Lakeside Cougars - The Complete Trilogy, page 37
“Are we?” Edith asked, looking suddenly more anxious.
“It sure seems that way. You sure aren’t hiding the fact that you’re really into me.”
“Am I?” she whispered, looking around.
“Yeah, I’d say he’s right,” Colleen murmured. “Although I don’t think it’s that overt...or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m too taken with you too and I’m just not paying attention.”
“Wouldn’t that be true of him, too?” Edith asked.
“Yes, but I’m the one paying attention to both of you. You have to try and pay attention to me and each other. And it’s not like I think everyone knows we’re, you know, together. I’m more saying this now because I can tell it’s going to get out in the near future if we continue along this path. I also wanted to talk more about the...cadence of our public interactions.”
Colleen smiled. She put her elbows on the table in front of her and laced her fingers together, then rested her chin on them and stared at him. “You have such a nice way with words.”
“So do you.”
She laughed softly. “Thank you...at this point, I’d be comfortable admitting to the media that you and I are an item.”
“Wow. That was fast,” he muttered. “Not that I’m complaining! At all. In any capacity.”
“You won me over very soundly.”
“...wait, really?” he asked.
“Atticus, was that not abundantly clear? You have hooked me. I am addicted. There is a part of me that knows it’s potentially stupid to just throw myself at you like this, but...I don’t care. You just make me feel beyond good, and it’s been so long since I’ve felt like this I genuinely forgot what it was like. And I know it won’t last forever. So I’m going to enjoy it while I can and I’ll deal with whatever fallout there might be later. But something tells me there won’t be any fallout.”
“I hope not.” He looked to Edith. “What are your thoughts?”
“My thoughts…” She hesitated, frowning, looking down at her hands for a moment. “My thoughts are uncertain and complicated. Like always. I know for sure I want this to keep going. And the idea of a relationship...appeals.” She began to say something else, then stopped and shook her head, then refocused intensely on him. “Okay, so, is that really on the table? Like are you actually willing to just abandon your old life, uproot everything, and move here? To date two old women?”
“First of all, you two aren’t old. Second of all, yes, I am.” He paused, feeling some hesitation as he spoke. “I still need to sort some things out, too, but after everything that’s happened, I have to say that a life here in Lakeside with you two, and I mean specifically with the two of you, not just the town, is orders of magnitudes more appealing than my current life. And I don’t think that’s going to change, but I have to be sure.”
“That makes sense,” Edith murmured. “I guess I just still have this fear. Of being found out. That you and I are...enjoying each other’s company. But I don’t really know why. Well, I mean, I’m afraid of people judging me, but I have to admit, that’s getting old. That’s getting really fucking old. And I’m just...I’m so fucking tired of being scared. I hate it.” She straightened up, suddenly resolute. “I don’t want to do it anymore.”
Colleen looked over with intense interest at her best friend. “Truly?”
“Yes,” Edith replied firmly. “It always seems to be just a bunch of worrying over nothing more than half the time anyway...so I don’t care if people know we’re together.”
“We as in…?” Atticus asked.
For a moment, she looked confused, then she looked at Colleen. “Oh...are we?”
“We’re experimenting,” Colleen replied, “and I don’t care if you don’t care.”
She seemed to struggle for a moment, then just nodded. “I want to work some things out and figure out if it’s even going to be a thing that’s sustainable, but I don’t care if anyone knows that, either. That’s what I’m deciding.”
“Good,” Atticus replied.
“And you? I can understand you wanting people to know you’ve got Colleen on your arm, but me?”
“Edith you’re just going to have to accept that you’re really beautiful and that I will be very happy to let people know you and I are an item. But that’s not why I’m doing this. But believe me, you on my arm, as you put it, is unequivocally a fucking win.”
“I see,” she murmured, blushing slightly. She cleared her throat and shifted in her seat. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. So, we’re all agreed that we don’t care if anyone knows we’re all together?” Both women nodded. “Excellent.”
That was when their food came.
There was more to discuss, but from the way they both immediately dug in, Atticus surmised that it could wait, and dug into his own food.
CHAPTER FOUR
“So where are we going now?” Atticus asked.
“We’re going to do the thing that you want to do,” Colleen replied. “Because I want to just kind of sit around and digest for a little bit, and this kills two birds with one stone.”
“You should meet Susan,” Edith said. “She’s probably the sweetest woman in the town.”
“Maybe he should meet her,” Colleen murmured.
“You said that with a tone,” Atticus replied.
“Yeah, you did. What do you have in mind?” Edith asked suspiciously.
Colleen smirked as she turned onto the exit ramp and began to roll them smoothly down it. “I was finding myself thinking that I really like it when I watched Atticus and Kate have sex. And I clearly don’t mind you two doing it. And we’ve already discussed the potential of Atticus sleeping with Vetra, which I am also fine with and actually really, really want to see. So it then must logically follow that I won’t have a problem with it if Atticus sleeps with other women. And I think Susan would be a really great choice.”
“Why?” he asked.
