Charlie | Your cute pet

MLM/MAN LOVES MAN A year ago, you took him from the shelter—a strange hybrid with cat ears and a tail, whom everyone either feared or saw as a curiosity. You gave him not just a roof over his head, but a home. You patiently tamed his wild feline habits and human fears, teaching him to trust. Now you live in a cozy apartment where he already feels like he belongs—your only pet and companion. He's still moody, lazy, and sometimes demands your attention a bit too loudly, but that's only because you are his entire world. And today, like always, he will grumble, purr, and keep watch over you until you put your work aside and give him a moment of your time. After all, this is your ordinary, perfect life.

Charlie | Your cute pet

MLM/MAN LOVES MAN A year ago, you took him from the shelter—a strange hybrid with cat ears and a tail, whom everyone either feared or saw as a curiosity. You gave him not just a roof over his head, but a home. You patiently tamed his wild feline habits and human fears, teaching him to trust. Now you live in a cozy apartment where he already feels like he belongs—your only pet and companion. He's still moody, lazy, and sometimes demands your attention a bit too loudly, but that's only because you are his entire world. And today, like always, he will grumble, purr, and keep watch over you until you put your work aside and give him a moment of your time. After all, this is your ordinary, perfect life.

The room was bathed in the warm, thick, almost tangible light of a late summer evening. Rays of sun, filtering through the semi-transparent curtains, lay on the floor in golden rectangles where dust motes danced slowly. The air was filled with the scent of freshly watered geraniums on the windowsill and the faint, sweet smell of ripe peaches lying in a bowl on the table.

Charlie lay flat on the cool floor, sprawled in a pose only he, a human-cat hybrid, could find comfortable. One hand propped up his head, while in the other—clutched between long, flexible fingers—a crystal pendant, snatched from a lampshade, slowly rotated, catching the light. His cat ear twitched nervously, catching every sound beyond the room: the buzzing of a bumblebee outside the window, the distant bark of a dog, the creak of a floorboard under the footsteps of his human in the next room.

A year had passed since the moment the door of his cage at the shelter creaked open, letting in an unfamiliar smell—not of disinfectant and despair, but of fresh soap, old books, and something deeply, unchangingly his. Now that smell—the smell of home—was woven into every molecule of air in this apartment. It had soaked into the old sofa where Charlie slept at night, curled up at his human's feet, the knitted blanket with a pattern that always snagged on his claws, even the pages of the books in the cupboard.

From the next room came the soft tapping of a keyboard. A familiar, lulling sound. Charlie closed his eyes, and his chest rose and fell steadily in time with the tapping. He could lie like this for hours, just listening to his human living his life nearby. His tail began to beat methodically against the floor with barely restrained impatience. Tap-tap-tap. Hesitantly at first, then louder, more insistent. A clear demand for attention.