Still worth it

I think now there's no going back. The bedroom door has been left open for the past three nights, and they are such a comfort when I wake in the middle of the night. Kai's face looms in the darkness, his warm clear eyes shine, he sniffs my forehead to say hello and then he's gone, off on pressing kitten business.

Just before I slipped into sleep, Meera draped herself across my ankles, as if to remind my almost-unconscious self that moving my legs would have serious and immediate consequences. But at some point during the night I forgot this, and woke to Kai nipping--quite ferociously--at the edge of my foot. I swept him off the bed with the foot not under attack, and said No! as forcefully as I could to him, in the dark, in the night, with people sleeping below me. I heard the thump of his soft paws hit the carpeting, and then the thump of his soft paws as he jumped back up. And now he thinks it's a game. Oh dear, oh dear.