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“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat. "We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
**
Josie received Leliana’s text the moment she broke out into blinding Brooklyn sunlight.
Running late. Commander on a rampage. Stake out some good pussy for me.
She hid her (slightly scandalized) laugh behind a hand, thumb moving fast over the cracked face of her screen. Tell Cullen he owes me one. I’ll save you a seat. She hesitated over the half-dozen off-color jokes she could make, then sighed and tucked her phone away. Maybe next time.
A steady wind blew, gusting down the avenue. She turned her face instinctively toward its source and breathed deep. The sizzle of the city filled her lungs: hot trash and cooking urine, flowers, the bay, a rooftop barbeque. The subway let out right in the heart of Red Hook, and framed in the distance was Manhattan—like something out of a postcard, the statue rising against shining silver-blue buildings. Josie couldn’t make out the Brooklyn Bridge from this angle, but oh, she could imagine it: cables hanging like strands of Christmas tinsel from sturdy red brick; express trains a flash of color as they trundled through the ruts and grooves; joggers pausing at each crest to admire the challenge they’d overcome.
Her chosen city was so very beautiful from a distance.
Josie’s phone buzzed against her hip, and she fished it out again as she set off toward the waterfront. The café was in a revitalized pier across from the Fairway. Leliana had sworn she couldn’t miss it.
And speaking of Leliana… If I killed him, no law in this land would find me guilty.
She shook her head, glancing up dutifully every few steps to check for foot traffic as she responded: As your future lawyer, I must advise you not to make so bald a confession. Josie hesitated at the next cross-street, toying with what to say next. It would be perfectly in-character to end there, but…
Leliana had mastered the art of wickedly bawdy humor. Josie was the first to admit that she tended to be a little more buttoned up—the perpetual straight man in their duo, for all she’d never much cared for being called the straight anything. But this summer was supposed to be about breaking past those self-imposed barriers, wasn’t it? Shaking loose all the schedules and color-coded binders and self-censorship and caution. And Maker, if she couldn’t manage it over a few texts with her best friend, who could she relax her guard around?
Biting her lip, Josie added an eggplant emoji, followed by a pair of pursed red lips. Weak, but considering who Leliana was sharing a (cramped) council room with at the moment, potentially effective.
The next text came as she was crossing the street, from Cullen this time. Whatever you said to her, I owe you coffee. Then: Of course, you also owe me a new tablet. She spit half a Dr. Pepper on mine.
Josie laughed again, flushed but pleased despite herself. She’d met Cullen and Leliana their first year working as interns at the UN, back when she was still fresh from school and burning with a fire to prove herself. Four years and one tour abroad later, none of them were quite as bright-eyed as they used to be, but they were all three still bound and determined to change the world despite itself—and even more miraculously, they were all still friends.
Tell her she had it coming, Josie texted.
Before she could do more, her phone nearly vibrated out of her hands with a sudden onslaught of heart-eyed cats and winky faces—Leliana, of course—and Josie tucked it away in bemused defeat. Her grin carried her all the way past artistically rustic breweries and graffitied storefronts to Red Hook’s old pier, where a trickle of tourists wandered up and down the waterfront admiring the skyline. Many of the stores were still closed, even after all this time, but a few had been refurbished and refinished, gleaming wood trim a stark contrast to the hurricane-pitted pier. Josie scanned the line of boutiques, spotting another microbrewery, a wine shop, a candlemaker…and a bright yellow sign with a single black paw print.
She drifted closer.
It was set into the same red brick as everything else, but the wooden trim had been painted in beautifully garish colors—bright pinks and purples and turquoise, like the inside of a box of crayons. The door was firmly closed, of course, but she could make out movement through the old leaded windows; even better, she could smell the coffee, even from here. Rich and full and warm, somehow, as it filled her lungs. Like melting chocolate, only nowhere near as sweet.
Firing off one last text to Leliana (I’m here whenever you break free), Josie tugged open the door, fully prepared to be utterly charmed.
A soft bell announced her presence, and immediately Josie was overwhelmed by the brightness of the room. The eclectic oddity of its rainbow-painted tables and chairs, the walls papered with notices of radical feminist meetings and queer book clubs, the rich smell of coffee and spices and baked goods, and, of course—the cats.
They were everywhere. An orange tabby sat curled just past the door, drowsily eyeing her from an electric pink cushion shaped like a uterus. A few feet away, sprawled out in the slanting sunlight, a calico swiped its paw through the air as if saying hello.
