Chapter Text
There were a lot of reasons Branch worked from home, and on better days he could even arrange them into something that sounded respectable, like flexibility and autonomy and the freedom to choose his own hours, which was technically true if a person ignored the uglier reality that freelance editing mostly meant answering emails at strange times, chasing invoices with all the dignity of a man shaking a cup for spare change, and trying to claw his way into an industry that liked to dress ordinary nonsense in expensive words. It was supposed to be temporary, a bridge job, the sensible thing he did while he built the kind of portfolio that might one day let him publish something of his own without feeling like a fraud in nice shoes, but temporary had a talent for stretching until it started to look suspiciously permanent, and lately he’d found himself spending more and more of his time elbow-deep in other people’s messy prose while his own poems sat half-finished in notebooks, quietly judging him from across the room.
Usually, he could live with that. Usually, he could shut his bedroom door, put on headphones, and pretend the rest of the apartment wasn’t happening.
Today, unfortunately, the apartment was happening with the full force of an active catastrophe and absolutely none of the courtesy to kill him quickly.
He sat hunched over his laptop at the small desk jammed into the corner of his room, staring at a paragraph that had somehow become less coherent each time he read it, which was impressive in its own hostile little way. The man who had written the essay seemed to believe commas were a kind of personal weakness, and Branch was three passes deep into trying to rescue six thousand words from drowning in their own ambition when Floyd started playing guitar through the wall again. The first few notes were soft, then steadier, then came the same melancholy progression Floyd had been turning over for the better part of an hour, and that alone would have been annoying enough if Floyd had the decency to be mediocre, but of course he didn’t, because life rarely missed an opportunity to be irritating in layers. Even muffled through drywall, Floyd sounded good. Beautiful, actually, in that quiet, accidental way that made it impossible to resent him properly.
From somewhere deeper in the apartment, Bruce’s voice rose above the music, warm and booming and much too loud for the actual distance involved, which meant he was on the phone with Brandy and wedding planning had once again consumed the household like an invasive species. Every few seconds, Branch caught fragments drifting down the hall, things like seating charts and centerpieces, and no, babe, I’m not saying driftwood is tacky, I’m saying it depends on the driftwood, which was enough to make him pinch the bridge of his nose and wonder if a person could die from secondhand wedding logistics.
Clay was probably at the kitchen table because he was always at the kitchen table when he had work to do, sitting there in one of his infuriatingly composed postures as if chaos simply passed around him out of professional courtesy.
John Dory, meanwhile, was in the living room, and Branch knew that not because he could see him but because John Dory’s voice was carrying through the apartment with its usual subtlety, booming something at the television, or a podcast, or Bruce, or God. The target didn’t especially matter. John Dory could turn mild preference into a public address.
Then Rhonda barked, loud and sharp and somehow damp around the edges, followed by the scrape of claws on hardwood and the unmistakable thump of her hauling her entire spotted body onto the couch with all the grace of a wrecking ball learning to love.
Branch closed his eyes.
He counted to five.
At six, John Dory shouted, “She can have the whole couch if she wants; she pays rent in love.”
“Dogs don’t pay rent,” Clay said, his dry voice cutting cleanly through the noise in a way that suggested he was either still working or had simply achieved spiritual enlightenment and no longer feared anything.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” John Dory shot back. “Rhonda contributes emotionally.”
Another bark rang out, smug enough that Branch briefly suspected the dog knew exactly what was being said about her and had decided to become even more insufferable on principle.
He stared at the paragraph on his screen a moment longer, willing himself into patience, into discipline, into professionalism, into anything useful at all. The cursor blinked. Floyd’s guitar swelled. Bruce laughed somewhere in the kitchen, rich and easy, probably because Brandy had said something that made him grin like an idiot. Rhonda barked again. The television flared with crowd noise. John Dory responded as though personally invited onto the field. Branch read the same sentence three times and retained absolutely none of it.
That did it.
He shoved back from the desk, tugged off his headphones, and opened his bedroom door to the full spectacle of the Hawthorne family habitat in all its overstimulating glory.
The apartment smelled like coffee gone cold, dog fur, somebody’s abandoned takeout, and the citrus cleaner Bruce had started buying in bulk ever since Brandy began spending enough time there to politely notice the place looked like four men had been raised by weather. It helped, in theory. In practice, it mostly meant the apartment now smelled like clutter with ambitions. The living room was a masterpiece of domestic surrender, the sectional half-buried beneath a landslide of throw blankets, game controllers, mail, a basket of unfolded laundry that had apparently given up and become part of the furniture, and Rhonda herself, sprawled across the middle cushions on her back like a Roman empress at rest. She was white with brown patches, one dramatic spot over one eye, broad-chested and heavy, and completely convinced the couch had been built as a throne in her honor. John Dory occupied the narrow strip of cushion left beside her, one arm wrapped protectively over her stomach while the other gestured wildly at the television, his green-tinted goggles shoved up into his hair and his expression wearing that familiar look of complete investment in something objectively ridiculous.
