I stared at my screen until the heat in my face went down and my heartbeat returned to something resembling professional.
Around lunchtime, a guy from the floor below came up to drop off a memo. I didn’t know him well, just one of the account managers who occasionally needed something signed or delivered, and he lingered at my desk a beat too long after he handed the envelope over. His eyes swept down my outfit and back up with a look I’d been getting since I was fifteen years old.
“Cute outfit,” he said. “Very, uh, schoolgirl.”
I took the memo and smiled at him. My sweetest, widest smile. “Thank you so much. I was actually going for ‘person who can do your job better than you in half the time,’ but I’ll take cute.”
He blinked. Opened his mouth like he was going to respond, thought better of it, and walked away without another word. I watched him go and then turned back to my email like nothing had happened, because nothing had. I’d been getting comments about the way I looked and dressed for as long as I could remember. From classmates, coworkers, strangers on the street. Too sweet, too girly, too pink, too small. At some point you either let it eat you alive or you grow teeth. I grew teeth.
The rest of the afternoon was meetings and emails and a budget review that Finneas ran with the same warmth and personality as a brick wall, which meant it was efficient and nobody argued with him and I took notes so fast my hand cramped. By the time six o’clock hit, I grabbed my bag and bolted for the elevator before he could drop another week’s worth of work on my desk with a sticky note.
I stopped at the bookstore three blocks from the office on my way to the shelter. The place was small, crammed floor to ceiling with shelves, and the woman behind the register knew me by name at this point because I came in every other week for the same genre and she’d started setting aside new releases for me. I picked up the next book in my highland romance series, book four, and tucked it into my bag with more excitement than a grown woman should probably feel about a fictional Scottish lord, but I wasn’t going to apologize for it.
I’d been reading the series one chapter a night and I was fully addicted. The hero was a Scottish lord with a brooding personality and a tragic backstory who couldn’t express a feeling without it coming out as a growl or a command, and the heroine was a sharp-tongued woman who refused to take any of his nonsense and called him out every single time he tried to be stoic instead of honest. I was aware of the parallels in my own life, thank you very much. I didn’t need Maryjane pointing them out, which she had, multiple times, with increasing glee.
I swung by Bonalisa to help Mary close up, walked the dogs that still needed their evening run, and refilled the water stations in the cat room. Mary was on the phone with a supplier arguing about a delivery that was three days late, and she waved at me with one hand while using the other to gesture aggressively at nobody. I blew her a kiss on my way out and she flipped me off with a grin, still mid-argument.
I got home close to eleven. The porch light was on because I’d started leaving it on for Fin, which was ridiculous because he was a dog and didn’t care about ambient lighting, but it made me feel better knowing that if he showed up the porch wouldn’t be pitch dark. And there he was. Big, black, gray-streaked fur, lyingon the top step with his head on his paws. His ears perked when he heard my footsteps on the walkway.
“Fin!” I dropped my bag in the doorway and went straight to him, kneeling down and pressing my face into his fur. He was warm and solid and smelled like pine and earth and something clean, and my shoulders dropped about three inches just from the contact. I’d been wound tight all day and I hadn’t even realized how much until I stopped.
“I got a new book,” I told him, pulling back and holding it up so he could see the cover. Not that he could read, obviously, but I always showed him anyway. “Book four. The hero just found out the heroine has been lying about who she is and he’s furious but also clearly still in love with her, and I need to know what happens or I’m going to lose my mind.”
I grabbed the blanket I kept just inside the front door, wrapped it around my shoulders, and settled in with my back against the porch railing. Fin shifted so he was lying beside me, his body a warm line against my leg, and I opened to chapter one and started reading aloud.
I always read to Fin. It started the first week he showed up because I’d been sitting on this porch reading alone for months and it felt less lonely with someone listening, even if that someone had four legs and couldn’t respond. Or maybe especially because he couldn’t respond. There was something about reading to someone who just listened, no commentary, no judgment, no “why are you reading that trashy romance novel,” just quiet attention.
I did voices. A terrible Scottish accent for the hero that I knew was terrible but committed to fully because half the fun was thecommitment. A slightly better English accent for the heroine. And a narrator voice that was just my regular voice but slightly lower, which Mary had once told me sounded like I was trying to host a nature documentary, and I chose to take that as a compliment.
Fin watched me with those dark, unblinking eyes the whole time, and I swore sometimes he was actually following the plot, because his ears would twitch at the tense parts and his tail would move during the softer scenes and I knew I was projecting but I didn’t care.
“‘I dinnae care what ye’ve done,’” I read in my best attempt at a Scottish brogue, which was genuinely awful but deeply heartfelt, “‘ye belong here, with me, and I’ll no’ let ye go.’”
I dropped the accent and looked at Fin. “God, that’s good. Why don’t real men talk like this? Why do real men just grunt and say ‘acceptable’?” I scratched behind his ear. “Present company excluded, obviously. You’re very articulate for someone who doesn’t speak.”
I read for another full chapter and then set the book on my knee, pages down, and leaned my head back. This was the part of the evening where the reading stopped and the talking started. It always happened. I’d come out here planning to read my book and go to bed at a reasonable hour, and then Fin would be warm against me and the night would be quiet and I’d just start running my mouth about whatever was stuck in my head.
“So he said ‘acceptable’ today.” I was scratching behind Fin’s ears in slow circles and his eyes were half-closed. “Yesterday it was ‘fine.’ Today, ‘acceptable.’ You know what kills me? I think he actually means that as an upgrade. Like in his head, he wentfrom a C-minus to a solid B and he thinks I should be grateful.” I laughed, but it came out a little bitter. “Two years, Fin. Two years I’ve been busting my ass for this man and his entire emotional range when it comes to my work goes from ‘fine’ to ‘acceptable.’ I’d kill for a ‘good job.’ Literally. I would commit a crime.”
Fin’s ear twitched under my fingers.
“And the worst part? The absolute worst goddamn part?” I shifted so I was facing him more directly. “He was watching me today. Through the glass. Just sitting there, not working, not reading, just looking at me. And when I caught him, he looked away like he hadn’t been doing it. Like I’m stupid. Like I can’t see him through a glass wall. And my stupid, traitorous body decided that was the hottest thing that’s ever happened to me. A man looked at me and then pretended he didn’t and I almost combusted at my desk. What the hell is wrong with me?”
I paused and ran my fingers through Fin’s thick black coat.
“He’s so annoying and so ridiculously good-looking and he doesn’t even try, Fin. He just shows up with that jawline and that stubble and those hands and I’m supposed to, what, function? Keep a straight face? My heart does a backflip every time he rolls his sleeves up and it’s humiliating. Genuinely humiliating. I’m a competent, professional woman with a degree and a career and I turn into a puddle because a man pushed his sleeves to his elbows. That’s not normal. That’s a medical condition.”
Fin’s tail moved against the porch.
I picked the book back up and read the next chapter. The hero confessed his feelings on a moonlit hillside and the words wereraw and aching and I read them in the terrible Scottish accent, both parts, his and hers, and when I got to the line where he told the heroine she was the only thing in his life that made him want to be softer, I stopped.
I closed the book on my finger and stared at the dark yard beyond the porch light.
“Imagine hearing that,” I said, soft, more to myself than to Fin. “Imagine someone just saying it. Out loud. To your face. Not a grunt, not a hand wave. Just... words. Real ones that actually mean something.”
I was quiet for a moment. The night pressed in around us, warm and still.
Then I shook it off, opened the book, and kept reading until I could barely see the words on the page. My eyes were burning and my neck was stiff and I finally admitted to myself that I needed to go inside or I’d regret it in the morning.
