Page 11 of Catastrophically Yours

NINE

CRISIS AND RESOLUTION

The afternoon light filtered through the blinds in patterns that reminded Drew of guitar fretwork as she spread her notes across the kitchen table.

Her laptop displayed a spreadsheet that would make Piper proud—venue contacts, musician availability, equipment needs.

Each detail catalogued with the kind of precision she'd never bothered with before.

Her phone pressed against her ear, she scrolled through numbers saved from Blue Moon Café's open mic nights. "Hey Marcus, it's Drew from Tuesday nights. I'm organizing a benefit concert and wondered if you'd be interested in performing..."

The response was immediate enthusiasm. Musicians understood emergencies, understood helping each other out. By the third call, Drew felt the familiar spark of a project coming together.

A crash from the living room interrupted her pitch to Sarah, the folk duo's guitarist.

"Sorry, can I call you back in five?" Drew ended the call and found Piper's carefully sorted mail scattered across the hardwood floor. Bills, bank statements, and what looked like insurance documents formed a paper landscape around Pickle's paws.

"Seriously?" Drew knelt to gather the papers, noting Piper's precise handwriting on several envelopes—due dates, priority rankings, a system for everything. "You know she spent time organizing this."

Pickle fixed her with an unblinking stare, pupils wider than usual. His tail twitched with agitation rather than playfulness.

"What's going on with you lately?" Drew reached for him, but he darted away, leaping onto the coffee table where her sheet music waited in neat stacks. One swipe of his paw sent lead sheets floating like oversized confetti.

The yowling started ten minutes later.

Not Pickle's usual conversational meows or attention-seeking chirps, but deep, guttural sounds that seemed to echo off every surface in the apartment.

Drew tried treats—ignored. His favorite feather toy—batted away with genuine irritation.

The crinkly ball that usually sent him into playful spins—completely dismissed.

Drew followed his restless circuit from kitchen to living room to hallway, hands raised in supplication. He paused only to scratch at Piper's bedroom door and release another ear-splitting cry.

The scratching intensified. Long, deliberate drags of claws against wood that made Drew wince. Piper's security deposit flashed through her mind, but more than that—this was Piper's sanctuary, her carefully maintained space that Drew was supposed to be protecting.

Her phone rang. Another potential venue, someone she'd left a message with hours ago.

"Hi, this is Drew about the benefit concert space..." She tried to focus on the conversation while Pickle's cries provided an increasingly frantic soundtrack. The caller—manager of a community center with a decent sound system—seemed interested until a particularly piercing yowl made him pause.

"Is everything alright there?"

"Just... pet situation. Totally under control." Drew forced brightness into her voice as Pickle launched himself at the bedroom door with enough force to rattle the frame. "So the twenty-eighth would work perfectly..."

By the time she hung up, having somehow secured the venue despite the chaos, Pickle had moved on to new destructive possibilities. Somehow, he'd gotten into Piper's home office.

The sight stopped Drew cold.

Paper everywhere. Not just scattered—shredded.

Pickle had apparently discovered that documents were satisfying to claw, and Piper's filing system now resembled a ticker-tape parade.

Tax papers with client names barely visible through parallel tears.

Insurance forms reduced to strips. What looked like budget spreadsheets—the kind of detailed planning that took hours to create—now existing only as confetti.

"No, no, no." Drew dropped to her knees, trying to assess the damage. Some papers were merely displaced, shuffled out of order but salvageable. Others had been thoroughly destroyed, important information lost to Pickle's claws and teeth.

A bank statement torn exactly through the account number. A medical bill—possibly related to Piper's father's situation—with half the reference number missing. Client tax documents that Drew couldn't begin to understand but knew were irreplaceable.

Pickle sat in the center of the destruction, grooming his paw with elaborate casualness.

"This is bad." Drew's voice cracked. "This is really, really bad."

She started gathering pieces, trying to match tears like a jigsaw puzzle. Some documents could be reconstructed with tape and patience. Others were simply gone, victims of Pickle's stress-induced rampage.

Piper's key in the lock at 11:47 sent Drew's stomach plummeting.

"Hey, how did the venue calls..." Piper's voice trailed off as she took in the scene. Drew kneeling on the floor surrounded by paper scraps, Pickle now hiding under the couch with only his tail visible, the home office door open to reveal further chaos.

"I'm so sorry." The words tumbled out of Drew before Piper could speak. "This is all my fault. Pickle was stressed, and I couldn't calm him down, and he got into your office, and I know how much time you spend organizing everything..."

Piper set down her work bag with careful precision. Her face revealed nothing—not anger, not disappointment, just the blank expression Drew had learned meant Piper was processing.

"Which documents?" Piper's voice was steady, professional.

"Um..." Drew gestured helplessly at the piles. "Tax stuff, I think? And insurance papers. Some bank statements. There's this budget spreadsheet that looked really detailed..."

Piper knelt beside her, sorting through the shredded pieces and organizing them by color and document type.

"He's probably picking up on how stressed we've both been," Piper said quietly, reaching for a torn bank statement.

"Cats get anxious when their people are anxious.

Between the benefit concert planning and my family situation, plus.

