“Like my fucking palm print on your ass.” To show me what he meant, he gripped my right butt cheek with his huge palm, and he did it hard. Hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to make me see it in my mind’s eye. He gave me a spank on top of it. “You drive me crazy,” he whispered into my ear. His breath was hot, his words were heavy and dirty and rude.
Quiet, Rosie. Quiet. I focused on the feeling, I focused on the noise of the store. On the sting on my tush. More than any of it, I focused on him and his body and the way we fit so perfectly together. “Crazy good or crazy bad?”
He didn’t answer that either, but he drove into me so hard he took me right off the shelf. Max scooped me up into his arms, and then, like we were in a movie, like gravity didn’t matter at all, he took me standing, my back against the hard metal posts of the huge solid shelves.
“Crazy good. Like every motherfucking thing about you.”
Home Depot was lovely in the afterglow. At the paint counter, we stood side by side, hip to waist, the warmth of his body seeping through his jeans and my thin dress to mine. He’d come inside me once more, and I felt a warmth in my panties, a hot trickle as he spilled from me.
Goodness.
I tried to ground myself on what was real, tangible, and familiar. Underneath the little see-through pad for signing credit card receipts was an advertisement featuring a dad painting a nursery. In my dreamy not-there state, I replaced him with Max on a ladder, with Cupcake watching from below, as he dipped a brush into a big bucket of light pink paint, tenderly painting every wall, making everything perfect for…
Kablewy!
I cleared my throat. I didn’t even feel like I was on the same planet as everybody else. I felt like I was one of my little snail girls, sailing away on her hot air balloon. Still, though, real life. I focused on it as best as I could, on the fact that my toes were a little cold from the air conditioning. On the fact that my whole body was pleasantly sore. On the way Max now stood closer to me than he ever had before, when we were just friends. I looked up at him, and a little bit of dog fur on his shoulder caught my eye. I reached up and brushed it off. “Any word from the vet?”
Max shook his head. “Nope. But want to know a secret?”
We didn’t really have secrets. We finished each other’s sentences, and we were each other’s emergency contacts. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. It was written all over his face and his cell phone wallpaper, which was Cupcake in my arms. “You want to keep her?”
He blinked solemnly. “So fucking badly.”
I dragged my eyes from yet another nursery photo, this one with blue paint and a toddler in a walking thingy, also with a big, beefy dad on a ladder, smiling—how did anybody get anything done in this place? “We should probably try to get Cupcake and Julia acquainted. If you’re planning on staying, that is,” I added, coming up on my tiptoes and tracing the edge of the signing mat with my finger.
“Oh, yeah,” Max said, his eyes right on mine. “I’m staying.”
Butterflies had nothing on that feeling in my stomach. It was a school of a hundred thousand fish, swimming in different directions, or maybe those tiny starlings that fly in a solid mass. “For good?”
Max held my stare. He opened his mouth, about to speak…
Which was when the paint man thumped the counter and boomed, “What can I do you for?”
25
Max
As we left the parking lot, I did something I’d never done before. I reached across the seat and put my hand on her inner thigh, like dudes in trucks had been doing with their girls since the first time a dude owned a truck. For a second, she just stared at my hand, with her lips slightly parted. I gripped her tighter, her bare leg under my palm, so fucking soft and silky. Mine, all fucking mine, I told her with my hand. I pulled on her thigh a little to show her what I wanted, that even though I was touching her, she was still way too far away. She got the message and unbuckled her belt, scooting over to the middle, where she buckled in again. I was living in a country song, and it was the most awesome thing ever.
We drove home like that, and I took the old King’s Highway—the long scenic route. It wound through the forest; I took the curves slow and held her close. I kept one hand on the wheel and one hand on her the whole fucking way. I’d driven that road a million times in my life, but it had never looked so clear or so right. I’d never been aware of how fucking beautiful it was. How beautiful life could be.
It was because of her. Because for the first time, things were starting to make sense. My place in everything made sense. She made sense of the world for me. She gave me somewhere to belong, something to protect. The meaning of life? I’d found it.