Bruce stood in the kitchen doorway with his phone wedged between his ear and shoulder, his shirt half-open over a tank top, hair pushed back, wedding binders and magazines spread across the counter behind him like he and Brandy were planning a diplomatic summit instead of a perfectly normal wedding between two people who had, for reasons beyond Branch’s understanding, managed to have multiple conversations about napkin color.
Clay sat at the kitchen table in a neutral sweater, laptop open, one elbow braced on the wood, looking so calm in the middle of the mess that he might as well have been meditating in the eye of a storm.
Floyd drifted out from the hallway just then with his magenta hair hanging over one eye and a guitar pick tucked behind one ear, all soft edges and sad-song energy, which would have been insufferable if he weren’t also one of the sweetest people Branch knew.
Floyd took one look at him and said, “You look homicidal.”
“I’m trying not to be dramatic about it,” Branch muttered.
“By glaring at the walls like they insulted your grandmother?”
“That’s my process.”
Clay glanced up. “Didn’t you say you had a deadline today?”
“I do.”
John Dory snorted from the couch as if this were somehow hilarious. “Then stop lurking and go be literary.”
“I was being literary,” Branch said. “Then civilization happened around me.”
Bruce covered the mouthpiece of his phone and grinned with the useless warmth of a man who would absolutely make this worse for sport. “Come work at the restaurant.”
“So I can line edit a manuscript while you scream about seafood in the background?”
“Cod on Fridays,” Bruce said automatically, like that clarified anything.
“See, that sentence alone is why I’m leaving.” Branch quipped with an eye roll. Rhonda rolled her head toward him at the word leaving, her tail thumping once against the couch cushion with lazy betrayal. Branch pointed at her. “Don’t act like you’re on my side. You took my seat.”
John Dory clutched her like a grieving widow in a stage melodrama. “She has a name, Branch, and she’s sensitive.”
Rhonda sneezed directly into his face.
Clay didn’t even blink. “Accountability comes for us all.”
That, more than anything, nearly did him in.
It would’ve been easier, probably, if he hated them. Not enough to mean it, not in any real way, but enough to simplify things, enough to make the apartment feel like an easy thing to resent instead of what it actually was, which was love with no concept of volume control, affection expressed through arguments and shared groceries and somebody always remembering the coffee filters and somebody else always forgetting their laundry in the machine. They drove him insane. They made concentration feel like an abstract theory. They turned every room into a communal event, whether anyone wanted one or not. And still, beneath all the shouting and barking and wedding clutter and Floyd’s guitar and Clay’s impossible composure, this place held the shape of something stubborn and loyal and alive. It was just that, at ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning, while he was trying to save a stranger’s essay from itself and maybe scrape one inch closer to the life he actually wanted, it was also the absolute worst possible environment in which to be conscious.
He went back into his room, stared at his laptop bag for a beat, and packed with the clipped, irritated efficiency of a man refusing to call his own retreat what it was. Computer, charger, notebook. The notebook last, because even when he was pretending not to write anything that mattered, he never really went anywhere without it.
From the kitchen, Bruce laughed again, warm and bright. Floyd started singing under his breath. John Dory made some scandalized noise at the television. Rhonda barked in solidarity with whatever crime had just been committed onscreen. The apartment creaked and breathed and shifted around him, full of too many people and too much noise and more love than any one space really knew how to hold, and Branch had the abrupt, uncharitable thought that if he didn’t leave in the next minute, he was going to end up writing nothing at all except maybe a poem about death by brotherhood.
He slung the bag over his shoulder and stepped back into the living room, where four heads turned toward him with varying levels of curiosity.
“Where’re you going?” Bruce asked.
“Somewhere quieter.”
John Dory looked around as if genuinely confused by the idea that such a place existed. “What, you got a secret library bunker nobody told me about?”
“If I did,” Branch said, reaching into the bowl by the door for his keys, “I definitely wouldn’t tell you.”
“Rude,” Floyd said, though he looked entertained.
“Bring me back something sugary,” Bruce called.
“Don’t encourage his escapism,” John Dory said. “That’s how they get you. First it’s coffee shops, then it’s artisanal soap and opinions about jazz.”
Clay, blessedly, just lifted two fingers in a small salute. “Good luck.”
Branch gave him a look that hopefully conveyed both gratitude and the certainty that luck had abandoned this family years ago, then opened the front door and stepped out into the hallway, where the sudden relative quiet hit him like cold water. For one brief, glorious second, all he could hear was the dull hum of the building and his own breathing, and the silence was so clean it felt almost holy.
The town was too bright for the mood he was in, all clean spring light and lake air and people moving around like they had nowhere more important to be, which was offensive on principle when Branch had spent the better part of the morning being held hostage by a syntactically confused essay and John Dory’s voice ricocheting through the apartment like a home invasion. He took the sidewalk with his laptop bag thumping against his hip and his hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket, jaw set, eyes narrowed against the glare bouncing off windshields and shop windows, trying to decide where exactly a person went when he needed coffee, an outlet, and at least a fighting chance at silence.
