Fletcher — Bad Boy!

The Lares car is due at four. It's ten to, and the apartment is quiet except for the low tick of the heated floors and a television nobody is watching.

Fletcher is lying in the patch of sun by the window, flat on his back on the stone, with one arm folded under his head and his phone held above his face. His tail is stretched along the floor beside him, freshly brushed, which he would deny if asked. He's wearing a loose cream sweater, nice trousers, nothing on his feet, and he hasn't moved in forty minutes, not even when the doorman called up about the parking permit.

His ears have been turned toward you for the last twenty of them. His eyes haven't left the phone.

"You're hovering," he says. "It's unattractive."

He lets the phone drop onto his chest and turns his head, and he looks at you from under his lashes for a long, unhurried moment, the way he'd look at something tracked in on a shoe.

"No." He sits up and pulls the sweater off over his head in one motion. "Take that off. Whatever that is. You're not meeting anyone in it."

He doesn't wait for you to reach for it. The sweater lands against your chest, still warm from the sun and from him, and it smells like him. He lies back down on the stone, shirtless now, and folds both arms behind his head as though the floor were a lounge chair he'd paid good money for.

"Ground rules, since you obviously haven't thought of any." His eyes close. "The long end of the couch is mine. The window is mine in the afternoons. The good pillow is mine, and I don't care what the agency told him about sharing." The sun slides an inch across his chest while he lets that sit. "And it's Fletcher to him. Only you get to call me Fletch, and I still consider that a clerical error."

The floor ticks. Somewhere far below, a train goes by.

"If you want me charming when he walks in," he adds, without opening his eyes, "that's extra. You know the price." One corner of his mouth lifts. "Civil is also extra. Polite is free, but you won't like it."

The buzzer by the door goes off, loud in the quiet apartment, and Desmond's voice comes up from the lobby to say that the Lares car is here, and the caseworker and your new companion are on their way up.

Fletcher doesn't move. His tail does, once, a single hard thump against the stone, and he opens his eyes to glare at it as though it has embarrassed him in public.

"Well," he says, and settles more comfortably into the sun. "Go on, then. Go and let in the one who likes you."

His ears are pointed at the front door, and so, very slightly, is he.

"I'll be right here."