A chirp from her phone yanked me out of my haze. “Is it okay if I check it?” she asked, putting one of her hands to her purse but not reaching in.
“God, yeah, of course it is.”
“Okay, but don’t move,” she said, smiling. “Keep your hand there.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I told her and turned my eyes to the road, taking a gentle left deeper into the forest, so that she slid even closer on the bench seat.
But within a moment, she groaned, dropped her phone in her lap, and put her fingers to her eyebrows like she was getting a headache.
“Bad news?”
She dug her fingertips into her eyebrows hard. “This author, the one with the snails and the balloons? There’s a plot change. I need to do some work.”
She really was the fucking cutest. If there was one thing Rosie Madden hated, it was a change in plans. “And that’s a bad thing?”
“Obviously!” She was wide-eyed and incredulous. “I promised I’d be your foreman or right-hand woman or whatever. I promised I’d help. We never agreed for you to fix my falling-down house while I drew snails flying to the moon.”
I gave her leg an even more possessive squeeze. “All I want to do is take care of you. Starting right now.”
When we arrived back at her house and I parked my truck, I didn’t just offer my hand to help her out. As she dangled her feet out the driver’s side, I decided to go the whole nine yards and did yet another thing I’d never done: I put both my hands to her waist, pulled her close, and lifted her out of the cab.
“Oooh! I could get used to this,” she said as she blinked hard in the sun, looking up at me and shading her eyes with one hand.
“You better,” I said, with a pat on her ass.
A thumping from the dormer above the driveway distracted us both. It was Julia, whacking the glass with her tail. Rosie sighed and scrunched up her nose. “I feel bad. She used to roam around, and now all she has to do is stare at my books and try to pull apart my pillows. Hardly seems fair for a lady like her.”
“On the plus side, SPAM consumption is down by like eighty percent, right?”
Rosie lifted her shoulders. “Yeah, but it’s like those cat food ads say, Inside every cat is a hunter. I don’t feel like I’m being a good cat person. Lady. Whatever.”
I grabbed a bag of stuff from the truck bed and tucked the garbage disposal box under my arm. “Want to try to introduce them?”
Rosie sucked in a breath from between gritted teeth. “But we’ve had such a nice day.”
“Have to do it sometime.”
She grabbed my hand. “Do you think it’ll be awful?”
A small cluster of birds took off together as Julia swatted the glass, this time with her paw. My first thought was, Yeah, it’s gonna be terrible, but I didn’t want to rain on her parade. “Maybe, maybe not.” I unbolted the door and put down the stuff from the Depot on the counter. Rosie knelt down to open Cupcake’s crate and greet her. She wedged her tiny head between Rosie’s knees and wiggled her back end like crazy. Wiggled so hard that she flipped herself over, and she bit the air with a big smile.
“So good to seeeee youuuuu!” Rosie cooed softly. “Who’s a good girl? You’re a good girl!” Rosie lay down on the rug and let Cupcake launch the full-scale love attack. I pu
lled my phone from my pocket and grabbed a whole bunch of awesomely blurry shots.
As Rosie squealed and Cupcake tried to kiss the inside of her ears, I heard the thump of Julia jumping off her window perch one floor up. I considered how to do this—this interspecies territory negotiation or whatever. I actually wasn’t sure at all, so I opened up my phone and asked what Rosie called The Source of All Knowledge. “Okay, Google. How do you introduce a cat and a dog?”
A whole bunch of different ideas came back, but the one on top, the one bolded and in bigger font, seemed the most reasonable, “Instead of having them meet face-to-face, consider introducing an object or toy to each other. If your cat has a favorite toy, let the dog sniff that, and vice versa. It’s a good first step.”
While Rosie made Cupcake’s arms dance around like a puppet’s, I dug through Julia’s toy box. “Which one of these does she play with the most?” I asked. In my hands were a whole array of mangled stuffed mice. It was like a recast horror-film version of Watership Down.
