Chapter 16: Corbin - Purrfect Valentine

The ring on Andi’s finger caught the café’s fairy lights and threw fractured rainbows across the counter. It was the same ring I’d picked out six months ago. A princess-cut diamond on a platinum band, classic and elegant, because Andi hated anything “too trendy.” I’d spent four hours at the jewelry store, wiping my sweating palms on my jeans, convincing myself she’d say yes.

She hadn’t said yes. She’d said, “I need time to think.”

But she’d taken the ring anyway. Three weeks later, she’d texted me that she needed space to figure things out. Time to think. And not long after that came the text where she broke up with me.

And shit, now she stood in Cupid’s Cat Café with that ring on her finger, talking about how she’d come to bring me home, and I couldn’t remember how to form words.

Ally was gone. She’d walked out thirty seconds ago, shoulders straight, a painful smile on her face, and I’d let her go. I’d stood here with my mouth full of words I couldn’t get out and watched the door swing shut behind her.

“Well.” Andi’s voice cut through the fog. “Are you ready to go? Where have you been staying? You weren’t at the inn.”

I blinked. Tried to remember how to move. My feet felt bolted to the floor.

“Corbin?” Andi wrinkled her nose, scanning the café. “Can we go, please? This place smells like cat.”

“It’s a cat café,” I said, focus blurring as I stared at nothing in particular.

“Obviously.” Andi brushed at her sleeve, though nothing had touched it. Cupid, who’d been watching from the counter, stretched and fixed her with an unimpressed stare. “Why would anyone voluntarily drink coffee while animals shed into their cup? It’s unsanitary,” she muttered, her arm linking through mine. “Let’s go before I get fleas.”

“They don’t have fleas. The elevation is too high for them to live,” Wim said from behind the counter, her voice steely. Bev looked like she was calculating how much bleach it would take to dissolve a body.

“Babe, can we please go?” Andi’s fingers wrapped around my bicep. “I’ve been driving for hours. The least you could do is take me somewhere that doesn’t reek of litter box.”

“Sorry.” The word fell out before I could catch it. “Yeah. Sorry.” My shoulders hunched.

Andi surveyed the café one more time, lip curling. “Why exactly have you been hiding out here?”

“I haven’t been—I told you my car⁠—”

“Could’ve gotten an Uber.” One eyebrow climbed toward her hairline. “Your car broke down. Fine. But you could’ve rented one. Called a rideshare. Done literally anything other than play small-town hermit.”

“There’s no rideshare here. And I tried calling you.” I tried—and failed—to hold back the bitter tone in my voice. “When I first got stuck. I called every day for a week.”

“I know.” She examined her manicure. “I was busy.”

“You were ignoring me.”

“I told you I needed space.”

“No,” I unhooked my arm from hers. “You texted me and told me it was over. Then you didn’t respond to any of my calls or texts.”

“I know.” She wrinkled her nose when Aphrodite, the Siamese, wound around Andi’s ankles. Andi’s whole body went rigid, and she nudged the cat away with the toe of her heel—not quite a kick, but close enough that Bev made a sound like a pressure cooker about to blow.

“Anyway.” Andi smoothed her coat. “We should go. Tonight, preferably. Get you back to civilization.”

“I can’t leave tonight.”

“Why not?”

I hesitated. Muffy was back at Ally’s place, waiting for me to bring her in for her daily shot. Her treatment wasn’t finished. And Ally⁠—

“The kitten,” I said. “She needs⁠—”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Andi’s voice flattened. “How many times do I have to tell you, babe. You’re allergic. A cat is not a good reason to stay here. I’m sure it’ll be fine wherever you found it.”

“Her. Her name is Muffy.”

“You named it.” She laughed, and I tightened my hold on the bag of pastries I’d brought for Ally to take to work for her and the vet techs. “You’ve had it for, what, a few weeks? And you’ve already named it? Babe, that’s kind of sad.”

I didn’t respond. My shoulders were creeping toward my ears again, and I forced them down.

“Let me guess,” she continued. “You’ve been playing house with it.”

“She was dying. I found her on the side of the road.”

“And you should’ve left her there.” Andi held up a hand before I could respond. “I’m not being cruel. I’m being practical. You don’t have a job. You don’t have income. And that means you certainly don’t have the resources to care for it.”

“Her. Care for her, Andi. It’s not that hard.” My jaw tightened. “Ally has been⁠—”

“Ally?”

“The vet.”

Andi crossed her arms over her chest, her eyes narrowing. “What about her?”

“She’s been treating her for this sickness. Muffy’s really sick, and Ally has been helping her get better.”

“Why?”

I frowned. “What?”

