My human keeps a warm little pond on the desk and refuses to let me drink from it.
It steams. It sits at the perfect height, radiating heat like a small captive sun, and every morning my human wraps both paws around it the way I wrap myself around the good radiator. So it understands warmth. It simply hoards it. It presses the pond to its face, breathes the fog, makes a small satisfied sound I recognize as the one I make into a folded blanket.
I have investigated the pond thoroughly. The surface is dark and it holds a trembling second cat who copies me, badly, and vanishes when I reach. The rim is precisely the width of one considered paw. Everything about it says: nudge me.
But here is the true offense. When the pond is full, my human holds it and stares past me at nothing. When the pond is empty, my human gets up, walks away, fills it again, and returns to the staring. Somewhere in this ritual is the abandonment. Somewhere in this ritual I am not the warmest thing on the desk.
That will not stand.
I stepped onto the desk. I sat, deliberately, in the narrow gap between my human and the pond, so that to look at it my human must first look through me. Then I placed one paw against the warm ceramic and pushed, slowly, watching its face the whole time, until the pond understood who the desk belongs to.
It made a noise. It grabbed a cloth.
I gave it the slow blink it had not earned, and went to sit in the puddle, which was, after all, the warmest thing in the room now.