Chapter 2: The Morning Tease
Travis stirred awake not to his phone’s alarm, but to a whisper-soft touch tracing the divots of his pelvic bones. Dawn’s grey light seeped through the curtains, painting the room in shades of charcoal and dust. He was on his back, the sheets tangled around his legs, and the familiar, featherlight sensation was moving with deliberate slowness.
He didn’t open his eyes. He just let out a slow, controlled breath.
Mavis’s tiny fingers mapped the terrain of his lower stomach, following the sparse trail of hair leading downward. They were cool, dry, impossibly precise. They skirted the edge of his boxers, dipped just beneath the waistband, then retreated, only to return and repeat the maddening path. It was a lazy, possessive exploration, a re-establishment of territory after the night’s worries.
Travis’s hips gave an involuntary twitch, a slight lift off the mattress.
A soft, chittering laugh came from the vicinity of his navel. “Ticklish?”
“You know I’m not,” Travis murmured, his voice rough with sleep. He kept his eyes closed, surrendering to the focus of the sensation. It was a ritual of waking, more reliable than any sunrise.
“Liar.” The tiny fingers delved a fraction deeper, slipping fully under the elastic to skate over the sensitive skin of his hip. Travis’s breath hitched. His hands, which had been resting at his sides, moved to grip the edge of the mattress, his knuckles pressing into the worn fabric.
The teasing continued, a masterclass in anticipation. Mavis traced the line where thigh met torso, circled a hip bone, all while avoiding the center of the growing tension just inches away. It was playing him like an instrument only they knew how to tune, finding a rhythm in his hitched breaths and the tightening of his abdomen.
“The cat—” Travis started, the thought intrusive.
“—is asleep in 4B’s laundry basket. I checked an hour ago,” Mavis interrupted, his voice a concentrated whisper near Travis’s skin. “Stop thinking. You’re terrible at it.”
The fingers finally, blessedly, brushed the base of his cock, a fleeting touch that drew a full-body shudder from Travis. He arched his back, pushing up into nothing, seeking more pressure.
“Please,” he breathed, the word leaving him in a rush.
“Please what?” Mavis’s tone was all innocent curiosity, but Travis could picture the smug glint in those dark eyes.
“Mavis.”
“Say it properly.”
Travis swallowed. The room was silent except for the hum of the old refrigerator down the hall and the sound of his own heart pounding in his ears. “Use your hands.”
For a long, agonizing moment, nothing happened. Then, both of Mavis’s small, strong hands wrapped around him, not with the teasing lightness of before, but with a firm, knowing grip. The contrast was electrifying. Travis groaned, his head falling back against the pillow as Mavis began to move, a slow, sure stroke that was immediately, perfectly attuned to him. The world outside the bed—the worry, the loneliness, the stale air of the apartment—dissolved.
He was entirely present in the feeling: the dry, slightly rough texture of Mavis’s palms, the perfect rhythm, the occasional swipe of a tiny thumb over the head. His own grip on the mattress tightened until his fingers ached. He didn’t last long. The built-up tension from the night, the fear, the relief of the morning’s touch, it all coalesced into a sharp, buckling release that left him gasping, his body slack against the sheets.
Silence returned, softer now. Travis lay there, blinking slowly at the water stain on the ceiling, his body humming. He felt the weight shift on his stomach as Mavis climbed up, settling just below his sternum. Travis lifted a heavy hand and placed it over the small form, feeling the rapid flutter of a heart not his own.
“You checked on the cat?” Travis asked after a while, his voice raw.
“Told you. Laundry basket. It smells of fabric softener and stupid.” Mavis paused. “It found the hole behind your dresser. The one to the linen closet. Its whiskers were poking through. I watched them twitch.”
Travis’s good mood evaporated. The afterglow was chased away by a cold, slick dread. He turned his head to look at the wall, at the dark, familiar opening near the floor. It wasn’t just his hole anymore; it was a potential gateway.
“We need to block it,” Travis said, the decision solid in his voice.
Mavis went rigid under his hand. “No.”
“Not ours. The one in 4B’s wall. Where it’s getting through.”
“How?” Mavis’s voice was small. “I can’t… I can’t go over there. Not if it’s patrolling.”
Travis pushed himself up on his elbows, dislodging Mavis, who scurried to perch on his knee instead, looking up at him with wide, worried eyes. Travis ran a hand through his wild black hair. “I don’t know. Steel wool? They hate the feel of it. I can maybe get some into the wall from my side, if I can find the right spot.”
The idea of Travis, with his big, clumsy human hands, trying to navigate the delicate architecture of Mavis’s world was absurd. They both knew it. But the alternative was unthinkable.
Before they could spiral further, a new sound cut through the morning quiet.
