gently onto the others. Her fingertips graze over it, so tenderly like she's afraid it'll crumble under anything more. When they flutter in the wind, she abandons them for only the amount of time it takes to shift an open box to pin them down.
Cat gnaws at her bottom lip, wavers in the doorway. This is a moment too heavy to intrude upon, given that she’s spoken to the girl maybe five times since she arrived. And though she knows she should leave, right now before Kara sees her, she lingers.
Moments—shocks of moment, of awareness, of recognition—have always been important to her. This moment? Cat feels like a thief, stealing past every smile Kara has ever given her, every moment of normalcy. She’s seeing something she has no right to see, taking something that has not been given to her, and it’s wrong but Cat…Cat can’t look away.
On the ground there, her secret heart poured out onto the floor next to her, heart blood pooling in her lap in the form of a red blanket, Kara is the same tall, long, lean young woman Cat has seen day after day. But when she tilts her face up to the window and stares with dark eyes up at the sky, Cat cannot recognise her.
The moon—full, fat, silver—makes her face alien, unfamiliar. The planes of her cheeks, her forehead, shift between harsh and soft with the slightest motion. It’s pale, pale light washes away anything earthly and there, in the dark, Kara is a vision of—
Is there a word for it? One strong enough? Vast, deep, fitting?
Pain? Pain isn’t enough. Pain is too much a stubbed toe, a knocked elbow as it is anything else. Too common. And fleeting, often, a shock, a sting. What Cat can see…it isn’t fleeting. This is an outpouring, a dam overflowing. It’s pressing at the edges of her and winning.
Agony isn’t right either, though Cat can see traces of it, the twist of it in the corners of her mouth and in the too-tense fingers clutching at her blanket. The way she moves to grasp her own shoulders in some sad, sad mockery of a hug. But agony? No, too loud. Too public.
Loss isn’t enough, nor hurt, nor grief, nor upset. Not even despair, torment, measure up to this—the utterly still maw of hurt.
It’s not often that Cat finds herself grasping for an explanation, a word, but she supposed in this instance it is fitting.
Kara’s shoulders hitch but Cat doesn’t hear it, can’t hear it. Her crying is silent and as Cat watches, Kara folds herself inward, presses her balled fist to the centre of her chest. Mouth opens in gaping, gasping pain.
An absence—Kara curled around her missing parts.
The moon burns clearer, wisp of clouds parting. The light throws everything into uncanny halves—Cat, fully shadowed by the door, can’t blink, can’t turn away from this silvered strange landscape that is nothing of her own home. Fully claimed by this girl.
This half girl, and her long shadow stretching out behind her.
Shaking—from the cold, her mind tries to explain it—Cat hooks her fingers around the door knob and she pulls the door back to where it had been before she had come. She makes her way back to her own bedroom, closes the door, and slips into bed. And when sleep refuses to come, she yanks her curtains closed and, with the moon gone, Cat falls into an uneasy sleep.
“Jesus, Cat, it’s nine in the morning. Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Sleep is for slackers.”
“Right.” He doesn’t look surprised to see Cat at his desk, working in his office—he shouldn’t be, she does it often enough that she’s heard people refer to it as Cat’s office more often than she’s heard Connolly’s office.
She hears him dump his satchel on the visitors chair and he walks straight to his bar. With a sideways glance to her that she spies in the reflection of her computer screen, he starts working on the coffee machine instead of the fridge.
“Want anything?”
“No, thank you.”
“Hmm.” The machine gurgles for a second before it starts to splutter in urgency and then spits out the coffee into his mug. Milk then. And, Cat rolls her eyes, three spoons of sugar.
Cat saves her document and turns her chair—his, technically—around so she can examine him. It looks like he slept just fine, she notes. With blonde hair cropped short, a crisp white shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and dress shoes Cat knows are polished religiously from the faint scuffs. Leaning back against the bench, mug in hand, beard coming in on cheeks and chin, he looks every bit a cool, old-fashioned journalist.