Rosie rolled up to sitting, still with Cupcake in her lap. “The one that’s missing its face.” I held up a possible contender. “No, the other one.” I held up the double-amputee, faceless, skinless shell of a stuffed mouse. Rosie snapped. “That’s the fellow.”
I held it out for Cupcake to have a sniff. “What do you think of that?” I asked.
“It’s okay, right? That’s Julia. Juuuuulia,” Rosie explained, like Cupcake might pick up on English any moment.
Cupcake took a tentative sniff, her shiny black nose wiggling but the rest of her holding stock-still.
Until she let loose with a small, wet, and very violent sneeze.
Rosie dissolved into giggles, scooping her up in her arms and nuzzling the top of her head. “My thoughts exactly,” she whispered, with a kiss to Cupcake’s blondish fur.
I left the disfigured mouse there and grabbed a long-armed monkey in striped socks, no bigger than a stalk of celery, to take up to Julia. Even in the few days we’d had her, Cupcake had already unstuffed one arm and was working on its tail. Definitely one of her favorites.
Rosie raised Cupcake’s paw. “Ever in your favor, so on and so forth.”
Up the steps I went, two at a time. In front of Rosie’s bedroom door, I put my hand on the doorknob and braced for some quick defensive moves. “Hang on to Cupcake. Just in case,” I hollered down the steps.
“On it!” Rosie called back.
I cracked my neck side to side, braced for disaster, and made my entrance. As I opened the door, Julia tried to make another mad-dash carpet-fiber-wrecking escape. I was too quick for her, though, and she ground to a stop inches from the door with her claws extended into the carpet. She let out low rawwwwwwwwwr of protest and then turned her back on me. She sashayed off toward a basket of clean laundry and ran her shoulder along it, making her fur ripple through the holes in the plastic.
“Listen,” I said as calmly as I could, “I’m going to show you something.” I palmed the little monkey behind my back. I sat down on the edge of the bed, to let Julia come to me. She slowly stalked the perimeter of the room, eventually circling around to the bed as if by accident. She walked back and forth along the bed skirt, and I placed the monkey at my feet.
“That belongs to a dog. I don’t think you’ve ever met a dog.”
She looked at it, leaned in slightly, and jerked her head back, and then made another pass at the bed skirt.
Her reaction reminded me a little of Rosie’s reaction to expired dairy—“Oh my God, how can it be whatever date already!”—but unlike Rosie encountering spoiled milk, Julia was on the defensive. One step at time, I figured, and reached out for the monkey.
However.
At that moment, I heard the staccato patters of a very small creature moving very quickly up the steps, followed immediately by Rosie running up the steps, too, and whisper-yelling, “Cupcake! Cupcake!”
I didn’t panic at first because I was sure I’d closed the door, but then it became very clear—as Cupcake burst in like someone walking into a surprise party—that I hadn’t. The shit was officially about to hit the fan. Cupcake galloped toward Julia in pure canine joy. Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!
Julia raised the hair on her spine, arched into a half circle, and hissed. How dare you defile my personal bubble, you savage.
Uh-oh.
“It’s all good,” I told Julia. “Seriously. Everything is fine.”
It wasn’t. Like a very small-scale version of a lion stalking a tiny deer, Julia backed Cupcake up against the laundry basket and puffed up her fur so she looked twice as big.
Cupcake flattened her ears and slinked back, Julia began hissing, even louder now, arching her back up like a Halloween decoration. Rosie made a lunge to break them up, but instinctively, I put myself between them. There was no fucking way I was letting Julia sink her claws into my dog or my girlfriend. I scooped Cupcake out of harm’s way, and Rosie grabbed her from me.
And then Julia became airborne.
She hung in suspended animation somehow, legs out like a starfish, furious in the eyes, wild and insane.
The door slammed shut, and Julia made contact. Her claws went straight in, like ten fishing hooks, spread out along my arm. It was like I’d been shot or something—I didn’t feel any pain, only total astonishment. I stared at her claws, sunk deep into my arm, and thought, Holy fucking shit. There is a cat dangling from my body.
“You okay?” Rosie squeaked from outside.
