Chapter Text
“Oh my god,” Rey breathes. “Stay still.”
She reaches for her phone as the cat—hugely fat and brown and orange and white—settles itself on Ben’s lap.
He stares at it with a look of complete shock and Rey gets a picture of it.
“We’re adopting that one,” she says. “It chose you, Ben.”
They’d been given strict instructions when they’d arrived: they couldn’t pick up the cats, but they could pet them, play with them, and it was fine if the cats climbed on their laps and sat down. Ben had been less engaged with the cats. Boredom, Rey assumed, or perhaps that he was still humoring her about all this.
So he’d sat in a chair and hadn’t moved for forty minutes while Rey had played with as many of the cats in the room as she could.
Which seemed to be a mistake because Porg—as the photoboard told her the cat was called—had decided Ben was a safe human and had deposited himself right on his lap.
“Hi Porg,” Rey says, sitting down on the floor. Porg extends her little face out and sniffs at her nose. Then he chirps at her. “Ben!” she squeals. “Look at her!”
Ben is. His hand is even resting on her back, stroking her absentmindedly. His eyes are on Rey.
Sometimes he gets this look in her eyes. She’s tried describing it to her therapist—the look that makes her feel as though her life can’t be real because no one actually looks at someone else this way.
Ben looks at her like this about twice a week. Sometimes more than that. And every time, it makes her go still.
Porg is purring loudly as Ben strokes her and Rey can’t breathe. Except she can. Breathing’s easier when Ben’s around.
“You like her?” she asks at last.
“Yeah,” he replies. “She’s cute.”
Porg decides to take that moment to meow a little, and stretch, and twist on his lap so that her belly is in the air. Rey scritches it and the purring gets deeper. Porg chirps again.
“Do you want her?” Rey asks, looking up at him.
“Yeah,” he says. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want—”
“Not any cat. Her. It has to be right. She chose you, but if you don’t want her then we don’t get her.”
Ben looks down at the cat, who is now kneading at his jeans happily as Rey scratches her. She’s a big cat, and has been recently spayed, her nipples large enough to tell Rey that she’d had kittens in her past life.
He keeps petting her and she grabs at his hand and starts licking it.
He smiles.
It’s not a big smile, not an all-consuming smile, not the sort that takes her breath away. But it’s soft, and sweet, even when the lick turns to a bite and he has to tug his hand away.
“I like her,” he says. “Probably more than any of the other cats in here. She’s a menace and I have a soft spot for those.”
The shelter agrees to hold her for twenty-four hours while they go and get a carrier, a litter box, some cat food. Ben spends several hours combing through Reddit advice for first time cat owners. And the next morning, bright and early, he and Rey go and pick up Porg.
Porg is just as fat as the day before, and just as chirpy and purry, but the second she’s in the second seat of the car, she starts yowling very unhappily.
“It’s a short hop,” Ben tells the cat as though it can understand him, but that doesn’t stop porg from yowling and yowling and yowling.
She doesn’t stop until they get home, where Ben and Rey let her out of her carrier in the bathroom, closing themselves in with her as she hides under the sink—frightened of her new surroundings.
“You’ll be ok,” Ben tells her as they sit down on the floor, watching her do her best to make herself as small as possible behind the toilet (wider, better for hiding). “I know it’s new. But it’ll be home soon.”
“Remember when you said you didn’t know if you could be nurturing to another living creature?” Rey asks him.
“Yeah.”
“You were fucking wrong about that,” she tells him. Ben looks at the cat, then back at Rey and the weirdest expression crosses his face. He does that thing where he works his jaw, suddenly nervous, suddenly vulnerable and Rey reaches out a hand to grab his.
He looks at Porg again, his eyes bright.
“I really like this cat,” he mutters. “I feel like she’s gonna own my ass.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s what cats do,” Rey says.
“Good preparation,” he says slowly and his eyes look back at hers and her mouth goes dry.
They talked a little more after it happened, but mostly to say no, they weren’t ready, and yes, everything sucked, and they loved each other and they were going to keep loving each other. No timeframes, no expectations.
And she doesn’t really think that time frames or expectations are changing now. But it’s significant, somehow.
One of the things Maz didn’t warn her about was how there would sometimes be things she didn’t need to say. She and Ben had always had a say it, always relationship that the idea that they’d get to a point where they don’t need to say things, they just need to feel them and the other would somehow, know, as if by fate—well, it was a silly idea.
Except it isn’t.
Because she’s sitting on the floor of the bathroom with Ben.
They have a fat cat named Porg who is scared of her new home, but will soon be the queen of it; maybe, just maybe, they’ll build a family together one day—if they both think it’s right, if they both feel ok about it, which feels more possible every day; and they’ve made it through the first year of living together.
It feels like a lifetime.
It feels like no time at all.
They sit there quietly for a while. Rey doesn’t know how long. It doesn’t really matter. They have all the time in the world, really.
Porg makes her way out from behind the toilet. She sniffs at the bathtub before hopping up onto the rim of it and padding around to sniff at the bottles of shampoo and conditioner. She jumps onto the sink, examines herself in the mirror, and then looks down at Ben and chirps.
“What do you want?” he asks her.
She hops down onto the edge of the toilet and extends her face to sniff at him. Then she hops down onto his lap again and starts to purr.
“We have a cat,” Ben says as he pets her.
“We do,” Rey agrees. She scooches over to sit next to him and rests her head on his shoulder and they pet Porg until she decides she’s bored of pets and goes to sniff at the door.
“Ready for your kingdom?” Ben asks, getting to his feet. “Christ, I’m stiff.” He opens the door for the cat. “Just remember, you can always come back in here if you get scared.”
“She can’t understand you, you know.”
“How do you know?” Ben asks. “I think Porg’s very smart.”
Porg meows at the open door and returns to hide behind the toilet and Rey rolls her eyes. “Come on—let’s go. She’ll be safe in there and she’ll come out when she’s ready and this is probably the last time we can have sex without her watching.”