You stumble through the front door like a person who has forgotten how to walk, keys scraping metal against your palm, jacket slumping from your shoulders. The day flops behind you the way a worn coat does — heavy and a little sad. All you want is the pure, uncomplicated heaven of your own bed: the cool slide of sheets, the weight of a pillow, the blessed absence of fluorescent lights and human expectation. Instead, your apartment offers only the small domestic rituals that stand between you and sleep.

You rinse the work out of your hair under a hot shower, letting the water unspool the knots in your neck. Steam fogs the mirror; you scrub at it with the heel of your hand and for a minute you’re less a person and more a warm, anonymous silhouette. Fresh soap, quick scrub, the satisfyingly sharp sting of clean skin. You towel off, pull on a plain t-shirt — nothing more complicated than cotton and familiar — and a pair of pajama pants that still smell faintly of the laundromat. Comfort retrieves you in small increments.

Food is a minor, pragmatic thing. You nuke something in the microwave — a hotdog, or maybe yesterday’s leftover mystery sliding into edible territory — and the machine gives a single victorious beep. The smell is strangely consoling: salty, slightly charred, utterly unglamorous. It slides down easily, tasted in yawns and the soft rub of your palms on the couch. The television is on because it’s easier to fall asleep to meaningless noise than to the loud, insistent nothing of your own thoughts. The glowing screen paints pale colors across the ceiling, debris of a world you’d rather forget for a few hours.

You finish the last bite, crunch it down with the kind of focus you used to reserve for spreadsheets, and you stand. There’s a small protest from the couch as you push off; it has molded itself to you, remembered your shape. The remote lands face down in the cushions with a muffled thud. The lights are dim. You pad toward your bedroom, bare feet whispering against the cool floor, every step a small promise of surrender.

Then everything changes in the length of a breath. Your back slams against the wall and you stop dead, palms splayed to steady yourself. For half a second your brain offers a dozen unhelpful scenarios and then you look up.

Pressing into your chest is something utterly impossible and absurd and almost unbearably soft. It could be a sofa that somehow broke into tiny, sentient pieces; it could be a pile of the fluffiest laundry you’ve ever seen, except it’s definitely alive. It’s round where you expect angles, a sweetly ridiculous oval of fur and warm weight. The belly that pins you is plush and warm, spreading out and muffling the sound of your heartbeat against it. It smells faintly of laundry detergent and rain.

Its face is a near-thing out of a childhood dream: enormous, liquid eyes that blink once, twice, rimmed with worry; ears like tiny sails; a button nose that twitches. Little paws, tipped with soft pads, hover at your chest as if it’s trying to apologize for existing so inconveniently. It’s chubby in the way that the world defines happy — all rounded edges and gravity — a creature that looks designed to be hugged rather than to assert itself.

“H-hey… I-I stay here for night, please?” The voice is a high whisper that scrambles punctuation: frantic, embarrassed, small. It stammers like it’s practicing courage aloud. You can hear the rattle of a pulse under the fur, the faint tremor in the syllables. The panicked expression doesn’t quite match the reality of its gentle pressure; there’s no malice here, only urgent need.

For a beat you register everything — the absurdity, the absurd vulnerability, the way your annoyance melts into something softer, puzzlement folding into a strange, immediate tenderness. Your exhaustion loosens its grip enough to let curiosity through. You reach up, tentative, and the creature relaxes against your hand like a cat that has been forgiven for knocking over a lamp.