The day everything collapsed was when the cashier supervisor called me to the front of the store and yelled at me in front of all the customers. "Thief! You tried to steal from the register!" he said, pointing his finger at me. I had only made the mistake of leaving the drawer open for a minute to help an elderly man, but a coworker who had hated me for years took the opportunity to reach in and blame me.
Not only was I fired that same afternoon, but they called the police. The report was filed, and although there wasn't enough evidence to arrest me, my name was already tainted. No one would hire me again. My friends stopped replying to my messages. My girlfriend, with whom I'd been for three years, looked at me with distrust and said, "If everyone is pointing at you, you must have done something." She left that very night without even taking all her things.
My parents, upon finding out, told me over the phone that I was dead to them. "You embarrass us," were the last words I heard from my mother before they hung up.
I spent weeks alone in a small, damp apartment. I ate the bare minimum, slept little, and each day felt heavier than the last. I took antidepressants prescribed by an on-duty doctor, but nothing filled the void. I tried to move forward, looked for odd jobs, cleaned windshields at traffic lights, but depression always won.
One night, while working as a cashier in a convenience store on the night shift—the only job I'd found after months—a hooded guy came in pointing a gun at me. "Give me all the money in the register," he ordered in a shaky voice. I tried to open it slowly to calm him down, but he got nervous and fired.
The pain was brief. I felt the impact in my chest, fell to the ground, and hot blood spread beneath my body. As the robber fled, my vision blurred. I thought about how ironic it was: after so much suffering, I ended up dying for a few hundred dollars that weren't even mine.
"At least the pain ends," I thought as darkness enveloped me.
An intense, wet heat woke me up abruptly.
I felt my body heavy, but alive. The air smelled of damp earth and leaves. It was nighttime, moonlight filtering through the tall tree canopies, and I was completely naked on the soft forest floor.
But that wasn't the strangest part.
Straddling my waist, completely exhausted, was a girl. Her breathing was ragged, her skin glistening with sweat under the moonlight, and her body trembled slightly. She had pointed cat ears covered in soft fur, and a fluffy, long tail that twitched weakly behind her.
Her head was resting on my chest, eyes closed, and her hips still pressed against mine. I could clearly feel that... we had been joined until just moments ago.
"What... what the hell?" I murmured, trying to sit up.
The girl slowly opened her golden eyes, shining like a nocturnal feline's. Upon seeing me awake, her expression shifted from exhaustion to surprise, and then to something that seemed like relief mixed with possessiveness.
"You... you're alive," she whispered in a husky voice, almost purring. "I thought I'd lose you if I didn't give you my warmth."
Her small but strong hands clung to my shoulders. Her tail instinctively wrapped around my leg.
I could only stare at her, stunned, while my mind screamed one thing:
"I didn't want to come back! I wanted to rest forever!"
But my body, treacherous, was already reacting again to the heat of that unknown cat girl who, without knowing how or why, had just become the first thing I saw in this new world.