“Andrea.” Maryjane set down her pen and gave me a look, the one that meant she was about to say something I didn’t want to hear and was going to enjoy every second of it. “You have been complaining about this man to me for two years. Two wholeyears. And in all that time, you have never once said you’re going to quit.”
I sat up straight. “The job market is bad.”
“Uh huh.”
“And I have student loans. And the economy is, you know.” I waved my hand vaguely. “The economy.”
“Uh huh.”
“What?”
She leaned forward on her elbows. “And of course this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you have a massive crush on your hot boss.”
My face went red so fast I could feel the heat climbing from my neck to my ears. I pressed my palms to my cheeks like that would somehow contain it. “I do not have a massive crush on my boss.”
“You literally described his hands to me last week for four minutes. The way he holds a pen, Andrea. You talked about how a man holds a pen.”
“That was a medical observation. I was concerned about his grip posture.”
“You said, and I quote, ‘he writes with this focus that makes me forget what I was saying mid-sentence and I can’t look away.’”
“I said that in confidence and you are betraying the sacred bond of friendship right now.”
Peter walked in from the back carrying a bag of dog food over his shoulder. He was thirty-four, tall, sandy-haired, and had been married to Mary for three years. They ran Bonalisa together and they were the kind of couple that made you believe in love and also want to throw something at them, because Peter looked at Mary like she hung the moon every single time she walked into a room and it was disgusting and beautiful and I wanted it desperately.
“Are we talking about the boss again?” he asked, stacking the bag against the wall.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Maryjane said.
“He’s not even my type,” I tried, and even I could hear how weak it sounded. “My type is nerdy. Glasses. Harmless looking. Someone who smiles and reads books and doesn’t grunt at me like I’m inconveniencing him by existing.”
Maryjane propped her chin on her hand. “And yet.”
“Don’t ‘and yet’ me.”
“And yet.”
I groaned and dropped my head back onto the counter. She was right and I hated it. My type, the theoretical type I had carefully constructed during college based on every romance novel I’d ever read, had absolutely nothing in common with Finneas Kingsley. He was tall and broad and grumpy and had a stubble beard and sharp square jaws and communicated primarily through a series of grunts and hand gestures and somehow,despite all of that, had become the center of my entire stupid cardiovascular system.
“I’m going to go clean some litter boxes,” I announced, pushing myself up from the chair. “Because that is a more productive use of my time than this conversation.”
“Sure, honey,” Mary called after me. “Run from your feelings. The cats will understand.”
I spent the next hour helping around the shelter, feeding the cats, refilling water bowls, sweeping the back kennels. A nervous terrier mix in the corner pen caught my attention because he wouldn’t let anyone else near him. He pressed himself against the far wall when I opened the gate, so I just sat on the floor and talked softly until he crept close enough to sniff my hand. Didn’t let me pet him, but he didn’t bolt either, and I counted that as progress.
Peter drove me partway home because it was close to midnight and he and Mary worried about me walking alone this late. I told him I was fine and he drove me anyway, which was just Peter being Peter, and I loved them both for caring even though I’d never say it in those exact words because Maryjane would use it as emotional leverage for at least a month.
I got to my front porch and there he was.
Fin was sitting at the top of the steps, big and black and solid, his dark fur catching the dim glow from the porch light. He had some streaks of gray through his coat and his eyes were so dark they were almost black, steady and watchful, and when he saw me his tail swept once across the wooden boards.
When I first saw him two years ago, I thought he was a wolf. He was too big for a regular dog, too broad, with a way of holding himself that felt more wild than domestic. But he never growled, never bared his teeth, never did anything remotely threatening. He just showed up on my porch one night, around the same time I’d started working for Finneas and moved into this house that an old acquaintance of my grandma’s had rented to me, and he kept coming back.
I’d tried to find his owner. Asked around the neighborhood, put up flyers, checked for a chip at the vet. Nothing. I’d tried keeping him inside, but he always found a way out and then showed up again a day or two later, well-fed and uninjured, like he had somewhere perfectly fine to go but chose to come back to me. Eventually I stopped trying to contain him and just let him be.
I named him Fin because for some reason he reminded me of Finneas, and I had never told another living soul this. I would take it to my grave.
