Sniffed.
Considered.
Then he lay down beside Dostoyevsky and rested his head on the greyhound’s front leg. Something loosened in my chest, because Hiro choosing to trust a strange dog was Hiro choosing to trust the world, and every time he made that choice, it felt like a small, private miracle.
“Don’t film it,” I said to Mia, who already had her phone out.
“It’s interspecies intimacy, Peter.”
“Let them be,” Rod said from the kitchen, where he had plated the peach pizza and was now doing something to the honey drizzle that involved a blowtorch he’d brought from home. Apparently, Rod traveled with a blowtorch the way other people traveled with a phone charger.
I stood at the island and scanned my apartment.
Chase was on the couch with Potato.
Jacks stood at the bookshelf running his finger along the spines with the slow attention of a person who reads titles the way other people read faces.
Rod stood in the kitchen with a blowtorch and a beagle.
Mia was filming the dogs despite my objections.
Dante sat in the armchair with his book, apparently content to exist at the periphery of a social event, reading Tolstoy while his greyhound served as a pillow for a stranger’s pit bull.
Finn was organizing the drink station because the Irishman had never met a drink station that didn’t need the Dewey Decimal System.
General Tso sat atop the refrigerator, tail his only moving part, twitching at the tempo of displeasure.
There were seven people, two dogs, a bulldog (because he counts as his own category), a cat on a refrigerator, and a hairless cat in a carrier behind the couch. My apartment, which had held exactlyoneperson and a rotating cast of foster animals for two years, was full in a way no home of mine had been since Portland.
Benji appeared beside me. He’d shed the apron and was holding two plates of pizza, one of which he set in front of me without asking if I wantedit, because Benji had learned that I would always say I wasn’t hungry but would always eat if food appeared, and that the most efficient path between those two points was to skip the question entirely.
“You okay?” he asked quietly.
“There are seven people in my apartment.”
“And three dogs and two cats.”
“I haven’t had seven people in my apartment since . . . in years.”
He didn’t ask what I meant. He knew what I meant. He just stood beside me at the island and let the sentence exist.
The letting-be was exactly what I needed.
“Is it okay?” he asked.
I looked at my apartment full of people and dogs and cats and noise and warmth and six pizzas that a man had spent all day making because he wanted his friends to come over and enjoy themselves.
And I swallowed.
Hard.
And clicked my tongue.
“Ask me at midnight,” I said.
I ate the pizza.
It was better than it had any right to be.
