The Cat Food

John took the dog. That’s what got April pissed off. John  had been going on “business trips” to Seattle for years. All those years, he was in fact seeing his mistress, this woman who was fifteen years junior, a school teacher, and together they bought and renovated a house, and now John lived there permanently, with April’s dog. Technically it was his dog, but April fed and walked the dog day in and day out. John left the cat Olive, which was technically speaking, hers as well. The big, lazy, black and white cat that often wandered to the neighbor’s yard and ate neighbor’s cat food. The same brand of cat food she put out for Olive. April hated the cat. The cat that ate out of other people’s bowls and slept in her house. April did not understand why the cat liked the neighbor’s food, it was the same brand, and of same taste. Sometimes April would come home late and she’d secretively wish that Olive would vanish, but no, instead, Olive was always yawning, sitting on the porch, waiting for her to pull into the garage when she returned. Olive was always well fed, and well rested. 

April was going to be pulling a late night again. Jack had been taking April to the same spa. It was called “Ocean Breeze Spa and Sauna”, but it’s located nowhere near ocean. Instead it was tucked in a side street in a sleepy residential inland town in Castroville. It was really more like a one hour quick hook up. Each room came with a hot tub, a skylight or a sauna, and a bed with no blankets or pillows. It charged on an hourly basis. Though the sign listed "child rate, $7 / hour", April doubted any child had ever set foot into this place. It cost $39 for two people for an hour. The sign said, "Cash only. We prefer single dollar bills." The rooms had numbers. The casher behind a bullet proof window asked which room they preferred, having guessed they had been there a few times. Then after the cash was paid, and a deposit of $20 or a valid driver's license was left, they were given two white towels and a key.

April had gone to hotels with Jack, or his house, when his wife was out of town; Jack had gone to her house, when her then husband was out of town. He had once left a condom, an open condom on her dresser, which was stupid, because her husband came home the next day and she forgot to remove it. By the time she saw and removed it, she noticed that he had set his car key next to the opened condom pack, but he said nothing. She imagined he saw it but did not nothing. 

Jack was significantly younger, and taller. He was 32. He was a math major in college, but like many college students, he went into software engineering and now worked a start up that focused on food write-up down the street from her. April was a petite and busty, under the right lighting, she could still pass to be a mid thirties woman. The two of them did not exactly started to date at first. They met at a networking event, she ran a non profit organization, and he did coding for a living, and the networking event was to bring people who were working in startups together over wine tasting. She spilled her red wine on his foot, his giant, size 14 and half foot, and they started talking. 

After a few lunches, they went on to have dinners. Eventually dinner became a pretense for getting together so that they could find a place to fuck.

In this spa they did two things: soaking and fucking. He liked to fuck her in the water, and outside of the water, on the bed or in the sauna. She loved anal sex and he would prep for it by licking her ass until she would come, and then he entered her forcefully, and when she cried with joy and pain he would come inside of her. It was their thing. They fucked and kissed and when they parted ways, they acted not like lovers but as friends. 

One year Jack took off for six months to travel the world with his wife. She did not hear from him during the six months, but when he returned, he called her and they were back together again for these meetings.

They never talked about the future. There was none. No one knew that she was seeing a younger man. She thought that it was not kosher among her conservative but caring girlfriends. 

When Jack was traveling the world, April did meet and fall in love with a man named Charlie. Charlie was more age appropriate. April was 45 and Charlie was 48 at the time. He had never been married and was childless. By then John was often gone for weeks at a time, and Jack was half way around the globe, meeting Charlie was a big deal.  Charlie was charismatic and energetic. Within four months of dating, Charlie claimed that he loved her. They had boring vaginal sex, he came in ten minutes, and if he smoked pot, he'd come in twenty minutes. She never orgasmed, but this man got to her heart. They were quite similar. He ran a company like she did, though his was for-profit. They both moved here from Michigan in their early twenties, and they had the same middle class, middle of America childhood. Charlie was into kinky sex, he sailed, and had access to those white nautical ropes. He often tied her up in them as he fucked her. Charlie liked to meet her in fancy hotels. Upon arrival, she was ordered to take off her clothes and he'd put her on a dog collar and leash, she was on her high heels and stockings, and on her knees. She would service him until he was about to come, and at that point she was ushered to the bathtub and he would piss on her until he was drained. Then they'd proceed to have regular missionary sex like the two most normal persons in the world. He would kiss her piss-covered face and tell her that he loved her. She would cry and tell him that she loved him too. Then when it was all over, sometimes they slept in the same bed in the hotels, other times they would go to their respective homes. Charlie had visited her once in her house, when John was away, and she felt uncomfortable about running into neighbors. Since then she stopped inviting Charlie over.

By the time Jack returned from his worldwide trip, her relationship with Charlie was dying down. At first she thought it was just a fluke, a mix-up of scheduling, but it became a pattern.  One day Charlie went on a business trip and said that he'd call, like he always did when he landed at his destination. He never did that time. She called him and he did not call her back. She called again. She tried to text him. She left messages at the hotel. She wrote emails. At first angry but then worrisome emails. She then declared love. And told him that she would do anything to be with him. And nothing. Nothing at all from Charlie.

She finally stopped contacting him. Six months later she got a note from Charlie, he said he had missed her and wanted to see her. Out of curiosity she went to meet him at their usual hotel meet up. She saw him under the broad day light, which was highly unusual - previously they only met up during evenings. Charlie offered no explanation for his absence or his disappearing act. He acted as if they still dated. She wanted to ask him if he got hit by a bus and consequently forgot about the last six months of absolute silence, but instead she just sat there, sipped her cocktail and watched his mouth move.

