A Cat Called Cupid: A Romantic Comedy Novella Read Online Free Page A

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    It is my theory that Cat Hater had realized that getting take-out every night quickly adds up. Either that, or he’d run out of clean socks.
    Whatever the real reason, it was not the one he gave. I sat on the back of the couch and peeked over Ann’s shoulder as the revolting volley of messages came through.  I won’t subject you to a play-by-play, but I will reveal that there were a lot of PLZs and U NO I LUV U BABYs. Why the human male persists in the belief that comparing a fully grown woman to a puking, crying, pooping, newly-minted juvenile is an appropriate term of endearment, I’ll never know. 
    Against all expectations—and reason—My Lady took him back. Within the hour, Cat Hater was back in his customary spot on the sofa. He arrived without dirty laundry, however. I suppose even the dimmest of human males knows when not to push his luck.
    Later that evening, there was a conjugal retreat to the bedroom, and Cat Hater left his phone sitting unguarded on the couch.
    I took th is opportunity to resume my survey of Cat Hater’s text messages.
    This time, tucked in amongst a lot of idiotic back and forth about football between Cat Hater and some guy named Rory, I struck gold.
    There was another woman. Her name was Vanessa. It appeared that Cat Hater and Vanessa had met online, and although their relationship had not yet progressed to the actual meeting stage, this Vanessa and Cat Hater had been communicating almost daily for months. In almost every instance, the tenor of their texts soon degenerated into the obscene. Some of the indecent suggestions Vanessa put forward would have been enough to make a feral feline with twenty-two litters of unknown patriarchal parentage blush from tail-tip to whisker.
    I finally had concrete evidence of what I’d suspected all along. Cat Hater was cheating, or close enough. Unfortunately, being in possession of this incriminating information did me no good unless I could figure out a way to use it against him.
    I could hear things winding down in the bedroom , so I hastily signed off and knocked the phone into a little crevice between the seat cushion and the arm of the couch. I then curled up over the crevice and pretended to be asleep. I wanted to see how Cat Hater would react to finding that his phone had gone missing.
    He didn’t react well.
    “I’m sure it will turn up,” Ann said, but Cat Hater went on a rampage. He looked under the magazines on the coffee table. He checked to see if it had slid under the couch. He even took off most of the cushions and checked beneath them. I hissed at him when he tried to dislodge me, so he skipped the one I was lying on. In the end, he had to go home bereft of his phone. You’d think he had lost an arm, the way he carried on about it.  
    After Cat Hater went off in a huff, Ann went to bed. I waited an hour and then extricated Cat Hater’s phone from its hiding place. I signed in.
    Now came the challenge. As you might imagine, it’s very difficult to text without fingers, but eventually I managed to tap out a message with my nose which did the trick. There were a lot of missing and extra letters, and it’s a testament to Cat Hater’s lack of literacy that Vanessa didn’t catch on that she wasn’t communicating with the real thing.
    Shortly before one in the morning, My Lady’s doorbell rang. Ann emerged from her bedroom, tousled and sleepy-eyed. She didn’t bother to turn the light on.
    The doorbell rang again. Ann peaked through the keyhole, but she didn’t answer. The ringing turned to knocking, and then a woman’s voice said, “I know you’re in there, Jimmy!”
    The name of Jimmy worked better than Open Sesame. Ann had the door open in a flash.
    “Who are you?” Ann demanded.
    “I’m looking for Jimmy.”
    “You said that already. Who are you?”
    “Who are you?” the doorbell ringer echoed back.
    “I live here ,” said Ann.
    “Isn’t this Jimmy’s place?”
    “No. I mean he’s here a lot,