A carpeted tower stood directly in front of her, a black beauty curled and purring on its top, a calico tail just visible one level down as it lazily swatted from one of the tower’s deep pockets. Another tabby lay curled against an older woman’s side, face tilted up toward the light scratch of her lacquered fingernails. Another sat perched on the far counter, winding indolently about the register. Others roamed the bright blue walkway lining the room a few feet from the ceiling, while still others were curled in faux window boxes or bizarrely painted cubes. A replica Eiffel tower took up the center of the room, each tier holding another uterus cushion and a contentedly purring cat.
Josie? Was in heaven.
“Oh,” she breathed, reaching out to brush her thumb along a satiny black ear. “Oh, hello there.”
The cat tipped its head toward her and purred, lulling her instantly into a frozen moment of perfect peace—
—shattered by the sudden slam of a hand against the far counter. Josie startled back, turning, one hand at her throat.
“Oi! Welcome to Pussy Galore!” a blond-haired girl with delicately tapered ears shouted, leaning so far over the counter it was a wonder she didn’t tip over the edge. Her smile was wide, wolfish, a little intimidating. “Where every Tom Dick n’ Dyke come t’get their tails twisted. Every fifth stroke’s free, aye? ‘Cept watch for the claws and tuck in your thumbs.” She curled one hand into a half-fist and actually winked. “Not the kind of scratching you’d be wanting, innit?”
“I,” Josie began, confused. Pussy Galore?
“You’re pretty enough, then,” the girl continued. Her choppy hair swung about her face as she cocked her head, eyeing Josie in a way that somehow felt both mocking and appreciative at once. “Squeezed tight like a nut, though. First time?” She gave a snorting laugh at whatever she read on Josie’s face. “First times are best times. And best times’re—”
“Sera, leave her alone,” a softer, deeper voice interrupted, rich with amusement—feline in its own way. “Go terrorize Cassandra if you’re feeling restless.”
Josie edged closer into the café just as a tall—tall—woman with deep black skin, a fall of skinny white braids, and gold-tipped horns stepped around the main counter toward her. She moved with an indelible grace, claw-tipped fingers wiping against a spotless white apron as she casually looked Josie up and down. The jeans she wore were dark and hugged generous hips; her electric blue drape-front top framed broad shoulders. And her smile…
“Enjoy your time at Pussywhipped, aye? Too right I do!” the blonde girl—Sera—brayed, then cackled her way through a back door as the tall woman’s grin slowly grew.
“I,” Josie tried again, overwhelmed. When Leliana had invited her to Brooklyn’s first cat café, she’d imagined toile and soft music and gentle pastels. Tea sipped from china cups as cats wound about the table legs. The rainbow stickers and political posters weren’t an unwelcome surprise, but the whole energy of this place was far grittier—more raw—than she’d been expecting. “I…Pussywhipped?”
The woman’s grin grew even wider. “Sera’s a strange bird,” she said, holding out one big hand. Josie automatically reached for the handshake, instincts primed by years of working with diplomats and UN officials…but the strange (gorgeous, a part of her whispered) woman just turned her hand over, thumb brushing once over Josie’s palm. “She means well, though. Welcome to The Cheshire’s Grin; you have a good heartline.”
“I,” she stuttered again. Her pulse was leaping, and she was torn between snatching her hand away and, inexplicably, swaying closer. There was a soft scent that clung to the woman’s skin—vanilla and musk and something sharp Josie couldn’t place. It filled her lungs and blended with the deep aroma of coffee and chai. “I have a good what?”
Her thumb stroked over Josie’s palm again, and this time one painted clawtip deliberately traced a line from wrist to pointer finger. “Heartline. It means you’re a good person. Or,” she added, letting go, “it would if you believed in any of that shit. Hi; I’m Hera.”
“Josephine,” Josie said, then blinked and shook her head. “Josie. I… I admit, this isn’t what I was expecting.”
Hera turned back toward the counter, a palpable sway to her step. There were artistic tears and smears of paint across the snug fit of her jeans; her shirt was open in the back, revealing the line of her spine and a swirl of a tattoo curving over the flare of one hip. Josie let her gaze dip before jerking it back up, flushing. Thoroughly off-balance.
“Have you ever been to a cat café before, Josephine?” Hera said, her name rumbling like a growl in the back of her throat. She rounded the counter and gently shooed the circling cat away.