“She’s hot. She’s mature, though not quite as ‘seasoned’ as we are. I think she’s forty this year. She’s really kind and sweet. She’s single. She’s lonely. And I definitely got some ‘bisexual but never actually explored it’ vibes from her the couple of times I’ve been up here.”
“Ah, so you want in on her, too,” Atticus said.
“Duh. She’s really hot. She’s thick. The most amazing hips and ass.”
“She is lonely…” Edith murmured.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. So far, I’ve hooked up with you two and Kate.”
“Oh, so we don’t count?” Colleen asked.
He sighed. “You know that’s not what I mean.”
“I do, but you yourself said you wanted to start a new chapter of confidence out here. Confidence starts in your head. Before anyone else sees you being confident, you need to be confident for yourself. I’m not saying you have to jump her, but...flirt with her. A little. Just a little. See what happens.”
“What do you think, Edith?” he asked.
“Gee, thanks,” Colleen replied.
“Oh come on, is it really unfair of me to ask for more advice?”
“I suppose not.”
“I think Colleen’s right,” Edith said after a moment. “Susan is a cupcake and she is a lonely one. She’s been single for a few years now. She had a really bad breakup.” She paused. “I guess she’s kind of like me. And Colleen too, I suppose. We moved away, our life fell apart, we moved back. And she’ll be just like us if you rail her, too.”
He snorted. “Okay, well...we’ll see what happens. Mostly I want to hang out with cats.”
“You know something that would get on her good side, and also probably make her wet, is if you volunteered to help with the shelter,” Edith said.
“Am I qualified?” he replied.
“Oh yes, it’s easy. We’re kind of desperate up there half the time. We honestly just need someone to come in and scrape catboxes, sweep up cat litter, drive out and buy more supplies and bring it back, help with feeding and watering the cats...what?”
“Just...watering the cats. I immediately got an image of a garden box of flowers, but there’s cat heads on the end. Ignore me.”
“That is kind of funny...but yeah, trust me, Atticus, you can absolutely do the shit we need done most.”
“I mean yeah, I can definitely do catboxes and haul supplies and sweep. I figured it’d be a lot more complicated.”
“The complicated stuff gets handled by people who’ve had training,” Edith replied. “That’s part of the reason we so desperately need help with the easy but labor-or-time-intensive stuff.”
They were coming up on the shelter suddenly. Atticus felt a vague fear stealing over him as Colleen parked in the lot.
“Atticus,” she said as she killed the engine.
“Yeah?”
“Trust yourself. You aren’t perfect, because no one is, but based off all our interactions, you have a very good grasp of how to speak with and treat a woman. Clearly you have good instincts. So trust yourself.”
“I think you’re really biased, because you are insanely horny for me, but that is not bad advice, and I will do my best to listen to it.”
She smiled at him in the rearview. “Good. Now let’s go see cats.”
The three of them got out and began heading for the front entrance. The building was a simple, long structure with a single story of weather-scoured brick. It looked worse than what he recalled. The windows were dirty, one of them was broken and had some cardboard taped over it. The front door looked awful, covered in gouges and scratches, the paint pretty much gone. The yard to either side of the building had trash in it.
They came into a small room that he didn’t remember and wasn’t quite sure of the purpose of. It obviously had one, because it was clear they’d built it themselves. It kind of just seemed like it added a second door to come through for no obvious reason, but as he opened it and a cat darted through the door, he realized abruptly what it was.
An airlock, basically. It was a good way to keep cats from escaping.
“Clover!” Edith growled, leaning down and scooping the cat up. “You know what this gets you!”
Atticus watched in amusement as she flipped the cat over onto its back and cradled it like a baby in her arms. The cat, big and orange, looked annoyed but not particularly upset about the treatment. Clover issued one irritated, halfhearted meow.
“He likes to escape,” she murmured while rocking him back and forth.
“Yes, he does,” a new voice said from the lobby area within.
Although calling it a lobby seemed a little fancy for what was basically a room with a big desk and a row of chairs and nothing else. Except for cats. There were six cats hanging around, some of them looking mildly interested at the new arrivals.
Atticus came in through the second door and got a look at the woman behind the desk.
His first thought was: Please dear God let this be Susan.
Because this woman was indeed very, very attractive.
She was indeed thick. Curvaceous and pale and beautiful. Her chestnut brown hair was pulled into a simple ponytail. Her eyes were deep blue and seemed to pop and sparkle. She was wearing a simple t-shirt and bluejeans, but they looked phenomenal on her. Her lips were thick, her smile was beautiful, and something snapped and sparked between them when their eyes met.
“Hey, Edith...Colleen...who’s this?” she asked, still staring at him.
“Hello, Susan. This is Atticus. He is...our friend. From out of town,” Edith replied.
“And,” Colleen said when that fell flat and no one spoke further as Atticus and Susan continued staring at each other, “he would like a tour of the shelter.”
“I can do that,” Susan replied, a little belatedly. “Um...do you two want help with anything or...?”
“No, go on, this is why we came here. I’ll watch the desk,” Edith replied.