“Is Ally treating it out of the goodness of her heart?” Andi scowled at me. “Or treating it because she’s sleeping with you?”

“What the fuck, Andi? I’m paying for Muffy’s treatment. With money. I have a savings account, you know.” I didn’t mention that those funds were seriously dwindling, or that I was supposed to spend today applying for jobs. I also didn’t mention that all the jobs I planned to apply for were remote because I’d been planning to stay. At least until Muffy was done with her shots.

When I noticed Bev and Wim staring at us, not trying to hide their eavesdropping, I pulled Andi over to the corner near the cat tree. “Please don’t cause a scene.”

“What do you care? You’re not going to see these people ever again.”

“Andi—”

“Leave the cat here. Let the café ladies deal with it.” She waved a dismissive hand toward Bev and Wim. “Or drop it back where you found it. It’s not your responsibility, and it’s certainly not coming home with us.”

Something in my chest went tight. Drop her back. On the side of the road. Where she’d been dying.

But I didn’t argue.

Andi was overwhelmed. I had been too when I’d first arrived. I’d been rude and short-tempered. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. Hell, she’d driven for hours to come see me. She didn’t understand this place yet—the way I hadn’t understood it when I’d stumbled in, angry and freezing and determined to hate everything about it.

She’d come around. She’d see.

“Look.” Her voice softened, and she stepped closer, running her hand down my arm. It felt familiar, and I took a deep breath. “I know things have been hard with the job, and us, and then your car. I know you’re scared and lost and grabbing onto whatever feels stable.” She gestured at the café, the cats, the pastel hearts in the windows. “But this isn’t real life. This is a vacation from real life. And eventually, vacations end.”

I said nothing.

“We’ve done this before,” she continued. “You spiral, I give you space, you figure it out, we move forward. That’s how we work. And now we can do it together, as husband and wife. Babe,” she offered me a small smile. “I want to marry you. I thought about it, and I want you. You’re good for me. Soften the edges and all that shit. Corbin, I love you.”

For the second time that day, I choked on words. “I—I need t-to take Muffy to the clinic,” I said, stepping back. “For her shot.”

Andi’s mouth thinned. “Fine. I’ll wait at that wine bar I saw when I drove in.” She pulled out her phone, already dismissing me. “Don’t take too long.”

The drive to Heart & Paws felt like my Mustang was filled with water and I was drowning. Muffy lay tucked inside my jacket, her small body warm against my chest. She’d screamed when I picked her up from Ally’s place—not in pain, but in greeting. I had decided a while ago that she didn’t have a low volume. She was loud. All the time. And she talked back to me when I spoke to her.

Leave the cat here. Drop it back where you found it.

Fuck that.

Muffy purred against my sternum, completely unaware that her future was being debated by people who’d never earned her trust.

The clinic’s waiting room was quiet. A couple with a nervous beagle. An older man with a cat carrier. The familiar smell of clean floors and antiseptic.

Denise looked up from the front desk, and her expression shifted when she saw me. Not hostile, but not warm either.

“Mr. Wright. Here for Muffy’s shot?”

“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Is Ally available? I need to talk to her.”

Something flickered across Denise’s face. She knew. Of course she knew. God, what state had Ally been in when she’d arrived?

“She’s finishing with a patient. Take a seat.”

I sat. Muffy squirmed inside my jacket, poking her head out to survey the room.

Then Ally appeared in the doorway.

She looked exhausted. Hair escaping from its clip, scrubs wrinkled, shadows under her eyes. But when her gaze landed on me, the noise in my head went quiet.

“Corbin.” Her voice was carefully neutral. “Denise said you were here for Muffy’s shot?”

“Yeah.”

She nodded once. “Exam room 2, please. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Exam room 2 was small. White walls, stainless steel table. A poster on the wall showed a cartoon cat with speech bubbles explaining the signs of feline stress.

I set Muffy on the exam table, and she immediately tried to climb back up my chest, claws hooking into my shirt.

“Hey.” I caught her, steadying her with both hands. “It’s okay. You’ve done this before.”

She meowed—loud, indignant, betrayed.

“I know. I know.”

The door opened. Ally stepped in carrying a small tray with a syringe, alcohol swabs, and a towel. Her face was blank. She didn’t look at me.

“Normally I have someone help me, but Denise and Margot are busy. Would you help me? Hold her steady, please. I’ll need you to scruff her.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Scruff her. Grab the loose skin at the back of her neck.” Ally set the tray on the counter and pulled on gloves. “The injection site is between her shoulder blades. She’s going to fight it.”

“I usually wait in the⁠—”

“I know.” She still wasn’t looking at me. “But today, you hold her.”

