by Huskyteer
Jared was able to hold back his tears, but he couldn’t keep from being choked up. “But I don’t want to stop looking for him,” he said.
Rachel squeezed Jared’s paw, and for a moment, the wolf was reliving that moment by Mischa’s bedside on that last day they’d gone to the park together. “Enjoy the life you have now, Jared,” Rachel said. “If Mischa loved you, don’t you think he’d want you to be happy instead of spending your time looking for him?”
It was true, of course. Jared had always known, inside, that Mischa would have wanted it that way. Maybe the wolf’s future didn’t lie with Mischa, and maybe it didn’t lie with Rachel, but there was still time for it to lie with someone. “Thanks, Rachel,” he said, squeezing her paw back. “I’m sorry for being such a weirdo and all.”
“You’re allowed to be a little weird when you’ve got a broken heart,” Rachel said with a quirky, foxish smile. “Just make sure you patch that heart of yours back together, yeah?”
“I’ll try,” Jared said with a smile of his own, but then he immediately corrected himself: “No. I will.”
Rachel put the lid back on her coffee and stood up. “I really do need to get back to the office now, Jared,” she said. Her eyes lingered on him for a few seconds, and then she said, “And don’t worry too much about mistaking me for Mischa. I hear that coyotes can be terribly tricky critters.” She flashed him a playful wink, and then slipped out the door.
Jared was left alone with a grin. He might not find or reattach with Mischa, but the things he liked about Mischa weren’t unique to only him. There were plenty of souls out there that had a seen a lot over the course of their lifetimes, and half the fun of being alive was finding someone to share those old stories with.
* * * *
After a long commute home, Rachel was nearly exhausted. It had been an unusual day, to put it lightly, and she would have sworn that the subway had been experiencing delays solely to give her more time to ruminate over it.
When she opened the front door of the apartment, she smelled that dinner was already underway, and that made her sigh with relief. “Oh, honey, I love you so much right now,” she said, dragging herself over to the living room couch, flopping onto it with her tail draped beside her.
Thomas leaned his head out from the kitchen. His own brush wagged into view as he held onto the door frame. “I heard about the backup on the subway on the radio,” he said. “So, I figured I’d do the gentlemanly thing and get things started.”
He stood there and watched her for a while. She knew he was looking at her, but she just lay back and looked at his reflection in the blank TV screen. Thomas looked back at her via her own reflection, and the moments continued to tick past in silence.
“Everything okay?” Thomas asked. He took off his oven mitt and stepped out into the living room.
Rachel closed her eyes and listened to her handsome fox come closer. “I ran into Jared this afternoon.”
Thomas’ footsteps stopped. He was quiet, too, for a few seconds, before chuckling. “Ah, yes,” he said. “I was wondering what day that’d be.”
The vixen looked back over at him. “So you remember?” she asked with a grin. “You knew this was coming and didn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t know when it was coming,” Thomas said, sitting down on the couch. He put his arm around her. “Besides, I remembered how surprised you’d been, so clearly, I hadn’t already told you.” He smirked, and Rachel thought it an altogether too coyote-like smirk.
Rachel swatted him playfully on the shoulder. “Come on, that’s not funny,” she said. “It was really hard, having to look him in the eye and lie to him.”
“But you had to do it,” Thomas said, kissing her on the cheek. “And it all worked out in the end. I promise you that Jared never thought poorly of you for anything you said.”
The vixen turned her head and kissed her fiancé on the muzzle. “And did he at least stop worrying about trying too hard to find his lost coyote?”
Thomas tucked his arm more tightly around Rachel. “Oh, he still thought about Mischa all the time, of course, but he stopped obsessing over him,” he said. “Besides, he knew that coyotes could be terribly tricky critters.”
“Ah, but which do we credit with tricking the cycle?” Rachel asked. “The coyote, or the fox?”
“Maybe we just credit ourselves,” Thomas said, “for wanting something so bad that we could bend the very rules of the universe.”
Rachel smiled. “I might have to side with coyote on that one, actually,” she said. “After all, I’m the one who thought of it, first.”
“Yes, but I’m the one who followed you.”
With that, Thomas, who used to be Jared, stood up and walked back into the kitchen, and Rachel, who used to be Mischa, got up to follow him.