Charlie looked surprisingly his age: his hair was gray, he had severe bags under his eyes, his faced looked disproportionate wide, his nose appeared to be too large for his otherwise, once upon a time, delicate face, and when he went to the bar to fetch another drink, she noticed that his pants were a little too loose and his butt looked sagging, like all old men’s butts did. She realized that at that moment she no longer loved him. She still wanted to have sex with him, despite all that. She wanted to know if their sex was still appealing to her. So they went from the hotel lobby to his room.

That meeting turned out to be the last time they saw each other. It was also the first time he fucked her in the ass.  Charlie had been wanting to have anal sex with her ever since they met. She did not want to, it felt too intimate physically and she felt that if she gave in, coupled with her emotional dependency on Charlie it would be proven too much for her to handle. She was strangely relieved that he finally got to have her in the most natural way, but at the same time she thought it was the end she was looking for - there was nothing left for her to give.

For a while she thought about writing to him, asking how he was, telling him about her non-profit's progress: they received another round of federal funding, their project won a prestigious San Francisco reward, and her husband John had finally left her: he moved in with his mistress, apparently all those allegedly business trips were in fact him heading to his other home. She was relieved that he had finally left her. The best thing ever happened was that she got to keep their California king size bed. It was a commissioned piece from this local artist in Marin. She loved it and bought a super firm mattress to outfit this gorgeous wooden bed. The one Charlie once slept in with her.

April wanted to tell Charlie, in this note, that John took the dog but she kept the cat. The lonely black and white cat who seemed to be always stealing neighbor's cat food all the time, even though she bought the same brand of cat food for the cat. She attended yoga and sewing classes here and there, and saw this younger man Jack for sex, once in a great while. 

“Oh yes. Have I mentioned to you that I have been seeing Jack for a number of years now? You see, Charlie, you were not the only one I dated.” 

She thought about writing to this man whom she thought she loved once, to shock him with the one last secret she withheld from their relationship, but then again, these were such trivial things. And it would not change a thing. It would not change the fact that she no longer found Charlie attractive, and she no longer loved him. And the note sat in Draft folder, staring at her back each night. For a while she revised the note, over a glass of wine, trying to make it witty or nonchalant, but she could never get just the right tone. So she tried again by writing a new one, but she failed again. Eventually she stopped her revisions, and one day she forgot about those draft notes. 

After Ocean Breeze, April often took Jack to a nearby Ethiopian restaurant for dinner. One year when she was working in Ethiopia, she ate nothing but wat and injera for two weeks straight, Then she missed cheese burgers. She missed it terribly, and French fries. You didn’t know what you had until you were deprived of it. Jack was an adventurous foodie, and it reminded her of how she once was when she was his age. As he stuffed his mouth with injera, scooped up with his hand, she would graciously sip her tea and tell him how much she enjoyed him licking her ass before he penetrated her. Then she'd move onto other course of business, like how her staff was being difficult and one gal had to leave every day at 5:15 to pick up her young daughter from the day care. What had the world become to? Why did they get to feel so entitled about child care when back in the day she did whatever she could for her job, and sacrificed her family life for her career? 

Jack would then tell her that he loved fingering her to orgasm and eating her out before sticking his equipment inside of her ass, and then he'd complain about his job, "Too mundane, lack of excitement and too predictable. When is our IPO anyway? I want to leave but I don’t want to lose my stock options.” He would say. Jack and his wife had been trying for a baby for a year. He wanted a kid but not that much. He concluded the conversation by complimenting her skin. She had the after glow. She smiled and wiped her lips with the edge of the white dinner napkin. 

Next week April would be traveling to Washington D.C. There was a very good Ethiopian restaurant near the DuPont Circle, she said. April wished that Jack could come with on one of her trips. She could show him D.C. and they could then take a train to Philly, where she often visited when she was still with that Charlie, the age-appropriate man. Charlie had an office on Arch street in downtown Philly. She would often meet up with him in his hotel when he traveled there. But she did not mention that to her young lover in the end.

Jack was born to a Scandinavia father and a German mother. His father grew up in Mariefred, just outside of Stockholm, while his mother grew up in Berlin. He had visited his mother and father's homelands but had never traveled to the east coast. It would be a fun trip if one day Jack could get away. April thought.

They parted ways via separate cars. He texted his wife to tell her that he was finally done with work, and she had to go home to see Olive. The black and white cat who often stole neighbor’s cat food, The lazy cat, who wandered in and out of the house, who always laid on the porch waiting for her return, no matter how late she would be.

When April arrived home she found invitation from Charlie’s office. It was a card that announced an upcoming funeral. Charlie had died. He died apparently due to a sudden brain aneurysm at work. He was survived, the card said, by his wife Lucy, and children Luke and Liam. 

That evening she opened her Draft folder of the emails. There were six edited versions of the unsent notes to Charlie. Olive had wandered into kitchen where she had been sitting, staring at the monitor. Olive took a few bite of the food in the bowl  and then she jumped onto April’s lap and rested her heavy head on April’s thighs. April scratched the bottom of Olive's furry chin as she read and reread the notes that intended for Charlie.

For the first time April felt a strange kinship with Olive. She finally understood why Olive ate the same kind of cat food from the neighbor’s bowl. It was not that the food was different, it was that it belonged to the neighbor.