Page 67 of Bounced!

He was so sweet it was going to kill me.

Then Dostoyevsky bounded into my mind. I sat up so fast I nearly took Mark’s chin with my shoulder.

“Shit, Mark, my dog. He’s been alone all night. I never—” I was already reaching for pants that weren’t even my pants because these weren’t my floors. “He’s been by himself since yesterday afternoon. Dosty gets . . . he’s a rescue . . . he gets anxious. He doesn’t do well alone. I’ve never once left him overnight, and I stayed here like a—” I found a sock. It was Mark’s. “I have to go. I’m sorry. I have to go get my dog.”

I don’t know what I expected. A joke? Mild offense that the morning was ending? The ordinary human thing where the night before matters less than it did in the dark, maybe?

I got none of that.

Mark was up as quickly as I’d risen, already pulling a shirt over his head, already handing me my pants from the chair where he’d apparently set them, folded, because of course he had.

“Go,” he said. “Go and don’t apologize. Why are you apologizing? Poor guy’s been holding it all night. You want me to follow you over? I can follow you over or—” He stopped and cocked his head, some calculus running through his brain. I watched a thought arrive on his face and settle like it owned the place. “Next time, just bring him.”

I froze with one leg in my pants. “Bring him?”

“Yeah. Bring Dosty so you don’t have to do this, so you’re not standing in my bedroom at seven in the morning half in your pants having a heart attack because you’re the kind of man who worries about his dog being lonely. By the way, that’s going on the list of reasons I’m keeping you.” He said it like it was obvious, like it was already decided. “He’s yours, which means he’s family now. Family comes to the house. I’ll get him a bed. What else does he need? Does he need a special bed? I could build him a bed. I build things. I told you that.”

I stood there, half dressed in a giant’s bedroom, and could not, for a moment, form words. I’d braced for the dog to be a problem. Somewhere in me, I’d already chalked him up as the thing that made this hard, the reason I couldn’t stay over, the anchor tying me to my own solitary life. Yet there was Mark, not simply accepting Dosty but claiming him, sight unseen, folding a nervous rescue greyhound into his family the same way he’d folded me in.

“He’s afraid of plastic bags,” I said, which was not what I meant to say. It was just the truest thing I had.

“Then we won’t have plastic bags. We’ll go paper. Done.” He shrugged like I’d raised a solvable problem, which to Mark was the only kind. “What’s his deal? Is he friendly?”

“He’s a coward with a good heart and legs like a tall spider. He’ll love you inside an hour and pretend he doesn’t.”

“Sounds like somebody else I know.” He caught my hand, the one not holding a sock, and reeled me in and kissed me, even with me halfway out the door in a panic about my dog. “Go get your boy. Bring him Thursday. We’re both off Thursday. I’ll make too much food. I’ll get the paper bags.”

“Mark.”

“Yeah?”

I was a man who read ten thousand pages a year and I had, in that moment, standing in his bedroom holding his sock, absolutely nothing. There were no words good enough for a man who’d take my anxious, ridiculous dog into his house, because the dog was mine and mine was enough. What finally slipped free surprised us both.

“You’re sweet, Mark,” I said. “I didn’t know you were sweet. Nobody warned me about that.”

Something moved across his face, surprised and pleased and a little shy again, the color coming back up under the stubble.

“Don’t tell Benji,” he said. “I’ve got a reputation to preserve.”

“Your reputation is that you cried at an ice machine’s funeral.”

“That was a dignified grief,” Mark said, “and I’ll thank you not to bring that up again. Now go. Go get your dog. I can see you vibrating. We’ll fight about my reputation Thursday.”

He turned me by the shoulders and steered me toward the door. I went out into a morning that had somehow gotten brighter than it had any right to be to collect a greyhound and bring him, on Thursday, to a house that had apparently just adopted us both.

I was halfway to my car before I realized I was still holding his sock.

I decided to keep it, as a hostage, just for good measure.

Chapter 22

Mark

Istood in my kitchen after Dante left, grinning at nothing, like a man who’d taken a few too many blows to the head. I couldn’t help it.

The house still smelled like bacon. There were two plates in the sink and a tea mug going cold on the nightstand, and one of my socks had wandered off somewhere. I’d never in my life been so happy about a missing sock.

I kept catching myself doing it, the grin, standing in the middle of a room with a dish towel in my hand, utterly, completely goofy in the head over a man who read Russians and worried about his dog.