Josie drifted helplessly closer. “I have, once. It was…nothing like this.”
Hera leaned forward, resting on her elbows. Even without her impressive height, she looked powerful. It had been a very long time since Josie had felt butterflies in her stomach, but Maker, it was as if she’d swallowed a whole swarm. It was at once the most uncomfortable and the most alive she’d felt in years.
“…doilies and chintz?” Hera was saying. “Vivienne—that’s our owner—figured there was enough of that in the world. She owns the winery a few doors down, too, if you’re looking for something a little more upscale, but The Cheshire’s Grin is proud to be the first queer, feminist, trans-friendly, fuckery-free, radically accepting cat café in the boroughs.” Her grin widened. “Probably farther. The only real rules are that you have to order a drink to hang with the cats and their needs trump your good time. They’ve got… Here,” she added, leaning across the counter to point.
It took a remarkable amount of willpower to lift her gaze from a flash of cleavage and follow Hera’s pointing finger to a grey-and-white cat delicately licking its paw a few feet from where Josie was standing. “See the green collar? That means she likes to be picked up, played with, petted, teased, what-have-you.”
The cat looked up from its bath with a curious trilling mraow? and Josie obediently crouched to stroke behind its ears. Its trill deepened into a rumbling purr, eyes closing in instant bliss. The cat didn’t resist when she carefully scooped it up and stood, letting it curl naturally in the cradle of her arms.
“That’s Bianca,” Hera said, resting her chin on her fist. Her bright copper-gold eyes watched Josie from beneath lowered lashes. “She’s one of the few who isn’t up for adoption; Varric would skin us alive if we allowed her to be taken. Anyway, the collars.”
She straightened again, pointing to another cat. “The blue collar means they like to play but don’t like to be picked up.” Another. “Yellow means petting and light play is fine, but don’t push them too far. And red,” she pointed out a cat with a shock of orange fur, curled at the base of the Eiffel tower and watching them with sleepy blue eyes, “means gentle hands only. Those are our elder cats, and it could hurt their poor old bones if you get too frisky. Any questions?”
“Red, Yellow, Green…got it. Do they have any other safe words?” Josie tried to joke and immediately regretted it. She ducked her face down against Bianca’s scruff, but Hera was laughing—a big, bright sound that rattled through Josie’s bones like nothing she’d ever experienced before. Maker. “Sorry,” she added, sheepish.
“No,” Hera said, “I like you. You’ll fit right in. Here,” she added, pulling back from the counter. “Let me get you a coffee. A tea? Maybe a phone number?” Hera winked at Josie’s low noise. “Can’t blame me for trying.”
She had no idea what to say in response. It had been, Maker, actual years since she’d flirted—much less flirted with a complete stranger. She felt flat-footed and off-balance. Thrilled and nervous and awkward as a new colt. “I, um, yes,” she said. “That is, I believe I will—”
The door jangled merrily behind her and Josie turned, half-expecting Leliana to come breezing in with her gleaming copper hair and wicked half-smile. Instead, a dark-skinned young man pushed his way inside, followed by a massive qunari in a ripped tank (which read Muscle Wizards Cast Fist) and an eyepatch.
“Never—and let me enunciate clearly lest you misunderstand—never again,” the man was saying, mustache practically bristling with temper. He stalked into the café, pausing only long enough to swipe back at a sudden tortoiseshell paw. “Hello, darling—no,” he added, swinging around and pointing a finger up at the qunari. “I will not hear it.”
The big qunari just smiled, wide and disarmingly sweet. “Aw,” he said, arms crossing. Two of the cats were already winding about his legs, rubbing against his ankles and purring. “You don’t actually mean that, Dorian.”
Dorian sniffed. “You’ll have a hell of a time proving it,” he said before whirling back around and sailing past Josie and Hera toward the door in the back. “I know,” he told Hera in passing, “I’m late. You can blame that one for keeping me.”
“I almost always do,” Hera agreed. “Ho there, Bull,” she added, tipping her head toward Josie. “Meet Josephine—she’s new.”
His gaze flicked from where Dorian had disappeared into the back room, then over toward Josie. A third cat had joined the other two making purring figure eights about his tree-trunk legs. “And already you’re working your wiles on her,” he rumbled. “Good work, boss.”
Josie flushed, but Hera was laughing again—rich and deep and gorgeous. “I’m trying, but some meathead and his boyfriend interrupted my first play,” she said. “Speaking of, shouldn’t you be back in the kitchen baking challah? I seem to recall a rather large order with your name on it.”