For one single heated moment, she knows that no one has ever questioned his integrity, his stance, whether it was biased or clouded by his emotions. She knows that he’s never had to fight for this position, not like she’s had to fight. For that moment, the one moment she allows herself to be furious, her future stretches out in front of her and she knows she’s going to be fighting for a very long time to be seen as anything—half as good, half as dedicated, half as worthwhile an investment.
She wants to grit her teeth until they crack when he sips loudly at his coffee. Tempering herself, the rage, until it coils deep inside her chest, she relaxes. The anger will be there when she really needs it but she can’t let it be her driving force—that is, and must remain, her determination. Her ambition, her desire. She lets the sound wash over her, pretends that it’s punctuation for the moment. The ellipses that lead to…
“Did you think about what I told you?”
To that.
Leaning back in her chair, she crosses her legs one over the other and drums her fingers on the leather arms. It’s a stupid question and she lets know exactly how she feels about it with a near-violent roll of her eyes. He laughs down into his coffee.
“And?”
“Well,” Cat tilts her head thoughtfully. “It was badly timed.”
“Right.” Clicking his fingers, he nods. “Assignments. My bad. I just wanted you to be prepared.”
“Oh don’t misunderstand, I appreciate the gesture. But,” she flutters her eyelashes innocently, gives him a soft smile that sits at odds with her cool, cool tone, “I may have eviscerated one of my group partners to work off some aggression.”
Connolly laughs and Cat turns back to her computer to hide a pleased smile. “I’m sure he deserved it.”
“You have no idea.” She shakes her head, trying not to fall back into annoyance. It feels good but it’s ultimately unproductive and she has a lot of work and a lot of plans to put into effect. “So, I printed out a list of writers I want to bring into The Tribune and,” she pulls a thick sheaf out of her purse, “I started thinking about the direction we want to take the paper. It’s been stagnant for too long and—”
“Cat, Cat,” Connolly steps forward, alarmed. He pushes a hand down onto the stack of papers so she can’t hand them to him. “What are you doing?”
“Working.”
“The Tribune has been cut,” he reminds her.
As if she could forget.
“No, you said that it will be cut. Which means it hasn’t yet. Which means,” she tells him, brushing his hand away and standing, “that I have time to save it.” The papers slap into his chest with a satisfactory thunk and Cat holds it there with her hand and with a look until he reaches up to take them. “Read through them. I have a lot of ideas.”
“Cat—”
“That wasn’t a suggestion.” She’s at the door when she stops. Purses her lips. There is no room for error here—he has to listen to her, he has to help her, because as much as she believes in her own rather extreme force of will there is no way that she can do this alone.
She turns back to him. “For four years, I’ve sat behind a desk here and worked harder than anyone else. By far. Longer hours, harder topics, better articles. I’ve had to listen to men thinking they’re top shit for four years, even when they clearly had no fucking clue what they were doing. It was handed to them on a silver platter and they ran this paper to the ground and now that it’s my turn, the turn I worked for,” she tells him, eyes narrowing to a dangerous slit, voice dropping, “now that I’m the one in charge, I find out that the university doesn’t want us anymore?”
She can’t stop herself from advancing on him. The heavy desk doesn’t look like much of an obstacle between them, not when she feels like this—like molten metal ready to be shaped, ready to shape its own damn self—and from the look on his face, he knows it too.
“That doesn’t work for me.” She’s proud of her tone—not a trace of anger in sight, even when she feels it licking at the insides of her lungs, smoke doing its best to make a husk around her words. She forces herself cold. Determined. “I’m not letting it happen. So, the only thing I want to hear from you is this, Connolly: are you going to help me? Or not?”
//
“Hi. Um. Cat?”
An arched eyebrow is her only reply. Fingers flying over her keyboard, she waits for the rest of the question and, when it’s not forthcoming, she blocks out the asker’s voice entirely.
Her next interruption she doesn’t mind so much.