“And I am content to sit down on that couch back there and allow cats to cover me for a little bit,” Colleen said.
“Right. Well...follow me,” she said. She pointed to the door at the back of the room. “That’s the office. It’s, uh, not for the public. Where we do all the boring filing and tax stuff.”
“Always fun,” he murmured.
She laughed and led him towards one of the other two doors left in the room and came to a corridor. Another six doors waited for them, four along the right wall, one at the end, and one more in the left. Susan stepped up to the first door. It was a mostly glass door and he saw about half a dozen cats inside. A red biohazard symbol had been slapped across the glass.
“This is the quarantine room,” she said, her tone darkening a little. “These cats have a transmittable illness.”
“What illness?” he asked, staring in at them as he felt a hard stab of empathy for them.
“Feline Leukemia,” she replied. “It isn’t as bad as it looks. Although it’s not great. They aren’t terminal, but there’s also no cure. The big problem is that it’s very easy to transmit the virus. So they have to be kept away from the other cats. But they have each other, they have the people who visit them, they have a little part of the backyard that’s carefully been cordoned off so they can run around and play outside every day. And, hopefully, kind people will adopt them and take care of them.”
“Hopefully,” he murmured, still staring in at the cats. A couple of them were looking at him and one of them had come up to sit at the glass. “Is it possible to see them? Visit them, I mean?”
“Yes, but you have to take precautions and also you have to leave as soon as you leave the room. Also, don’t worry, it can’t be given to humans. Or any other species. Just cats. So if you do want to see, it can be a final stop before leaving.”
“I definitely want to spend some time with them,” he replied.
They lingered for a few seconds longer, and then she continued the tour. She showed him one room that was dedicated mostly to catboxes and litter and yes, it became immediately obvious that someone needed to help them with it. The second room was a storeroom. The final door on that side let to a penned in backyard area, the door at the end of the hall led to a bathroom, and the final door let into a big, broad room with couches, chairs, tables, boxes, toys, and a fairly impressive, if random, cat tree that stretched across half the inner wall.
Colleen sat on a couch, smiling broadly and looking like a queen of cats. Two were her lap, one lay to either side of her, another was perched on the back of the couch behind her. They were all purring and looked very content.
“This is the cat room,” Susan said. “And that’s basically the tour, except for the outside.”
Atticus took one look around. There were another good dozen cats wandering around or sleeping. Colleen gave him a smile and a somewhat suggestive look. He turned back to Susan. “I’d like to see the backyard.”
“Sure, come on.”
He followed her and tried not to look at her ass.
He failed.
It looked amazing in the jeans she was wearing. The way they sat on her hips, the way they hugged her ass and showcased it, the way her thighs looked like they were in danger of ripping open the fabric. He spent just a moment indulging in fantasies of what she would look like naked, what she might sound like screaming in ecstasy, then pushed the thoughts away.
The backyard area was of a good size and completely penned in with wire mesh affixed to finished logs. There was even mesh over the top, but that made enough sense. Cats were insanely good at jumping. There were more toys out here, a couple of old deck chairs to either side of a battered old table, and a couple of sheltered areas built out of a random assortment of junk.
The shelter had the appearance of a place that was poorly funded, but run by people who genuinely cared and tried hard despite the limited budget.
“So, uh...you’re friends with Edith and Colleen?” Susan asked after a moment.
“Yeah,” he replied, turning his attention back to her. Fuck, every time he looked at her it was like getting slapped in the face with pure attraction. There was just something about her. He nodded his head towards the table and chairs and they sat down. “I’m from a few hours away. I used to come here for summer vacation when I was younger. Stopped coming over a decade ago and finally decided to come back after I managed to see some success in my career.”
“What’s your career?” she asked, leaning forward. God, was her smile inviting.
It was very difficult not to look down, as her shirt had come away from her chest a little bit and he could get a decent view of her cleavage if he wanted to.
He also had the impression that she knew this, and had done it intentionally.
“I make video games. By myself.”
“That...really? How?” she asked.
He chuckled. “Um, a lot of hard work and some talent. I happened to be good enough at programming, art, writing, and sound design just enough to be able to cobble together some games. How about you? What do you do?”
It took her a second to reply, to even register that he’d asked a question because...was she actually enamored of him? Enough that she wasn’t fully paying attention to what he was saying because she was so intensely focused on looking at him? That couldn’t be right, right? Well, he did have the attention of Colleen, Edith, and Kate, so it suddenly felt a lot more possible.
Susan looked vaguely embarrassed. “Oh, you know, nothing worth writing home about.”
“Fair enough...what do you care about?” he asked.
“This,” she replied, looking back to the building. “I mean, other things, too, but this. In my dreams, I have enough money to quit my shitty jobs and just do this job all the time. Which, I know, is really weird, but–”
“That’s not weird, cats are amazing,” he replied.
She paused, then regained her smile. Broader this time. “I agree, and...thanks. But, uh, I mean something would have to change drastically in my life to make that a reality.” Another brief silence descended.
