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Caitlin blinks a few times, taking a slow step forward as she approaches the entrance to the building. As she walks past, her eyes carefully follow the small gray ball of fur curled up next to the staircase. She takes another tentative step, knowing that she has to get closer in order to proceed, but now hyper-aware of the possibility that she may wake it.
She was right to be paranoid, because with her next step, the cat’s head sticks up abruptly. It scans its surroundings for a second before locking eyes with her and standing up. It looks as though it’s preparing itself to dart away should it feel the need to. She stands still for a minute, maintaining eye contact with the animal in front of her. She doesn’t even realize that she isn’t blinking until she does and, surprisingly, the cat reacts. Caitlin breaks the concentration she hadn’t even realized she’d been keeping and the animal turns its head, relaxing its posture a bit as it does so.
The cat continues to glance around the area, but now thankfully pays Caitlin no mind as she rushes past it and up the stairs into the building. She hurries down the hallway and knocks on the door to Beck’s office once she reaches it.
“Come in,” he bellows from the other side of the door.
“Beck,” Caitlin hisses loudly as she pokes her head in the doorway. “The cat is back.”
“The gray one?”
“Yes, not many cats hang around the steps of Yale law buildings.”
Beck stands from his desk, walking around it and towards the door. He responds to her snark with a calm huff and a knowing “You don’t know that,” despite the fact that Caitlin does, in fact, know that. It is not a hard piece of knowledge to obtain through observation by any means.
The cat had been wandering around the department nearly every day for weeks a while back, until it had stopped showing up about a week ago. Caitlin wasn’t sure whether to assume that the cat’s owner had found it, or to assume the worst. So the cat’s return posits some good news, as she isn’t sure how much longer her somewhat pessimistic outlook would allow her to continue to believe the former.
Beck stops before he reaches the door and turns towards a pile of junk in the corner of his office. He really needs to clean this place out; she makes a note to pester him about that later sometime in the next few weeks. She watches him pick up a small can from on top of a large box and underneath a stack of papers.
“What’s that?”
“Cat food. I brought it in just before he stopped showing up, planned on leaving it out, but…”
“Where did you get cat food?” she asks, as he joins her at the doorway and they begin to make their way back down the hall.
“Home.”
“Wait.... Beck, do you have a cat?”
“No, I have two cats.”
“How did I not know that? What are their names? I want pictures.”
“One is named Socks,” Beck replies calmly. “The other is named Jason 2.”
“You…. you named your cat after yourself?”
“It’s the sequel,” he grins.
She makes a mental note not to tell Frankie about Jason 2. She knows he’s planning on trying to get a pet next year and as much as she loves him, she doesn’t want him getting any ideas.
They make their way outside as it occurs to Caitlin that Frankie might appreciate hearing about this update on the stray situation. She pulls out her phone to message him as they approach the door.
Law cat is back!
She watches the read receipt show up, and then the bubble that appears as Frankie starts to type.
name it elle woods
Caitlin snorts a little, smiling as she messages back.
Can’t. Elle’s Harvard, this is a Yale cat. It’d be treason :(
“He’s coming over!” Beck says a bit excitedly beside her, the giddy tone coming from his deep voice just a little amusing to hear. She quickly shoves her phone in her pocket and glances up. Sure enough, the cat is slowly starting to approach the can.
“We’re both about to be late for class,” Caitlin remarks a bit more calmly than she expected herself to.
“My students won’t mind,” Beck responds, reaching a hand out and running it down the cat’s spine. “I don’t have a perfect attendance record so far this year, to be honest.” This, she figures, she probably should have assumed, given the amount of times she’d seen him show up late to class with slushies last year. He maintains that this is the fault of the city for having a 7-11 too close to campus, despite the fact that the nearest 7-11 is a ten minute drive from the law school.
“My professor… will mind,” Caitlin says, still remaining in place. Like Beck, she reaches out to pet the cat. A year ago, Caitlin would have been anxious at just the thought of missing a class. But now, she thinks she’s perfectly content showing up a bit late. Ever since the mess this past fall with Russell Library, since her discovery of atypicals and reconnection with Caleb, since she met Frankie, she’s been working on slowing down a bit. Taking the time to appreciate things more, perfect grades and attendance be damned. School is still important, of course, this is her career and her future she’s talking about here. But she’s determined to spend the rest of her senior year actually living, even if it took almost dying in a library to give her the push she needed.
Then again, petting a cat with one of their teachers may not be most people’s idea of an adventure. Still, it’s a lot more exciting than listening to a lecture. “What should we name it?” she asks as the cat moves towards her, brushing the side of its head against her arm.
“Not sure,” he hums.
“What, not looking for a Jason 3?”
He shakes his head. “I’m worried it’ll sacrifice the artistic integrity of the franchise.” Caitlin snorts a bit in response and Beck continues. “We could just keep calling him Law Cat.”
“Law Cat’s got a nice ring to it I guess,” she agrees, reaching out carefully and scooping the cat up in her arms. “Hey LC,” she hums. She pets him and watches him curl up to her. She’d be lying if she said it didn’t catch her off guard. Cats don’t usually like her, and this one was running away from her a few minutes ago.
“He’s so skinny,” she remarks.
She’s not going to pretend this year hasn’t been hard. This year has been a nightmare so far, and it isn’t over yet. But she’s learned how to take time to breathe.
“I think he’s gotta be a stray,” Beck tells her.
Caitlin has always been bad at breathing. All through elementary school her allergies had been so bad that she had had to breathe through her mouth, and that habit had stayed for years afterward. And in middle school, she had started to get anxiety attacks so frequently that she lived in a constant state of never knowing if her next breath would come easy.
There was one summer, the summer after eighth grade, when she felt like her lungs would never quite fill. She barely went outside, barely did anything, she was wasting so much of her energy on trying to catch her breath.
The flow of air through her body was never something that came easy to her. She thinks that may have shaped a lot of who she is, and that hurts to think about just a little. So much time spent gasping for breath, so much time spent fearing that it would be knocked out of her again.
It’s easier now, though.
She has an understanding professor to mentor her, she has a boyfriend who loves her, she has plenty of friends who support her, and now she has a cat. The air moves in and out of her lungs at a pace that she has become accustomed to, with the people in her life all aiding its process in their own measure.
She’s still afraid, of course. The idea of having to gasp like that again is one that terrifies her, but for now she’s content not wallowing in her fear.
She’s content to just breathe while she can.
She takes an inhale and stands, cat still in her arms. “Maybe I’ll take him home,” she considers.
“I don’t think Mr. Hayes would have any complaints with that.”
“No,” she chuckles, “neither do I.”
“Well, you can think on that. Keep me updated. I should go teach my class.”
“You should go do that,” she smiles, rolling her eyes a bit. “See you later.”
She watches him leave and glances down at Law Cat in her arms. She thinks about the class she’s supposed to be at in a few minutes.
She finds a nice spot on the grass to sit back down, setting the cat on the ground and grinning as he walks right back over to her. Class can wait. It’s a nice day out, and she could always use some fresh air.