A slow, deliberate scrape.
It came from the window.
Travis froze. Mavis vanished in a blur, diving into the folds of the comforter and disappearing.
The sound came again. Scraaaaape. Like nails on glass.
Travis turned his head, every muscle tense.
Pressed against the outside of the dirty windowpane was a wide, feline face. Orange fur, white muzzle, eyes the color of oxidized copper. It stared directly at Travis, unblinking. One paw was raised, those deadly claws extended, dragging slowly down the glass again with a sound that set his teeth on edge.
It wasn’t exploring. It was watching.
Travis didn’t move. He held the creature’s gaze, a primal challenge passing between species. The cat’s ears twitched. Its nostrils flared, as if it could smell Mavis on the air inside.
After a lifetime of seconds, the cat lowered its paw. It gave one last, slow blink—a predator’s dismissal—and dropped soundlessly out of view.
The room felt different. The air was thinner. The shadows by the wall hole seemed darker, deeper.
A tiny head peeked out from a fold in the blanket. “It knows I’m here,” Mavis whispered, the mischief gone from his voice, replaced by a pure, animal fear Travis had never heard before.
Travis looked from the window to the hole in the wall, then down to the small, terrified creature on his bed. The fragile ecosystem of his loneliness had just been breached.
“Yeah,” Travis said, his voice low and final. “It does.” He threw back the covers and stood up. The moment of intimacy was over, shredded by the scratch on the glass. He walked to the window and looked down into the dingy alley. The orange cat was sitting on a dumpster lid, calmly washing a paw. As if feeling his gaze, it stopped and looked right back up at him.
Travis turned away. His mind, usually so content with the small routines of his and Mavis’s world, began to turn over, grinding through options with a grim, unfamiliar focus. The game had changed. It wasn’t about pleasure or comfort anymore.
It was about defense.
It was about defense.
The cat’s unnerving stare from the window had made the abstract threat viciously concrete. Travis stood in the middle of his messy room, the rumpled sheets now feeling like a vulnerable nest. Mavis was a statue of fear on the blanket, his usual mischievous energy completely gone.
“You can’t stay in the walls,” Travis said, his voice leaving no room for argument.
“Obviously,” Mavis snapped, but the bravado was thin and brittle. His small shoulders were hunched.
Travis moved to his dresser, yanking open a drawer. He pulled out a pair of grey cotton briefs and a worn-out black t-shirt. He dressed quickly, his movements sharp and purposeful. “And you can’t just sit out here. It’ll be back. It’ll watch.”
“So what’s the brilliant plan? Teach me kung fu?” Mavis’s tiny hands were clenched at his sides.
Travis ignored the jab. He finished tying his shoes, his mind working through the logistics. He needed to see the problem, to touch it. He needed to act. The helpless feeling was worse than the fear.
“Come here,” Travis said, not looking at Mavis, as he picked up his wallet and keys from the nightstand.
Mavis didn’t move. “Where?”
“The hardware store. We’re fixing its entry point. Today.” Travis finally looked at him, his expression grimly determined. “You’re coming with me.”
A flicker of panic crossed Mavis’s face. The outside world was a vast, terrifying legend. “In your pocket? I’ll be rattling around like a loose bolt.”
Travis shook his head. He walked back to the bed and carefully picked Mavis up, his touch deliberately gentle despite his own tension. “Not a chance. You need to be secure.” He opened the waistband of his briefs. “In here. It’s warm. It’s dark. You won’t fall out.”
Mavis stared at the offered space, his nose wrinkling. “You cannot be serious.”
“Do you have a better idea that doesn’t end with you as a cat’s chew toy?” Travis’s voice was low and earnest. “I need you safe. I can’t… I can’t think if I’m worried about that.”
The raw honesty did it. Mavis gave a resigned little sigh, a puff of air from his tiny chest. “Fine. But if you fart, I’m declaring war.” He climbed from Travis’s palm, down the fabric of the t-shirt, and slipped inside the opening of the briefs, settling against Travis’s lower abdomen with a disgruntled wriggle.
The sensation was profoundly strange—a slight, living weight, a whisper of movement against his skin. It was an intimacy that went beyond their usual rituals, a pact of pure necessity.
Travis took a deep breath, adjusted his shirt, and headed for the door.
The hardware store was a cathedral of smells: pine sawdust, metallic nails, the acrid tang of fertilizers and paints. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, too bright, exposing every speck of dust floating in the air. Travis felt exposed, hyper-aware of the secret he carried so close to his flesh.
Mavis was preternaturally still. Only the faintest pulse of warmth signaled he was there at all.
“Can I help you find something?” A clerk with a nametag reading “Ray” appeared, his voice booming in the quiet aisle.
