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Mina is used to be the only source of noise (and life) of the ninth floor; she is the only person living there, the other three apartments empty for as long as she’s arrived at the building, two years ago. Apparently, old buildings with nine floors and no elevators are not so appealing anymore, and she can’t blame people. Climbing nine floors of stairs wasn’t that fun, and sometimes Mina herself wondered why she still lived there.

The lack of possible complainers is the reason of why Mina doesn’t care when one of her grocery bags gives up to the weight of the three milk cartoons in it while she tries to reach for her keys in the very bottom of her purse. She barely gasps when the cartoon basically explodes when it hits the ground, covering the hallway floor with a pool of skimmed milk.

Fortunately, no can actually listens her noises or check on the mess she’s made.

She jumps over the mess and enters her apartment, simply happy to be home after the 2-hour commute (she likes the term “daily trip” better) and a long line at the minimarket near the station. Mina even hums a made-up melody while she drops the rest of her groceries over the counter and pulls a rag from under the kitchen sink to clean the mess outside her door.

It’s Friday, she’s home, nothing can get in the way of her good mood at this point.

She gets rid of her shoes on her way back to the door and stops on her tracks when she notices she has company.

The spilled milk is reduced to almost the half of its amount by the time Mina is back, and an eager cat continues to the remains on the floor.

Mina frowns.

She looks around in awe.

A cat?

As far as she knows, pets aren’t allowed in the building – and she tried to sneak a few strays from the street a good amount of times to know about this rule. But there is a very real, a very black cat drinking the spilled milk outside her door, seeming unfazed by her utter shock.

“Hey, kitty?” Mina purrs, squatting until she is facing the cat closely. “What are you doing here?”

As if sensing the aura of someone who is a er for cats, the animal looks up. There are tiny drops of milk hanging on the dark fur around its mouth, and the cat proceeds to clean its own mess while looking intently at Mina.

For a moment, the woman thinks the cat’s winked at her.

Mina shakes her head and it’s impossible not to smile back at the chubby, round face that seems so curious.

“Do you like the milk?” She asks, taking tiny steps towards the cat in order to not scare it away. “Let’s take you inside…” for Mina’s surprise, the cat doesn’t budge when the woman makes mention to grab it.

Instead, the animal purrs and let itself being carried inside the apartment, the milk forgotten behind them.

Mina has always dreamed of having a cat – or a dog; at least a company when the days get way too quiet.

Living alone was her option, after years living with roommates during college years, all Mina wanted was privacy and space, personal space.

The old apartment rested on the main street of the Old Town part of the city, with tons of walls made of cute bricks and pubs and flower shops crowding each block. It was Mina’s dream, even though living there means to face two hours in public transportation every day to downtown; yet, she still holds the pleasure of coming to a cute and modern neighborhood every night, away from sirens and trending clubs and people flooding the streets at 2AM in weekdays.

There, she has peace. But – still – no pets are allowed.

So when she brought the black blob of fur inside, she clearly wasn’t thinking all the way through. Somehow, the cat managed to enter the building, and somehow the cat also managed to climb all the stairs up to the ninth floor. Even if the animal found its way up using the fire escape stairs, it was almost impossible to get into the building through them.

Mina is marveled, to say at least, as she sits on her kitchen floor and watches the cat inhale the bowl of warm milk. Are you a magical cat?, she thinks, laughing of her own silliness. If not magical, a very cute cat.

You look so fat and trimmed to be a stray cat. I wonder where did you come from.

However, the cat looks up with a knowing look.

Ops, I forgot you can’t talk. But maybe you can tell what I am thinking?, she squints her eyes in mocking suspicious of the cat. The animal sticks its tongue out, cleaning what it’s left of milk on its mouth and glares at Mina with a bored look, not interested at all.

I’m not boring, Mina acts offended until she notices she is keeping an imaginary conversation with a cat.

She gets up, taking the now empty bowl of milk to the sink with the black cat following her closely. It sits next to Mina’s feet while she washes the bowl, and it looks at her with curious eyes when Mina looks down, hip against the counter. “Now what?”

The cat lets out a cheerful meowing, running past Mina as if it owns the place. She rolls her eyes because, of course, cats, and finds the furry ball making itself a bed on her couch.

“I shouldn’t be doing this…” she hums, a little too soft with all the purring of the black cat. “But you must be tired, so I’ll let you be” Mina whispers, tiptoeing back to the kitchen, leaving the content cat having its rest.