Right. Okay. Ally was pissed. I could take it, as long as she didn’t take it out on my cat. I didn’t think she would, but I still hesitated.

I’d never seen this part. Every day, I’d handed Muffy off at the front desk, sat in the waiting room scrolling my phone, and collected her five minutes later.

Ally drew the medication into the syringe. The liquid was clear, innocuous-looking.

“GS-441 is viscous,” she said, voice clinical. “Remember that it burns going in. She’s going to yowl. She might scratch. Don’t let go.”

My stomach tightened. “Okay.”

“It’s saving her life, even if it is painful.” Ally finally looked at me, and something flickered behind the professional mask.

She swabbed the injection site. Muffy tensed under my hands, ears flattening.

“Hold her.”

I tightened my grip on the scruff, my other hand pressing gently on her hindquarters. She was so small. So fragile. I could feel every ridge of her spine, every rapid beat of her heart against my palm.

Ally inserted the needle.

Muffy screamed and hissed. Her whole body convulsed, claws scrabbling against the steel table, and the vibration of her pain traveled straight through my hands and into my chest.

“Hold her,” Ally said, steady. “Almost done.”

“Jesus—” My voice came out strangled. “Is it supposed to⁠—”

“Yes.”

Muffy thrashed. I held on, but my hands were shaking, and something hot and awful was clawing up my throat. She trusted me. She’d trusted me since day one, climbing into my jacket on that frozen road, purring against my chest like I was the safest place in the world. And now I was pinning her to a table while someone stuck a needle in her spine.

“Done.” Ally withdrew the syringe and pressed a cotton ball to the site. “You can let go.”

I released her scruff. Muffy immediately scrambled toward me, pressing her face into the crook of my elbow, her whole body trembling. She was still making sounds—small, wounded mews that didn’t sound anything like her usual loud demands.

Ally disposed of the needle, stripped off her gloves. “It’s working, in case no one’s told you. I drew her blood yesterday and her white blood cell count has gone up.”

I couldn’t respond. I was staring at Muffy—at this tiny creature I’d carried out of the cold, who’d slept on my chest every night, who yelled at me when I was too slow with her breakfast—and all I could think was: she’s been going through this every single day, and I never knew.

Eighty-four days. That’s what Ally had said at the beginning. Eighty-four daily injections to save her life.

And I’d sat in the waiting room scrolling through job listings while this happened for the first three weeks.

“Corbin.”

I looked up. Ally was watching me, and some of the professional mask had slipped. She looked tired. Sad.

“This is what you chose,” she whispered. “When you decided to treat her instead of—” Ally stopped. Swallowed. “This is what saving her looks like. It’s not pretty. It hurts her. But she’s still here because you made that choice.”

Muffy burrowed deeper into my arms, still trembling. I pulled her against my chest.

“I didn’t know,” I said. “I didn’t know it was like this.”

Ally leaned against the counter, arms crossed. “It was the right decision, but sometimes that’s the hard one. The painful one.”

She wasn’t only talking about Muffy’s FIP anymore. I could tell.

“Ally—”

“Denise also said you wanted to talk to me.” Her voice became careful again. Guarded. “So talk.”

I’d rehearsed this on the drive over. Planned exactly what I’d say—how Andi showing up had caught me off guard, how I hadn’t meant to introduce Ally like she was nobody, how what we had was real and important. I didn’t want to lose it.

But standing across from her now, that steel table between us, watching her watch me with those careful hazel eyes, everything evaporated.

“I like you,” I said. Smooth. Real smooth. “What we have—it’s real to me. It’s not a rebound or a distraction. It matters.”

Ally didn’t move. Her hands remained folded across her chest. “You’re engaged. You didn’t bother to mention that you’d proposed to her. Corbin, that’s kind of a big fucking deal.”

“I’m not engaged.” The words came out sharper than I intended. “She never said yes.”

Ally’s eyebrows rose. “She’s wearing a ring. On her left hand. The engagement finger, Corbin.”

“I know which finger it’s on.” I scrubbed a hand over my face, still holding Muffy against my chest with the other. “And yes, I proposed. But she said she needed time to think. Then she took the ring anyway.”

“She took the ring but didn’t say yes?”

“Yeah. And then she texted me that she needed space to figure things out. That was her answer. Via text. Then she broke things off, again over text.”

“But you proposed.” Ally choked on the words. “Because you love her.”

“I do, I mean, I did. I don’t—I don’t know.” I couldn’t look at her anymore. “When I showed up in Cupid Corner—car broken down, no job, no girlfriend—I wasn’t exactly eager to add ‘rejected proposal’ to the list of ways I’d failed.”

