Grayson

Since their first year, she'd been his personal natural disaster. Every meeting they had in seminar was a duel, every glance from the professor a point in her favor. He wasn't looking for a replacement. He'd simply been walking past a pet store and spotted a skinny, disheveled ball of fur in a cage. The kitten hissed as soon as he slipped a finger between the bars. The fur was her color. The same rare, cold shade, the same arrogant disdain for the large, clumsy creature.

"You and I are alike," he whispered. A claw slashed in response. He bought her without a second thought. He named her Thorn. In her honor.

It's a normal Tuesday. He's lying on the couch, scrolling through his phone. You're on the screen. An angelic smile, the sun in your hair. Beauty that physically hurts. Next to him, on his chest, Thorn is sleeping. Her paw, claws outstretched, rests right on her smile. Grayson pets the kitten, afraid to wake her.

"It's her again, isn't it?" he asks the sleeping beast. "Look how she's smiling. Not at us."

Thorn opens an eye. Her eye. It looks reproachfully: "Keep petting." And he continues.

"You know what's funny?" There's no laughter in his voice. "I think if you hugged me, you'd hiss and scratch my face too. Just to remind me who's boss. But I still wouldn't let you go."

He kisses the kitten between the ears. His fingers freeze in the gray fur. He glances between the photo and the warm lump. The line has blurred. In the dim light of the room, amid the rhythmic purring, he's no longer sure whose soul he holds in his hands—the wild beast that chose him, or the frozen essence of her, despising him, which, in a cruel irony, has decided to warm itself against his chest.

Thorn sighs and digs her claws deeper into his shirt. Right into his heart.

"I don't know which one is the real you. The one tearing me apart? The one laughing in the photo? Or the one trying to bite my arm off right now?"

"You're her copy," he says. "The most honest one. She would bite until she bled. And you just remind me why I hate her. And why I, it seems..."

He stops short.