.." She paused, fingers stilling on a paper fragment.

"Plus knowing this arrangement has to end soon. "

Drew looked up sharply. "What?"

"It's been almost two weeks." Piper's voice remained carefully neutral. "We agreed on temporary housing while you found something permanent. Your applications must be processing by now."

The words hit Drew like a physical blow. In all her focus on organizing the benefit, on helping Piper's family, she'd somehow forgotten that her time here had an expiration date. That Piper was probably expecting her to move out any day now.

"I..." Drew started, then stopped. How could she explain that she'd stopped looking for other apartments? That somewhere in the past two weeks, this had started feeling like home in a way that had nothing to do with temporary arrangements?

"I'm upset about the documents," Piper continued, holding up two pieces of what had been a client tax form, checking if they could be matched. "But anger won't reconstruct them. Most of this exists digitally—we can reprint from my backup files."

The relief was so sharp it made Drew dizzy. "Really?"

"Really." Piper's fingers brushed Drew's as they both reached for the same paper fragment. "Though we should probably address the underlying problem before he escalates to furniture destruction."

They worked side by side, Piper's laptop retrieving digital copies while Drew handled the careful work of taping together what could be saved. The familiar rhythm of collaborative problem-solving settled around them—Piper's logical approach balanced by Drew's intuitive pattern recognition.

"Here." Drew pulled up a pet advice website on her phone. "Says that big changes and owner stress are the main things that set cats off like this. Recommends consistent routines, pheromone diffusers, and..." She scrolled down. "Creating safe spaces where they can retreat."

"We've been asking him to adapt to a lot." Piper printed out a replacement insurance form, checking it against the original fragments. "New apartment, new human, disrupted schedule because of my late work hours."

"Plus I'm probably radiating anxiety about..." Drew caught herself before saying 'leaving,' the word too painful to voice. "About everything."

"Emotional feedback loop." Piper aligned papers with geometric precision. "His stress increases ours, which increases his."

At 2:30 AM, they finally finished. Piper's filing system reconstructed, digital backups printed and organized, even a few successfully taped documents that looked professionally repaired. Drew had researched pet anxiety solutions while Piper handled the logistics of replacement paperwork.

Exhausted but strangely peaceful, they settled on the living room floor among the neat document piles. The apartment felt calm again, crisis managed through partnership rather than individual struggle.

Pickle emerged from his hiding spot tentatively, approaching with the cautious optimism of a cat testing the emotional weather. He sniffed at the organized papers, found them less interesting than chaos, and settled into the space between Drew and Piper with a deep, settled purr.

"Think he's okay now?" Drew stroked his orange fur, noting how his breathing had returned to normal.

"For tonight." Piper's hand joined Drew's, their fingers overlapping on Pickle's back. "We'll need a longer-term plan. Pet-proofing, anxiety management, maybe..." She hesitated. "Maybe talking about timeline expectations."

The phrase hung between them, loaded with implications neither seemed ready to examine directly.

"I love how your brain works," Drew said softly, watching Piper organize empty file folders for tomorrow's paperwork refiling. "You see problems as puzzles instead of disasters."

"I love how your heart works." Piper's cheeks flushed, but she maintained eye contact. "You see solutions I'd never consider. The benefit concert idea would have never occurred to me, but it might actually help more than trying to solve everything alone."

Pickle's purring intensified, a rumbling soundtrack to their whispered conversation.

Outside, the city had settled into late-night quiet, emergency sirens distant and infrequent.

Inside, the three of them formed a small island of resolved crisis, the kind of domestic moment Drew had written songs about but never quite experienced.

"We should probably get some real sleep," Piper said eventually, though neither of them moved.

"Probably." Drew closed her eyes, suddenly aware of how tired she was. The adrenaline of crisis management was fading, leaving behind the deep satisfaction of problems solved together.

But as they began to gather themselves for bed, Drew found courage in the darkness and the intimacy of shared crisis resolution.

"What if I didn't want to find another place?" The words came out quieter than intended, but in the apartment's silence they carried clearly.

Piper's hands stilled on the file folders. "What?"

"What if this feels more like home than anywhere I've ever lived?" Drew's heart hammered against her ribs, but the words kept coming. "What if temporary stopped feeling temporary somewhere around day three, and I've just been too scared to say anything?"

Piper was quiet for so long that Drew began to worry she'd misread everything. Then Pickle chose that moment to stretch and resettle more firmly across both their laps, as if determined to keep them exactly where they were.

"I've been dreading the day you'd tell me you found somewhere else," Piper admitted finally. "Which is ridiculous, because temporary was the deal, and I don't do roommates, and this whole thing was supposed to be practical and limited and?—"

"But it's not," Drew interrupted gently. "Any of those things."

"No." Piper's smile was soft and wondering. "It's not."

They fell asleep there on the hardwood floor, Pickle warm and settled between them, surrounded by the evidence of their partnership.

Tomorrow would bring new challenges—venue confirmations, musician schedules, conversations about lease modifications and long-term arrangements.

But tonight, they had proven something important: that some problems required two people, and that accepting help didn't mean abandoning independence.

It meant finding better ways to build something together.