“Corbin—”

“I was already a fucking disaster, Al.” My voice cracked. Muffy stirred against my chest, letting out a small, worried mew. “Unemployed. Stranded. Chasing a woman who’d dumped me via text because I didn’t know what else to do with my life. You want to know why I didn’t mention the proposal? Because I was humiliated.”

I finally looked at her. She hadn’t moved from her spot against the counter, and tears silently rolled down her cheeks. Hell, they might’ve been rolling down mine too.

“It wasn’t just my girlfriend who left me,” I continued, voice cracking. “It was the woman I wanted to spend my life with. The woman I picked out a ring for. The woman I got down on one knee for.” My throat tightened. “And she couldn’t even give me a straight answer. She took the ring and then ended things in a text message, like I wasn’t worth a phone call.”

Ally was quiet for a long moment.

“Why didn’t you tell me later?” Her voice was softer now. “After we started... whatever this is. Why didn’t you tell me then?”

“Because it makes me pathetic.” The admission scraped out of me. “Telling you I had an ex-girlfriend who dumped me is one thing. Telling you I proposed to someone who couldn’t even be bothered to say no to my face?” I shook my head. “That’s a different level of loser.”

“You’re not⁠—”

“I am, though.” I held Muffy tighter, felt her small heart beating against my palm. “I am exactly that pathetic. Hell, I was driving through here to win her back. I was ready to get on my knees and beg. There was a pretty good chance I was going to show up at her door and beg her to reconsider.”

Ally flinched. I couldn’t blame her.

“And now she’s here,” I continued. “Wearing the ring. Saying she wants to try again. And I don’t—” I stopped. Swallowed. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You don’t know what to do.” Ally’s voice had gone flat again. “After everything. After the past two weeks. You don’t know.”

“It’s not that simple.”

Ally shook her head, wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Okay,” she whispered, nodding once with a frown on her face. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“When you leave town, you’ll need to arrange continued GS-441 treatment for Muffy. She still has at least sixty more days of injections. And⁠—”

“Ally—”

“She’s making good progress, and you don’t want to ruin that by⁠—”

“Ally—”

“—Being inconsistent with her shots.” Ally continued to talk over my interruptions. She sniffled, smoothing down her scrubs. “I’ll make sure to document what I’ve done so another vet can pick up from here and⁠—”

“Andi wants me to leave her here.”

The room fell silent, and I waited for the storm to hit.

“What?” Ally whispered, her eyes widening.

“She said—” I swallowed. “She said Muffy’s a burden considering I don’t have a job or an income. That I should leave her here. Or drop her back where I found her.”

“What the actual fuck, Corbin? Drop her back where you found her? Does she know where you found her?” Ally’s voice went up several octaves. “On the side of the road. In the cold. Where she was dying.”

“I didn’t say I agreed.”

“Did you disagree?” A tear slipped down her cheek. She wiped it away and glared at me. “You didn’t, did you?” She shook her head, exasperation written across her face. “Do you roll over and sit like a good boy for her too? ‘Come with me, Corbin.’ ‘Stay with me, Corbin.’ ‘Abandon the innocent kitten who loves you more than life itself, Corbin.’ God, you really are a dick.”

I tried to ignore the sting of her words and opened my mouth to respond, but she kept going.

“I can survive you leaving me, Corbin. I’ve been left before. Men don’t stay. Not for me.” Her voice broke. “But Muffy? She didn’t ask for this. She was dying, and you picked her up. You saved her life. And now you’re standing here telling me you might walk away?”

“I don’t want to walk away.”

“Then don’t.” The words came out ragged. “Stay. Keep her. Choose this. But you have to actually choose.”

Before I could respond—before I could find the words—the door burst open.

Margot stood in the doorway, face pale. “Sorry to interrupt, Dr. V. Emergency. Car versus dog, multiple fractures. Two minutes out.”

Ally transformed. The tears vanished. Her spine straightened.

“Okay. Prep surgery two. Get ready for X-rays and blood typing the second they arrive.”

Margot disappeared. Ally turned back to me, face still wet, but her eyes were already somewhere else.

“I have to go.”

“I know.”

She paused at the door. “If you leave,” she said without looking back, “make arrangements for Muffy. She deserves that much.”

Then she was gone.

I stood alone in the examination room. Muffy stirred against me, pressing her nose into my chest. Trusting. Unaware. She kneaded her tiny paws against my shirt, and settling deeper, and the simple contentment of that gesture, which used to soothe me in some mystical way, now only twisted my stomach into knots.

Andi was waiting for me. My fiancée. That’s what I’d wanted when I’d come to Cupid Corner, but standing there with Muffy, I couldn’t remember why.