SILVER LINED DOUBT. [JESS MARIANO]

TWENTY-FIVE.

(fancy seeing you here. it's been a minute. hope you're ready. also; unedited. severely. please excuse mistakes, i'm super busy but i will fix them very soon. love u all tons! enjoy! -mags)

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MARLEY AND JESS had adopted a cat two weeks after they'd moved in.

He was an orange Tabby with white paws and freckles on his nose. He was unbelievably vocal about everything and liked to wake both of them up by jumping on their beds and making his way up to lay on their heads. He liked to watch Marley make her breakfast before class and could be found sleeping in the sun on the windowsill as Jess wrote on the weekends. He was surprisingly well behaved and had adjusted well to his new surroundings.

Despite his total aversion to the idea and hesitance when Marley brought him home, Jess had warmed up to the cat within the first two weeks (though he would never, ever, admit it). Marley had always suspected it, but it had been confirmed for her when she'd walked home from the paper one day and found him asleep on the couch with a book in his hand and the cat on his stomach.

Jess had even ended up naming the cat. After hours of going back and forth about it (Marley spent at least an hour suggesting the name Cat Stevens to no avail), Jess had found a name that they both seemed to agree on. And thus, Bowie the cat had been adopted into an apartment that was starting to feel more like home every day.

Bowie had become yet another reason that all of their friends decided to hang out at their apartment. Lauren had become Bowie's favorite person on the planet and she had a way of always finding the cat when she was drunk. Marley had found the two in her bathroom playing with a laser pointer at their pregames more than once.

Things, for the most part, were good. Really good, actually. Truncheon was doing well, as the author they signed skyrocketed their sales as they had hoped. The numbers weren't huge, but they were bigger than anything they'd seen since they started the company.

Jess was in the process of plotting a new book, something he'd been working on since they'd moved in. He'd written a rough draft (a rough, rough draft, he'd stressed when Marley had asked to look it over) of the first chapter and while it was something completely different than The Subsect and was not at all what she was expecting from Jess, Marley saw a ton of potential in it.

Marley (despite the amount of stress the Harperch internship, her schoolwork, and the paper put on her) was doing really good too. She worked at Harperch three times a week filing papers, getting coffee, and running errands. Every once and a while she got to talk to her supervisors and pitch some ideas for marketing strategies to them and even though she knew that they probably weren't even listening, it made her feel like she was actually doing something. In typical Marley fashion, she was determined to stand out in a way that wasn't overwhelming, and she was pretty sure she'd done that so far.