Then something occurred to me. “I’m going to have to go to the store.”
“Yeah,” he agreed distractedly. “I’m looking up what you need to get rid of the smell of ammonia from the attic. Baking soda seems to be a popular one, but there are sprays with enzyme things in them that do the job as well. If not, you’re probably going to have to—”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I interrupted, frowning at how much work it was going to be on top of what I already had to do. “Okay, I’ll add the sprays and some of those bad smell-absorbing things to the list of stuff I need to get.”
Looking confused, he asked, “What do you need to get at the store?”
“Well, cat stuff. I can’t have a cat without food, a bed, toys, and whatever else they need. Hey, can you look up what cats need online, please? And Doyle’s as grumpy as Pops was, so see if they know what I can get for him. He’s only two and a half, but he acts like he’s ninety.”
“You need to go to the store to get cat shit?” he drawled. “For a feral cat?”
“Stuff,” I corrected, “and he’s hardly feral.”
At that moment, he was purring and rubbing his face on the hoodie as I scratched his stomach.
“Check under his nails, and you’ll find my flesh and blood from where he tried to kill me.”
Rolling my eyes, I made a point of holding a paw and pressing, so the nails came out. Seeing the length of them, though, I winced and let go again.
Probably best not to draw attention to the tiger length talons.
“I need a name for you,” I said, watching him watching me. Were those song lyrics?
“Diablo?” Logan suggested, glaring down at us.
“Bunny?”
“Fuck no. That thing kills those poor animals, you’ll give it blood lust or something. Lucifer?”
“Tinky-wink?”
“Mephistopheles?”
Raising my head, I looked over my shoulder to see him looking at his phone. “What’s that? A flower?”
“Another name for Satan,” he muttered. “Beelzebub?”
“Be serious, will you,” I snapped. “I don’t even know if it’s a him. How do I find that out?”
“I’m being very serious,” he assured me. “Look between its legs. If it has a dick, it’s a boy.”
“Oh, well, I never thought of that,” I said sarcastically but got up onto my knees to look at the area the cat was proudly displaying to the world. “Wow, you’re not bashful, are you? Look at you letting it all sway in the breeze.”
Squinting, I turned my head to the side, then back again. The only one I had as a point of reference was Doyle, and I couldn’t say I’d ever looked closely at his crotch. There were laws against that type of thing, weren’t there?
“Can you look up what a cat penis looks like?”
“Hell no.”
Turning my head to the other side, I made a choice. “I think it’s a boy that’s been neutered. Aw, baby, did somebody do mean things to your poor body?”
The cat meowed and purred even louder, apparently loving the sympathy.
“In that case, I’m going with Prince of Darkness for him,” Logan mumbled. “I’ve got a list of cat shit you need here. You getting a litter tray for it?”
Okay, as a kid, I’d had bunnies, a cockatiel, and I’d babysat a dog for two months for my friend while her parents had to go away on business, and she was staying with her grandma. I’d seen cats, played with cats, even thrown them bits of ham from my sandwich, but I genuinely had no idea what they did or needed.
“What’s that for?”
“For it to shit and piss in.”
Standing up, I turned to look at him, checking to see if his nostrils were flared. I knew his tell—when Logan was lying, his nostrils gave him away. At that moment, they weren’t doing it, though, and that confused me.
“What’s litter? Do I have to go to Home Depot or something?” Wasn’t that the stuff you put down when the roads were icy? Why would a cat need it?
“It’s a thing you put in a tray for a cat so it can go to the bathroom without going outside. You get it from grocery and pet stores.”
Chewing my lip, I thought about it. Could I put up with the smell from the attic in my house?
What Logan said next kind of sealed the deal for me. “If you don’t, you’ll have it pissing on the furniture and curtains while you’re out, or you’ll have to cut a hole in the door to put a cat flap in.”
“I’ll get a litter tray and anything it needs so I don’t have to do any of that.”
I could deal with poop in whatever litter was.
I was so caught up in my thoughts, that I didn’t think about what was going to happen when Doyle met the cat, and just let him in the back door before we left.
The good news was that they obviously knew each other or recognized each other’s scents, because neither of them attacked each other.
The bad news was that they both still hated Logan, so he got corresponding growls and hisses as he walked past them.
What the hell had Pops done to them to make them hate him so much?
Chapter Nine
Logan
It’d been three days since I’d seen Bex, and I was still stuck in the bowels of confusion hell.
I think the biggest problem was that I was scared to say something that’d upset her and make her run away again, and it meant I wasn’t letting myself relax fully around her.
Sure, years had passed, and she’d moved home, but I kept overthinking what I was doing and saying around her. My brain was stuck in eighteen-year-old Logan mode when it came to her, and it was having problems with adult Logan mode. Like the two were clashing.
Why was that a problem? Well, maturity for one. I was a Sheriff’s Deputy now, a