“Cat—photos here from the Pride march,” James tells her, firm, to the point. No wasted time. “I have to head off to class but do you want anything else before I go?”
“No, shut up and leave me alone.”
He laughs and drops his photos onto the stack. “Alright, see you later. Oh hey!” Cat starts to tune him out—he sounds too happy, which means he’s not talking to her—but then a name sticks. “New girl! It’s…Kara, right?” Ah. So that’s who the lingerer is. “How are you going? Fitting in alright?”
“Ah—yes. Yeah, yes, I am. It’s, um, well,” Cat can hear the tell-tale sound of fidgeting, “it’s a learning experience.”
Cat grins down at her computer. That’s code for floundering if ever she’s heard one. Then, her smile fades when for a moment, this sunshine-clad, sunshine-voiced girl is superimposed with her double, that cold, dark girl crying on her bedroom floor.
Her hands shake and she squeezes them into fists and loosens them slowly, relieved when the warmth rushes back in. Just in her head. Stupid. She frowns at her screen, backspaces a few words she doesn’t remember having written and that have nothing to do with the email she’s trying to craft. Another one for Darren, less harsh but more comprehensive than the last.
She taps at her spacebar, listening to the girl chat with Olsen. She sounds cheerful enough, and genuinely so. Could be an act. Or the crying could have just been from exhaustion. Nothing about it suggested it was Cat’s fault. Her tired mind could have exaggerated the whole thing—it had been dark, and late, and she couldn’t really see Kara’s face.
“Well, hey, it was really nice to meet you, Kara, but I have to run to class. I’ll see you around?”
Looking up just in time to catch the end of their conversation, Cat manages to catch the way James reaches forward, squeezes the girls shoulder. Kassie beams over at the boy and nods quickly, smile so wide her cheeks nearly hide her eyes.
“I’d like that!”
Cat rolls her eyes. She wonders if the poor girl even known that James is taken. From the way she stares after him, Cat guesses not. It’s none of her concern, so Cat returns to her email. Maybe she could make it a little scathing.
“Cat,” Kamille says, and Cat is startled enough by the suddenly firm tone to look up at her. Katie beams, apparently thrilled that this tactic has worked, and it ruins the moment. Cat looks away again. “All your emails are sorted and…” She runs her finger down her notebook, taps the page. “Luke Hampson is late with the public interest article.”
“There’s a surprise.” Cat makes a note on her computer—he’ll be the first one she cuts when it comes to that. “Anything else?”
“I finished my article.”
“Yours?” Cat frowns up at her. “Who are you again?”
“K-Kara? Danvers? I—“ Having learned from the last time she said it, the girl wisely doesn’t mention that they live together. She gapes for a moment, “I, well, I know the job description was communication support but you did say that I could write an article for you?”
“Did I?”
“Yes. Then you told me to go home and milk a cow.”
Cat laughs at that. “Oh yeah, I remember now.” She shrugs and rolls out her shoulders before holding out her hand to Kiera, who blinks at it, confused. “The article, Kristie.”
“It’s Kara, actually,” she tells her, but it’s muttered down into her bag as she searches for the pages. If it’s covered with food or pencil shavings or, god forbid, hand written, Cat is going to throw it straight into the bin with Karla looking on. It isn’t—it’s actually zipped into a pretty neat folder and Cat makes a note to get one for herself. It looks smart and spacious. Unexpected from small-town Katie but appealing nonetheless. She takes the pages handed to her, and puts them down on her desk without looking at them.
Cat returns to her computer. She feels Kara linger for a minute, and then she’s gone.
//
At the end of her very long day—and after an excruciating conversation with Connolly she can barely think about with her head immediately throbbing—she cleans up her desk and readies to head home. The article is still sitting there on her desk and she sighs, yanks open her bottom drawer, and drops it in where it will stay for the foreseeable future with the rest of the stuff she can't be bothered looking at. A broken stapler, a half empty tin of mints, that frayed charger cord she keeps meaning to throw away.
She nudges the drawer closed with her foot and walks away.