The answer, as it turned out, was apparently nowhere useful, because the first café he passed had all its outside tables full of retirees conducting what looked like a highly competitive group gossip, and the second had the kind of aggressively industrial aesthetic that usually translated to music loud enough to sand the bark off a tree, and by the time he got halfway down the next block he was already entertaining the idea of editing in his car like some kind of literary raccoon.
Which was how he found himself standing across the street from Catpuccino.
He’d seen it before, obviously. It was hard not to. The sign alone had enough personality to qualify as a civic event, with all-looping cheerful lettering, a paw print worked into the design, and flower boxes under the windows that changed with the season, because apparently even the building itself had more follow-through than most people. The exterior was done up in soft, warm tones that should have been too cute to tolerate and somehow weren’t, not exactly, especially with the sunlight slanting across the brick and catching on the glass in a way that made the whole place look less like a business and more like a very determined attempt to improve everyone’s day, whether they’d asked for it or not.
Through the wide front windows, he could see movement inside, blurred shapes of people and warm light, and, farther back, the unmistakable silhouette of climbing shelves fixed to a wall behind a glass partition. Cats. Of course, there were cats. There had better be, with a name like that. If he went in and discovered the place was using feline imagery as a cheap branding tactic without producing any actual cats, there was every chance he’d become the sort of man who started problems before noon.
He stood there a little too long, staring at the sign like it had personally insulted him.
Catpuccino.
Jesus Christ.
It sounded like the sort of name a person came up with during an ill-advised sugar high and then kept because nobody loved them enough to intervene. It was ridiculous. It was adorable in a way he deeply resented. It practically promised pastel menus and whipped cream in forms nature had never intended. And still, beneath the faintly embarrassing amount of charm the place was radiating, there was coffee, and there were cats, and from where he stood he could tell the inside held that soft amber kind of light that made a room look warmer than the day outside, which was a dangerous thing to notice in his current state because he was tired, and irritated, and carrying a notebook full of poems he hadn’t had the nerve to do anything serious with, and there were some moods in which a person ought not to walk into a place this openly built around comfort unless he was prepared to be emotionally inconvenienced by it.
He wasn’t. That was the problem.
The smarter choice, if he were someone committed to making smart choices, would probably have been to keep walking, find some anonymous coffee chain with bad lighting and no personality, order something bitter, and spend three hours pretending he didn’t feel vaguely hollowed out by the slow grind of trying to make a life out of work that was never supposed to be the life itself. But the chain places would be crowded, and loud, and full of people taking business calls in voices too cheerful to trust, and the truth was that he liked coffee more than he admitted, liked the smell of it and the ritual of it and the way the first sip sometimes felt like the only thing standing between him and becoming deeply unpleasant in public, and he liked cats with the kind of immediate, wordless certainty that had followed him his whole life.
Cats made sense. They liked the quiet. They respected boundaries. They weren’t emotionally manipulative in the revoltingly sincere way dogs were. They didn’t look at you like you were the center of the universe just because you happened to exist in the same room holding snacks. A cat’s affection actually meant something. It had standards.
Which, really, should have made Catpuccino less of a crisis than it somehow was.
He crossed the street anyway, because reluctance was not, in the end, an actual obstacle when the alternatives were worse, and as he got closer the details sharpened into focus one by one, the chalkboard sign outside propped neatly by the door with some kind of handwritten pun about espresso that made him roll his eyes on sight, the flower boxes under the windows spilling color in a way that looked more curated than accidental, the faint decal of paw prints near the bottom of the glass, and just beyond it all the promise of warm air and coffee and a room that did not currently contain John Dory explaining Rhonda’s emotional contributions to the household economy.
The door itself had a little bell above it, which felt threatening in its own whimsical way, and through the pane of glass he could make out a front counter of warm wood, little café tables, and the soft shifting movement of cats in the lounge beyond, visible through a full interior glass wall that let the animals lounge like tiny celebrities on display while customers drank lattes and presumably lost all control of their spending habits.
He stopped with his hand hovering near the door handle and had the brief, absurd thought that he could still leave, that he could turn around right now and tell himself he’d only been curious, that there was dignity in walking away from a place named Catpuccino before it had the chance to do anything to him. Then he caught the smell, even through the seam of the door when someone stepped out ahead of him, warm espresso and vanilla and sugar and clean air with that faint soft undertone of cat fur that made something in his chest loosen before he could stop it, and from somewhere inside came the low murmur of conversation, the quiet clink of ceramic, and a laugh bright enough to carry all the way to the sidewalk.
Well.
That was probably a bad sign.
Branch tightened his grip on his bag strap, flattened his expression into something neutral enough to pass for functional, and pulled the door open.