It isn’t hard to decide that the cat can stay, but it is a lot harder to think of a way of keeping her – Mina finds out before going to bed that night that the cat is actually a she – hidden from the landlord of the building. She places a new bowl on her kitchen floor before going to sleep, this time with canned tuna, and gives the cat some scratching behind her ears before going to sleep.

The next morning, Mina knows something is not right.

There is a loud bang somewhere outside her room and Mina wakes up with what she can only assume to be a horrified crying. She shoots herself up in the bed, mind still lost in the haze of sleep, heart pounding fast.

For a whole minute, she forgets that there is another living being in her apartment, but the realization brings her a wave of relief. It’s just the cat…

She gets up quickly, not even sliding her feet into her slippers before sprinting to the living room.

The cat is banging her chubby paws against the door, meowing like there’s no tomorrow.

“Hey, kitty, hey” Mina makes a little run to the cat, patting her head in a vain attempt of calming her down. “Do you want to go out?”

She wonders for a minute or two. If she lets the get go out, she may not ever return. But Mina has no heart to keep the cat locked inside her apartment when she sees the huge yellow eyes looking so pleading at her. She nods, unlocking the door with sleepy fingers, barely registering when the cat squeezed her body into the tiny space that Mina has opened.

“Hey!” Mina gasps, looking around for a coat to throw over her pajamas. “Kitty!”

She blames her stupid sleepy brains for open the door so carelessly, groaning as she makes her way out of the apartment only to find the door of apartment number 99 slowly being closed.

She stares, partly shocked, partly in complete disbelief.

People actually live in apartment 99?!

She keeps staring, waiting for the door to open again. Since when?

The weekend passes by and there is no sign of the cat, or from anyone from apartment 99. Mina even thinks she had imagined things, imagined a black cat that could read minds that ran away inside an empty apartment. But the couple of pictures she sent to her friends showing her new companion were still in her phone and she has no heart to tell Jeongyeon that she lost the cat.

During the whole Saturday, Mina contemplates whether she should go over the next apartment or not.

On Sunday, she decides that she won’t. Whoever lives there didn’t have the trouble of coming by to present themselves or being noticed, even if she lived right on the next door. Plus, she never saw any sign of light coming out from the window next to hers, not even when she took her reading time on the fire escape stairs. So Mina let it be. About the cat… she would find her way back if that’s what she wants to.

She tries to focus on the spreadsheets she brought home for the weekend and ignores the light disappointment when she recalls the cat trying to get out of her apartment that quickly.

It’s on Monday that Mina’s resolution falters.

She has just made to the ninth floor, her breathing a little off pace, when she spots a girl – probably her neighbor – for the first time. She is locking her door, headphones on.

That makes Mina stop almost immediately, like she is watching a wild and rare animal for the first time and doesn’t want to scare it away.

The girl seems a little younger than Mina herself, blond her in a short modern cut tied in a messy half ponytail, eyes covered with makeup, her lips shimmering with some glossy coat. She’s dressed all black, and her huge combat boots were probably giving the girl more inches of height.

“Hi!” Mina almost – but pretty much – screamed when the girl turned around. “I’m Mina, I’m your neighbor!” She kept her volume high, trying to surpass whatever the girl was listening on her phones.

The girl smiles, pointing to her own ears. “These are off” Mina feels her cheeks burning right there, blaming her rusty social skills on that. “I’m Chaeyoung.”

Mina nods, pushing her hair back just to keep her hands busy. She finally takes some steps into the hallway.

“I didn’t know there were new people on the building…?”

“I got here two days ago” the girl says as a matter of fact and they fall into this awkward, dense silence. “So… I need to get going” Chaeyoung has insure eyes and insure voice.

Mina’s smile falters.

“Did you see a cat?” Mina burps out. She can’t contain herself, not when the girl seems to be ready to walk out. It’s been two days since she last saw the cat and she needs to know if her chubby friend is okay.

“A cat?” Chaeyoung rises one single brow. “Here?”

“Yes, a black and chubby cat.”

“I have seen no cat” Chaeyoung states abruptly. “Now, if you excuse me, I’m late for work. See you around.”

Mina thinks she should be offended by how quickly the girl dismissed her.

On Wednesday, Mina gets home to a cat waiting for her by the door.

She runs, giggling, happy and relieved that the cat is back and well, rushing her inside the apartment and looking for the not too shabby stack of canned tuna. The cat eats with mild interest before sprinting on a tour around Mina’s apartment.

