Birthday Shift by Desconhecido(a) Page A

of
surprise.
    “You scared me,
baby,” she murmured, leaning down to pet him. He rubbed his soft, silky
forehead into her palm and purred his little feline heart out. Molly melted.
She scooped him up into her arms, cuddling him against the towel. “Hope you
don’t mind that I’m a little damp,” she whispered into the back of his neck.
Cade snuggled, his purring vibrating his long, warm body.
    “Time to call Lil
and thank her,” Molly said, more to herself as she padded bare-footed into her
bedroom.
    The bedroom was
small, but in New York , Molly knew lady luck had
smiled on her to be able to afford a separate bedroom at all. Most of her
friends made do with a studio apartment where a standing Chinese screen
separated the bed from the living area, or a fold-away bed that became a couch
in the day time.
    She set Cade down
and he curled up, green eyes fixed on her.
    Retreating
briefly to the living area to grab her cell phone, Molly padded back into her
bedroom and flopped down on the bed as she dialed. Cade came to lay next to
her, wiggling his warm body in beside her own.
    “Hello?” Lil
answered, on the third ring.
    Molly idly
stroked Cade’s soft as silk fur as she spoke. “Hello stranger! Thank you for my
new friend.”
    “You’re welcome!”
The smile came through in Lil’s voice as she replied. “I’ve always said I’d get
you a man, didn’t I?”
    Molly smiled
wryly. “I suppose Cade’s going to prove more reliable than any man I’ve ever
met.”
    “Well.” Lil’s
tone turned sympathetic. “I sort of wanted you to have someone who’d always be
there when you came home.”
    Molly’s heart
squeezed.
    “So!” Cheerful
again, Lil asked, “Are we going for birthday drinks this week? You should
celebrate. You only get a birthday once a year, you know.”
    “Maybe tomorrow.”
    “Okay. Let me
know. You can’t be a hermit all the time, much as you seem to enjoy it. God! My
animals are driving me insane,” Lil continued, talking about the menagerie of
pets she kept in her sprawling, inherited house in Queens . “I’d better go. It’s feeding
time.”
    Laughing, Molly
hung up. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Lil had given Cade to her from
Lil’s own mini-zoo.
    She put the cell
phone down and, sensing the opportunity, Cade crawled on to her stomach and
began to play with some loose threads on her towel. Molly giggled. “You are so
much fun.”
    As she lay back
and relaxed, thoughts of the day running through her head, Lil’s words came
back to her. A man who’ll be there when
you come home.
    It was certainly
true that Molly’s luck with men seemed to have run out even before she'd
started dating. Peter, her first love, wanted to play the field before settling
into a serious relationship – but told her this only after she found him in an
interesting position with someone else. Tom, a workaholic, had had a more
meaningful relationship with his blackberry than with Molly, but two weeks
after they broke up he promptly got engaged to someone else. Anton, a gorgeous
Albanian, doted on her, but had forbidden her to have any male friends.
    And on it went.
Molly felt sure she could fill an entire book with her disastrous romantic
entanglements.
    So, she’d decided
it was so much easier just not to bother. She relied on herself, and she got
along just fine. No one to break her heart. No one to stand her up. No one who
ranked her second.
    But today, Cade
had made her too happy to dwell on her atrocious romantic history. “Time for
dinner and then a book in bed,” she told the cat, untangling him from her towel
threads. “Mommy needs to get dressed and eat some dinner – and you need feeding,
too, don’t you, baby?”
    Cade sat up on
the bed as Molly hung up her towel and slipped into her favorite at-home
clothes, a pair of satin pajamas which had been last year’s birthday gift to
herself. They’d been worth every cent, although her purse had rolled over and
cried shortly