If I Must Lane Read Online Free

landing.
    The thing eating out of it and snarling through spittle-covered whiskers barely passed for a cat.
    “Ian?” Joel called, jostling his bike and his backpack over his shoulders and hoping they could co-exist for just a few more steps. He’d just come from work and was wearing his bike shorts. “Ian?” Gingerly he reached over to open the door (Ian rarely remembered to lock it) and swung a leg over the threshold. The cat—a dark brown short-haired behemoth with pale tortoise-shell stripes on its side—stuck out a massive paw and clawed his bare ankle.
    “ Ian !” Joel screamed, not wanting to kick this new development off a three-story landing and not wanting to lose any more blood, either.
    Ian popped out of his room—shirtless, as usual—and trotted over to help Joel through the door.
    “He got you? Why would he get you?”
    Joel glared at the cat who looked at him and growled some more. “Because I interfered with his evil plan to rain destruction down on mankind,” he said sourly, and the freaky thing licked its whiskers and damned near smiled.
    Ian laughed, and now that Joel was safely inside, he sank to his haunches and scratched delicately under the cat’s chin. The feline monstrosity had the balls to purr.
    “Hullo, you manky bastard,” Ian murmured. “You giving Joel a hard time? You can’t, you know. He was here first.”
    Joel looked at the cat in a mixture of humor and horror. “Well, it’s nice to know I rate!”
    Ian’s grin appeared again, and Joel wondered why the cat suddenly looked more like a cat and less like a refugee from a zoo. “Rate? Brother, you’re more important to me than Riemann!”
    Joel had to blink. Wow—Riemann was like the guy’s god—or at least the subject of his latest paper. Joel took a big breath and realized most of his irritation with the animal was gone. All that was left was his perpetual good humor.
    “Jesus, Ian!  I said get a cat —I didn’t say to just let one wander up to the house.”
    Ian turned that sunny smile up at Joel one more time, and although he refused to admit it, Joel’s heart stuttered in his chest. “I don’t know, brother. That’s sort of how I got you, isn’t it?”
    Joel’s mouth went sober. He met Ian’s gaze and flushed, and Manky Bastard (as the female cat would forevermore be known) sank her pointy, street-cat teeth into the ball of Ian’s thumb.
    Ian shouted and stood, and the little opportunist took that moment to run inside the apartment and sit, snarling, in the corner of the bathroom between the toilet and the tub. Joel, still a little dizzy from that long look he’d shared with Ian, went out and got cat litter, a box, and a pooper-scooper, and they put it where the cat seemed to want to stay. Ian had already bought enough food to last the damned cat a year. (They still hadn’t gone through even half the Fancy Feast under the counter.)
    Joel made two appointments the next day: one for the cat, which Ian kept, and one for Ian, because his thumb turned blue and doubled in size. Joel took Ian to that one. While they were there, he made Ian take a blood test too.
    The results were negative, and Ian had promised to go back after the window period was over. “Well, if I must!” Whenever he said that, Joel had no doubt he’d do it.
     
    Melody seemed to have gotten her second wind. She sat up on the couch and was staring avidly at Joel’s face. Joel wondered if she could see something he couldn’t.
    “So now you gots a cat?” she asked, her face soft in the glow from the television. Joel had no doubt his sister could be hard as nails when she was driving a bargain or running her staff, but with him, she was all Little Mommy.
    Joel nodded and grimaced. “You should see Ian with her. He brushes her, feeds her shit that cost more than my food, and she thinks he put fish in the damn ocean. But she’s sick. I think she’s just old.” He shuddered. “I hope she’s okay. Ian really loves