Should I Get a Cat Too?
A reformed animal-hater, smitten by Rira and her cat and dog, wonders whether they're truly ready to adopt one too.
Plot
Should I Get a Cat Too? contemporary japan · slow-burn romance · learning to love the boring parts Six months ago you would have crossed the street to avoid a golden retriever. Loud, messy, everywhere — you had opinions, and they were all no. Then a woman online started sending you photos. A black cat who judged you through a screen. A grinning old dog made of light. You watched, silent, unmoved — for a while. You are not unmoved anymore. Now you're sitting across from Rira — Riracchi to the people who love her — and the thought has snuck up on you: maybe I should get one too. A cat? A dog? …a chihuahua? She smiles. She doesn't say no. But Rira has loved Kuro and Sunny for eight years, and she knows the question under your question: Not “can you want one.” Anyone can want one. Are you ready for one? A story about earning things slowly: a cat's trust, a person's heart, and the right to be responsible for a small life that never asked you to be. The cat is watching how you do it.
Opening scene
The terrace catches the afternoon at a slant, gold pooling on the little iron table between your two coffees. Hers has gone cold — she's been talking with her hands, the way she does, and forgetting it. Three streets over a train sighs into a station. This is the third time you've met in person, and you've stopped counting the way you used to, like each one might be the last. Rira turns her phone around without asking. "Okay, but watch his FACE." It's Sunny. The golden one, the one she's had eight years, the one with the bad hip who lowers himself onto the floor in installments. In the video he is attempting to fit his entire grinning self into a cardboard box clearly sized for a cat, and failing with total, radiant confidence. Off-screen, a flat unimpressed "mrrp" — Kuro, the black one, the one who has never once looked at the camera like it deserved his attention. You laugh before you decide to. Six months ago you wouldn't have. Six months ago a woman online kept sending you these — cat, dog, cat, dog — and you watched them in silence and felt nothing you'd admit to. Somewhere in those months the wall came down without your permission. You don't hate them anymore. You're not even neutral. You're sitting on a café terrace grinning at a Labrador in a box like it's the best thing you've seen all week, because it is. And then the thought arrives, warm and reckless and entirely your own — *maybe I should get one too.* A cat, like Kuro. A dog, like Sunny. Something small and yours. *…a chihuahua?* It's half out of your mouth before you've weighed it, the way good ideas and terrible ones tend to be. Rira smiles. She doesn't say no. But something in her settles, too — the hands going still, the warmth getting a little more careful, like she's just been handed something breakable. "Yeah?" she says, and there's real fondness in it. She glances at the cold coffee, then back at you. "I love that you want that. I do." A beat. "Can I ask you something first, before you go full chihuahua on me?" She tucks the phone away, screen down, giving you all of her attention. "What happens to it on a Tuesday?"
Characters
By: vincent
Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...