“Can’t,” he said, crouching in place. The cats had seemingly multiplied between one blink and the next. There were a good half-dozen of them now—maybe more—rubbing against his knees, butting up against his side, trying to climb up to his massive shoulders with needle-like claws. “Covered in cat hair; health code wouldn’t allow it, would it Cole?” He rubbed under a ghostly white kitten’s chin.
“The last time you tried puling that card,” Hera pointed out, “I came back to the kitchen to find you buckass naked. Vivienne would actually flay you alive and wear your hide as a rain slicker if you pulled that stunt again.”
The noise he made was affronted, but his one eye gleamed with mischief when it met Josie’s. “For the record, boss, I wasn’t completely naked,” he said, giving the white cat a final scritch before standing. “I had on a perfectly serviceable apron.”
“Pink ruffles and all.”
“It’s pretty.” He winked at Josie. “Don’t let the grey skin fool you; I’m a total spring.”
She clutched the purring cat—Bianca—tighter to her chest. She felt more and more like Alice tumbling head over ass into Wonderland, and she couldn’t yet decide if this was the greatest thing that had ever happened to her, or just the most terrifying. She was in her element when it came to meeting rooms and strained political functions; teas and fundraisers and summits. Her apartment was an empty grey box and her cubicle was her world. Never, never had she sat in her safe little world surrounded by her neatly color-coded folders and constantly cascading lists of priorities and imagined that a place like this even existed.
“I,” Josie began, because it seemed as if the huge qunari were waiting for her to say something. Hera was no help; she just smiled encouragement, tiny white braids falling in a mass over one shoulder. The little gold nose ring she wore caught the light, winking back at Josie like some kind of Morse code. “I… Why do you call Hera boss if Vivienne owns the store?” she finally stumbled on.
Bull just laughed. “Because no matter what the W2 says, she,” he said, pointing as he skirted the counter and moved toward the back door, “is the boss of me. I hope you come back soon, Josie,” he added. “Believe it or not, you’ll fit right in.”
The door swung shut behind him.
“I’m not sure I do believe that,” Josie managed, trying to make it a joke.
“Everyone says that the first time they stumble in here,” Hera said, shrugging one shoulder as she pulled out a cup and began the complicated process of brewing; machines hissed and the heady scent of chocolate filled the air. “But Bull’s a good judge of character. It comes from being a sneaky asshole!” she added at a higher volume, tipping her head toward the back room.
Then she grinned at Josie, sharp-toothed. “Just in case he was standing there with his ass in the air and ear pressed against the door. He’s mighty invested in my game.”
“Your…game?” Josie asked. She finally leaned down, setting Bianca on her feet with a stroke from velvety soft ears to tail. The white kitten—Cole—pawed gently at her ankle before nuzzling against her with a flick of his tail.
“Yeah,” Hera said, finishing the coffee off with a mound of whipped cream. She cast Josie a quick look—assessing her—before topping that with chocolate flakes and sliding the cup over. Josie caught it, startled…and laughed at the neatly printed number along the rim, actual little hearts in place of zeroes. “You know. My game. How’s it working on you, anyway? Are you charmed yet?”
She was surrounded by cats and the scents of chocolate and coffee. She was staring up into copper-colored eyes, all at once aware of the towering differences between them, as well as the small sparks that had her wondering whether there could be similarities too. She could hear the sound of bickering coming from the back kitchen echoed by big, booming laughter.
The garish colors, the radical pamphlets, the flirtatious grins, the unstructured chaos of it all should have made her feel like a stranger in a strange land. Instead…
Instead, she felt like maybe she really could fit right in if she chose. Like maybe her square peg would find its home in this delightfully round hole—and good Maker, that thought was absolutely filthy. “I…yes,” Josie said, leaning awkwardly forward to rest her elbows on the counter. Getting comfortable in more ways than one. She smiled up at Hera, and her heart gave a little trill when Hera leaned on the counter across from her, face just near enough to be a promise. This close, she could make out the gleam of her dark metallic navy eyeliner. “I could perhaps be convinced.”
“Well,” Hera purred, voice dropping a teasing register; Josie actually shivered. “Good thing I’m so damn convincing then, hmm?”
Cole pawed at her ankle again and Josie’s smile melted into a welcoming grim. “Yes,” she said. “I think it is maybe a very good thing.”