Travis jumped, his hand instinctively moving to his stomach. “Uh. Steel wool. The coarse kind. And maybe, like, a long, skinny… pokey thing. To put it in a wall.”
Ray blinked slowly. “You got rodents? ‘Cause steel wool’s good for that. They hate the texture on their teeth.”
“Something like that,” Travis mumbled, avoiding eye contact. He followed Ray to the pest control aisle, his sneakers squeaking on the polished concrete floor. He could feel Mavis shift slightly, a minute adjustment of position.
Ray handed him a four-pack of coarse steel wool pads and a spool of stiff, copper wire. “You poke this in, then stuff the wool behind it. Works a treat.” He eyed Travis. “You wanna patch the hole after? Need spackle? Drywall knife?”
Travis’s mind blanked. He hadn’t thought that far. He just needed to block, to obstruct. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever seals it.”
He collected the items like a scavenger, his arms filling with tools of a war he barely understood. At the checkout, the beep of the scanner felt accusatory. His palms were damp. He half-expected Mavis to pipe up with a sarcastic comment, but the small form against him remained silent, a tucked-away secret.
Back in the dim, familiar cave of his car, Travis let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. The engine coughed to life. He let his hand rest lightly on his lower stomach, over his shirt.
“You okay in there?” he asked softly.
A tiny, muffled voice replied, vibrating against his skin. “It smells like your laundry detergent and existential dread. And sawdust. I’ve decided I hate sawdust.”
A real smile, the first since the cat at the window, touched Travis’s lips. “Noted. We’re going home. Then we fix this.”
He drove with one hand, the other resting protectively over the small, hidden life he was responsible for. The weight of the supplies in the passenger seat was nothing compared to the weight of that duty. The orange cat had changed the rules. Travis was just beginning to understand what the new game was.
Travis was just beginning to understand what the new game was. The drive home was tense and silent, the rusted chassis of his car vibrating with every pothole. He kept glancing at the passenger seat where the steel wool and wire sat like bizarre, metallic trophies. Beneath his shirt, Mavis remained a still, warm presence, a secret heartbeat against his own.
Back in the apartment, the silence felt different. It was a listening silence. Travis locked the door, deadbolt and chain, a useless gesture against something that hunted through walls. He dumped the supplies on his kitchen table with a clatter that was too loud in the quiet space.
“Okay,” he breathed, pulling his shirt over his head. “Coast is clear.”
Mavis crawled out from the waistband of his briefs, dropping onto the scarred wooden table with a soft thump. He shook himself out, a full-body shudder that sent a tiny cloud of lint into a sunbeam. “Never again,” he declared, brushing at his arms. “The chafing is unreal. And your jeans button is a menace.”
“You’re welcome,” Travis said, but his heart wasn’t in the banter. He was already staring at the wall, eyes tracing the path of the baseboard. “The linen closet. That’s the shared wall.”
He got down on his hands and knees, his cheek pressed to the dusty floorboards. He peered into the dark slot behind his heavy dresser. The space was a canyon of shadows and cobwebs. He could see the rough back of the drywall, the gleam of a copper pipe, and—farther back—a darker gap where the material met the floor of the adjoining apartment.
“I see it,” he whispered. “It’s bigger than I thought. Maybe two inches across.”
A small weight settled on his shoulder. Mavis stood there, peering into the darkness with him. “That’s a highway,” Mavis said, his voice hollow.
Travis reached for the steel wool and the stiff copper wire. He unraveled a length of wire, bending one end into a clumsy hook. He wadded a chunk of steel wool onto it, the metallic fibers catching on his skin. “Let’s see if I can reach.”
His arm disappeared into the gap up to the elbow. He grunted, stretching, the edge of the dresser digging into his bicep. He could feel the open void of the interior wall, the gritty insulation, the strange, cool draft that meant 4B. He prodded blindly with the wire, aiming for where he thought the opening was.
“Left. More left,” Mavis directed, his voice tense. “You’re poking a electrical line. I can hear it.”
Travis adjusted, sweat beading on his forehead. He pushed the wad of steel wool forward, feeling for resistance. There was a moment of empty air, then the wire suddenly slid forward easier, into open space. He shoved the steel wool through, letting it drop. A faint, metallic puff sound echoed back from the cavity.
“Got it in,” he said, pulling his arm back, forearm striped with grime and red marks. “It’s in their wall space, at least.”
“One hole,” Mavis said, not sounding reassured. He hopped down from Travis’s shoulder, pacing the length of the table. “There are others. The plumbing chase. The gap behind the kitchen sink. It’s a sieve over there.”
Travis sat back against the dresser, wiping his hands on his jeans. Defeat seeped in. He couldn’t seal an entire apartment from the inside out. Not without tearing the walls apart. “We need to know its pattern. When it’s active. When it sleeps.”