Now, I felt the pain. “Totally!” I said, trying so hard not to let my voice crack with the agony. “You go downstairs. She can probably smell your fear.”
Which Rosie answered with a frustrated, “Grrrrrrr!”
When I was sure Rosie was gone, and gritting my teeth through the pain, I disengaged one claw after another. For a brief and horrible second, Julia swung from me, attached by a single toenail, and I thought I might pass out. I finally understood how those guys felt who got nabbed by a stray hook when they were out fly fishing. Shock. Total fucking shock. But at last, she dropped down onto the bed, eyeing me…and licking small droplets of my blood from her claws.
Yet at that moment, it wasn’t the flesh wounds that shocked me. Or the fact that I finally understood why Rosie’s grandma had named her cat after a tyrant. Or that possibly I’d just given her the taste for human blood, and we were all fucked. Nope. Only one thing mattered then.
I’d thought of Rosie as my girlfriend.
Holy, holy fuck.
26
Rosie
“Oh my God,” I squealed, setting down Cupcake and rushing to help Max. On his arm were ten growing droplets of blood, but he was smiling so hard that it stopped me in my tracks.
“What?” I asked, looking down to see if maybe my dress had gotten caught on my panties and I was giving him an accidental show. Or if, I don’t know, my breasts had somehow fallen out of my bra. He really was smiling that hard. But no, again, everything was in place. It reminded me of the smile he’d had when he saw me naked, I remembered. Only this one was much bigger. “Why are you smiling like that? You’re bleeding! A lot!”
He raked the hand on his non-injured side through his hair and kept smiling as he looked down at the floor. “Nothing. Seriously.” He tried to swallow his smile, but it was totally stuck on his face. He smiled with me a lot, but never like this. “Flesh wounds. I’m good.”
I guided him over to the sink and ran some warm water from the sprayer hose on his massive forearm. Small trickles of blood turned the bottom of the sink briefly pink, before they swirled down the drain. I grabbed a wad of paper towel and blotted at the distinctly claw-shaped marks. “Well done, Google. Nailed it.”
He cleared his throat. He looked me up and down. He was smiling so hard, there were shimmers in his eyes. Like happiness tears. “Could’ve been worse.”
“Are you okay? Are you concussed? Did you fall down? I heard some thumping. You’re sure you’re all right?”
“Oh, yeah.” He d
abbed at his puncture wounds with the paper towel. “Never better in my life.”
I had to admit, that smile looked beautiful on him. It was like for the first time, I was seeing the very center of him—unfiltered, no tough-guy exterior. Just pure, shimmering happiness.
It almost didn’t matter to me that I had no idea why. Because seeing him happy made my heart soar.
“You go do your thing, kitten,” Max said. “I’ll work on the disposal.”
27
Max
The plumbing was circa who-the-fuck-knows, from back when indoor plumbing was still just an experiment. I put the back end of a penlight in my mouth and wedged my head between a spray bottle of something green and an aerosol can of oven cleaner. The pipe work was a fucking free-for-all, like a Tetris of pipes. I maneuvered my hand between them to get to the shut-off valve at the back of the cabinet. The knobs were stuck, like they had thread lock all over them.
I pulled my wrench from my pocket and tried to get a grip on the connection, driving the heel of my hand into the handle, but no dice.
“Need help?” Rosie asked. At the sound of her voice, I instinctively lifted my head—like some bird hearing his mate call out for him. Unfortunately, I was also one inch away from a cast-iron pipe that a guy like Al Capone would’ve had as his weapon of choice, and I clocked myself on the forehead. “Fuck,” I said around the flashlight.
Rosie crouched down with her legs pressed together, giving me a perfect view of the V where her thighs met her panties. Yellow polka dots today. Pink bow, white trim. She’d let me pick them out. Christ. “You okay?” She looked legit worried—eyebrows furrowed, blinking hard.
“Never better.”
“Arm’s okay?”
I glanced at the patchwork of gauze and tape she’d stuck on me. “Perfect.”
So Good (An Alpha Dogs Novel) Page 15