Page 75 of Bounced!

Took another.

Froze again.

Mark didn’t move a muscle, just sat there being a mountain with excellent posture. Dosty finally reached him, stretched his neck out to the absolute anatomical limit, keeping his feet as far back as physics allowed, and booped the very tip of his nose against Mark’s knee.

One boop only.

A reconnaissance boop.

And then, betrayed by his own body, he sneezed.

The sneeze startled him.

He leaped straight up, all four legs, a full vertical launch of pure greyhound panic, came down sideways into the kitchen island, ricocheted off it, and skittered on the hardwood in a frenzy of scrabbling nails, legs going in four directions and finding purchase in none, until he fetched up under the kitchen table in a tangle of limbs. He stared out at us, wild-eyed, as if the floor itself had attacked him without provocation.

Astonishingly, Mark didn’t laugh. The man had the decency and the iron discipline not to laugh at my humiliated dog. I could see the strain on his face, his shoulders shaking, one hand pressed hard over his mouth.

“He’s fine,” I said. “This is normal. He forgets he has back legs sometimes.”

“He forgets—” Mark’s voice came out strangled. “He forgets he has legs?”

“He’s got a lot on his mind.”

“He’s got four legs on his mind, and he can’t keep track of two of them—” And then he lost it, the laugh breaking out of him despite everything, big and helpless. That laugh filled the whole too-big house, and Dosty, under the table, cocked his head at the noise. Something in his anxious little skull recategorized everything.

Mark’s laugh wasn’t a threat.

It was a good sound.

He crept out an inch.

He watched Mark laughing.

He crept out another inch.

“Okay, okay.” Mark wiped his eyes, got himself back under control, and went very still and casual again, resuming his bus-stop posture, but Dosty had already decided something. He came back across the floor, past the scene of his own disgrace, and this time didn’t stretch and boop and flee. This time, he walked the whole trembling length of himself into Mark’s side and leaned his full weight against his massive arm. He let out a groan of such total, boneless surrender that it sounded like the dog equivalent of a man collapsing into a recliner after a double shift.

Mark froze, arm out, not daring to move, a sixty-pound coward draped against his side.

“Dante,” he whispered, barely moving his mouth. “Dante, he’s touching me. What do I do?”

“Pet him.”

“What if he does the sneeze thing again?”

“Then he does the sneeze thing again. Pet the dog, Mark.”

And Mark, with the exaggerated care of a man defusing a bomb, brought one huge, scarred hand up and laid it on my dog’s narrow back.

Dosty didn’t flee. He did not launch. He didn’t forget any of his legs. He just sighed and melted another degree into Mark’s side.

Mark looked up at me with such pure, stunned, delighted triumph, a grown man who’d just been chosen by a nervous animal, that I had to look away for a second, because it was doing something to me I wasn’t ready for while standing in another man’s kitchen.

“He likes me,” Mark whispered.

“He tolerates you.”

“He likes me. Look at him. This is a dog who likes me.” He was still whispering, as though normal volume might revoke Dosty’s approval. “I have a dog leaning on me, Dante. I have never in my life had a dog lean on me.”