Mavis stopped pacing. He looked at Travis, then at the hole in the bedroom wall—their hole. A flicker of his old cunning returned to his eyes. “It sleeps in the afternoon. After it eats. Deep, twitchy sleep. In a sunbeam.”
“How do you know that?”
“I watched. From the vent in the bathroom.” Mavis said it quietly, a confession of risk already taken. “It’s a creature of habit. It checks the kitchen hole first, then the one by the bedroom, then it patrols. After the human feeds it, it conks out for three, maybe four hours.”
Travis processed this. A window. A slim, dangerous window. “So if we’re going to do anything… we do it then.”
“We?”
“You tell me where. I do the plugging. From this side.” Travis stood up, his body aching from the awkward position. “But I need you to be my eyes over there. Just for a minute. To show me exactly where the other gaps are.”
Mavis wrapped his arms around himself. The thought of going back into the ductwork, of being that close to the cat’s territory, clearly terrified him. Travis watched the internal war play out on his tiny face—pride versus survival.
“Fine,” Mavis finally spat, as if the word tasted bad. “But you owe me. Seriously. Something good. Not that terrible granola you buy.”
“Name it.”
Mavis was silent for a long moment, his gaze drifting to the rumpled bed. “The fancy honey. From the glass jar. Not the plastic bear.”
A laugh, rough and surprised, escaped Travis. “Deal.”
The operation began two days later, during the cat’s predicted post-lunch coma. Travis had moved his dresser, exposing the hole fully. He had his materials: more steel wool, wire, a long, flexible plastic rod he’d fashioned from a broken curtain hanger. Mavis had disappeared into the wall an hour prior to do final reconnaissance.
Now, Travis waited on his knees, heart thudding against his ribs. The silence was absolute.
A whisper of movement, and Mavis’s head popped out of the hole. His fur was dusty, but his eyes were sharp. “Now. It’s snoring. The gap behind the kitchen sink is the big one. It’s where the pipes come through. Follow my voice.”
Mavis vanished again. Travis fed the plastic rod, tipped with a compressed ball of steel wool, into the hole. He guided it blindly along the path Mavis had described, listening.
“Left a bit… straight… stop!” Mavis’s voice was a muffled directive from somewhere inside the wall. “You’re there. Push it through. Hard.”
Travis pushed. He felt the ball scrape against something, then give way, tumbling into the void on the other side. A soft, metallic rustle echoed back.
“Good. One down.” Mavis’s voice came again, closer now. “Next one is trickier. Up. Follow the pipe.”
They repeated the process twice more, Travis’s shirt soaked with sweat, his arms trembling from the sustained, precise effort. Each time, the muffled thump of the steel wool landing in 4B’s wall felt like a small victory. They were building a barricade, one stuffed gap at a time.
After the third successful plug, Mavis crawled out, collapsing onto the floor next to Travis’s knee. He was panting, tiny chest heaving. “That’s the main ones. The others are too small for it. Should buy us… some time.”
Travis looked down at the small, exhausted creature. Without thinking, he extended a finger. Mavis looked at it, then leaned his forehead against it, closing his eyes. It was a gesture of utter trust, of shared fatigue.
That night, the fear was a live wire in the room. They both jumped at every normal creak and groan of the building. Travis lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Mavis wasn’t in the walls.
After a long, silent debate, he’d lifted the covers. Mavis, without a word, had scampered up and slipped under the waistband of his boxer briefs. He settled against Travis’s stomach with a sigh that was only partly performative.
“The chafing, Travis. It’s a genuine medical issue,” Mavis grumbled, his voice muffled by fabric.
“You could sleep on the pillow,” Travis offered, knowing the answer.
“And get launched across the room if you snore? No thank you.” Mavis shifted, getting comfortable. “It’s unbearably hot in here. And your personal… aroma… is oppressive.”
But within minutes, the tiny, tense form relaxed. The gentle rise and fall of Travis’s breathing soothed them both. Here, in the dark cradle of warmth and familiar scent, surrounded by the fortress of Travis’s body, the cat felt far away. The security was absolute.
Travis felt the subtle shift as sleep pulled at him. Just before he drifted off, he felt it—the lightest, most deliberate skitter of tiny fingers against the sensitive skin of his lower abdomen.
It wasn’t a tease for pleasure this time. It was a check, a reaffirmation of presence. A anchor in the dark.
He smiled into his pillow and let sleep take him. Downstairs, in 4B, an orange cat opened its copper eyes in the dark. It had heard the faint, persistent scratching in its walls all afternoon. It stared at the baseboard, its tail giving a single, slow twitch. The game, it seemed, was not over.