“Make yourself home” she pats the soft fur when the cat rolls her tail around Mina’s ankle.

From this day on, there’s this perfect harmony between Mina and the cat.

They stablish their routine – sometimes the cat is waiting for her, sometimes she is not, but she doesn’t spend more than two days without giving Mina a heads up.

Still, Mina doesn’t know where did the cat come from or where she goes everytime she sprints through Mina’s door, even if her senses are screaming to go and take a look on her neighbor next door.

It’s the last Sunday of the month when the mystery thickens.

She had just woke up with the cat meowing on her door, too impatient for getting out to wait for Mina to naturally come out of bed. She covers the path between Mina’s bedroom and the front door at least three times before the woman even gets there, and when she does, the cat walks away with the sassy sway that only a cat could hold.

The cat never walked away so calmly like this before. Mina sticks her head out and watches as the cat happily trails her way to the number 99.

Mina squints her eyes.

Chaeyoung.

It seems like the door is already open, only waiting for the cat to come in.  Soon as the cat vanishes through the door, Mina steps outside.

Only three knocks are necessary to bring Chaeyoung to open the door.

“Hi!”

“Mina” she says, looking at Mina from head to toe in a blunt, if not rude, kind of way. “Good morning?”

“Good morning, Chaeyoung” Mina tries to look as nonchalant as possible while peeking over Chaeyoung’s shoulder. The only thing she can spot is a couch with a multicolored quilt resting on top of it while the morning light is blasting through the large old windows. “Have you seen a cat?”

Chaeyoung’s brows deepen into a confused frown.

“No…” she says, and Mina can swear she hears something behind Chaeyoung’s voice. “You know pets aren’t allowed in this building, right?”

“I know, but…” Mina gives up and sighs. Either Chaeyoung was bluntly lying to her face, or Mina’s been imagining this black cat for the last weeks. Either way, she can’t risk telling Chaeyoung about the cat and have the landlord inspecting all the corners of the building after the little ball of fur. “Never mind.”

Chaeyoung sustain her gaze, looking for something else on Mina’s face and Mina feels like she is looking at a mirror, because she is also trying to find any trace of dishonesty in the girl’s large eyes. They both call a silent truce, and Chaeyoung’s eyes even get softer on the corners.

“Did you have breakfast?”

“What?”

“I asked if you had breakfast” only then Mina notices that Chaeyoung is holding her keys and there’s a little purse crossing the front of her body. It’s a neon green tiny purse, something a teen that it’s too much into fashion would wear, but if fits Chaeyoung in some sort of way. Still, she is all covered in black clothes, but this time there are worn out white Converses on her feet, the combat boots nowhere to be seen. “I’m going to this bakery across the street, they have the best croissant.”

Mina opens and closes like a fish. It sounded like an invitation.

“Croissant sounds nice” she nods, still confused with the sudden change of plans. She still had a cat to chase… At least she thinks she does.

“Uh, isn’t too cold for pajamas?” Chaeyoung calmly says, not looking at Mina while locking the door.

The opposite of cold is what is burning on Mina’s cheeks. She was really about to go outside wearing her Tim – the teddy bear! – pajamas.

Even if it’s too late for this, Mina shyly covers herself and tells Chaeyoung to wait for her.

She has never visited that bakery, not even once. It is true that the place is always starting to open for the day by the time Mina passes by hurriedly on her way to work; she may have noticed once or twice the amazing smell that fills up the street, the scent of fresh buttery bread and rich coffee acting like a lure for the hungry workers awaken at 6:30 in the morning. Not Mina, who had a perfectly efficient coffee room at her office, where the coffee was kind of bland but it would work perfectly fine for her.

Mina knows she’s been missing something when they cross the entrance of the bakery and suddenly they’re engulfed by warmth and a swirl of different smells. Everything is gold and yellow inside the bakery, the walls covered with displays showing off different types of bread and pastries.

Although she is quite small, Chaeyoung walks like someone who owns the place. She slaps the counter, being much noisier than Mina would consider appropriated. She eyes Chaeyoung with surprise and warning.

However, the only worker at the moment, a pale girl with a cute apron around her thin waist, turns around with a blinding smile.

“Look who’s here!” she cleans her hands on the apron, her smile still bright and gentle. “Same as always?”

“Make it two” Chaeyoung points at Mina as a kid points to their annoying friend. “Mina, this is Dahyun. Dahyun, this is my neighbor.”

“Is Chaeyoungie already making new friends?” Dahyun coos and Mina can’t help but smile at the w