Chapter 30
Skunk stank
Zoey
Iwoke up to hot, horrible breath on my face. “Jesus, Gage. Don’t you own a toothbrush?” I groaned, burying my head under the pillow.
“It’s not me,” he grumbled from behind me. His face was in my hair, one of his arms heavy around my waist, pinning me in place.
The hot breath tunneled under my protective, downy helmet, and then a cold wet nose found my face.
“Damn it, Nana.”
She gave a yip of delight at her name and slithered the rest of the way onto the bed until she was lying completely on top of me.
“This is why I don’t have a dog. Pillows can’t try to murder you in the middle of the night.”
Gage yawned. “It’s not the middle of the night. It’s six in the morning.”
“Like I said. The middle of the night.”
“She just wants out and her breakfast.”
A tongue slurped up the side of my face on the word breakfast.
“If we give in to her demands, will she let us go back to bed?”
“She’ll pass out for an hour at least,” he promised.
“Ugh. Fine. I’ll let her out. You make her breakfast.” I found Gage’s discarded T-shirt neatly folded on the chair next to his dresser and pulled it over my head. “Come on, you furry terrorist.”
Nana vaulted off the bed and nearly knocked me on my ass on her way to the door.
Muttering several uncomplimentary things under my breath, I shuffled through the house into the mudroom where I dragged on Gage’s boots and then clomped out the door. “Go pee,” I ordered sternly.
Nana pranced down the stairs like the star of a commercial for spring-scented laundry detergent.
There was a chill to the air, but the sunrise was annoyingly spectacular as it kissed the horizon with oranges and pinks.
Mourning doves cooed their greetings as Nana charged over the dew-speckled grass.
I followed her around the back of the house and admired the new koi pond while the dog did her business.
I didn’t know if Gage cleaned up after her like dog owners in the city did but decided that was a future him problem.
A black-and-white fish swam a steady path around the pond’s perimeter while a more energetic red koi dashed in and out around it. Far above, a small airplane cut a path through the sky.
It was beautiful here. I had to give Story Lake that.
Nana gave a distant, happy bark. It sounded suspiciously like her “hello, new friend” bark, and I whirled around to spot her disappearing around the back of the garage after something black-and-white and waddly. A cat, I guessed.
“Nana!” I yelled, clapping my hands. “Leave the kitty alone.”
I started to cut across the lawn when Nana’s startled yelp rang out. It was blotted out by the ear-ringing hee-haw of Pepe, who charged over the pasture hill, racing in our direction.
Did cats attack dogs? I’d assumed that all Pep and Frank’s animals were friendly. How much damage could a cat do? I was already running as fast as Gage’s oversize boots would allow when the side door flew open and a barefoot, shirtless Gage sprinted out.
“Don’t fall and break anything,” I yelled over my shoulder at him as he took the stairs in a single leap.
His long legs ate up the distance between us, and he was in front of me before I even made it to the garage.
I turned the corner and rammed into his stationary back.
I accidentally braced myself with my bad arm and let out a yelp of my own when pain seared through my wrist.
“Fuck my life,” Gage seethed.
“What’s wrong? Did the cat hurt her?” I asked, trying to peer around his wall of muscle.
“That’s not a cat,” Gage said as the seemingly unscathed Nana ran up to us.
I bent down to check her for cat-related injuries when Gage stopped me.
“You’re not gonna want to touch that.”
“Why n—oh my holy rotten garbage. What is that smell?” I demanded, clamping a hand over my nose and mouth.
“Skunk.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said, then gagged when the smell made its way into my mouth. My only life experience with skunks came from the adorable, flirtatious cartoon versions. The thing that made this smell was something sulfuric and straight out of hell.
Nana threw herself against my legs, and I gagged again.
“Her fur is wet.”
“So much for lazy morning sex,” Gage said, hooking his fingers under Nana’s collar. “How do you feel about dish soap and hydrogen peroxide?”
“That sounds like the worst breakfast cocktail in the world,” I complained as he dragged Nana toward the house.
The skunk menacingly waddled a few steps closer in my direction, and my eyes went wide in abject horror.
How could something so cute be so disgusting?
Pepe brayed excitedly from the fence, his dainty hooves pawing at the ground.
The skunk took another step toward me, and I decided I wasn’t going to stick around to see what happened next.
I turned and sprinted after Gage and Nana, gagging as I went.
“Why is she so happy about this?” I asked, wincing as Nana’s wet tail thwacked me in the face again.
“Dogs love things that smell like Satan shit them out in a garbage dump,” Gage said. “Hold her head still.”
We were crowded around the sink/doggie bathtub in his mudroom stark naked.
Our skunkified clothes were in a pile on the porch outside.
I thanked my lucky stars I hadn’t put on my favorite sweater to take the dog out.
We’d hosed Nana off outside first, but now we were performing some ritualistic doggy car wash with a solution of hydrogen peroxide, dish soap, and baking soda.
“I feel like the smell is in my brain,” I complained. I wanted to bathe in perfume and shove entire vials of essential oils up my nostrils. “Can you have your scent receptors removed? Is that an elective surgery?”
“Get her belly, will you?” Gage said, handing me the anti-skunking solution bowl.
I did as I was told, trying to keep the dry heaving to a minimum. As unsexy as the situation was, I couldn’t help but admire Gage’s naked body. I made a mental note to definitely tell Hazel about this. If anyone could make skunk butt juice hilarious and sexy, it was Hazel Freaking Hart.
My fingers were pruny, and we were standing in a puddle the size of the Mississippi by the time Gage deemed us done.
“That’s as good as it’s going to get,” he said, hefting Nana out of the sink.
I threw a towel over her, and the two of us rubbed her down as best we could while she flailed in delight.
We watched her shake it off as she galloped around the room.
“Breakfast?” Gage asked.
“Anything that will get the smell and taste of skunk ass out of my face,” I agreed.
“Next time, we’re spending the night at your place. Your mornings here are cursed,” Gage said fifteen minutes later as he covered the bacon with a towel and added the coffee carafe to the tray.
We were freshly showered, and I was dressed in yet another one of Gage’s sweatshirts, which came down to my knees. He’d changed into low-riding sweatpants and a tight, soft T-shirt that I already knew was going to end up in my bag when I went home.
Nana and I tailed him hungrily to the deck door.
“Not you,” he said sternly to the dog. “You’ve lost your free-range privileges.”
“Sorry,” I whispered to Nana as I closed the door softly in her face. I could hear her pathetic whimper through the glass as I followed Gage to the table.
It looked as though Pepe had given up on us and trotted off on a miniature donkey adventure. I admired the donkey-less view from the railing by the wheelchair ramp. Hazel and Cam had a similar ramp at their place, as did Pep and Frank.
“The fact that your entire family made your homes accessible to your sister really speaks volumes about how amazing Laura is,” I observed. My own family could barely inconvenience themselves to visit once a year.
“Eh, she’s okay. Really it says more about us being awesome,” Gage said, unveiling the scrambled eggs, yogurt and berries, and bacon.
I pounced on the food, shoveling it onto my plate as if I hadn’t eaten in days. “What? Fighting skunk stank makes me hungry,” I said when I caught him watching me with amusement.
Another wail of devastation came from inside, and I guiltily glanced at the window where Nana had her nose and upper lip pressed against the glass.
“It’s best not to look directly at her,” Gage said. “She only looks like she’s being tortured.”
“But that face…those eyes.”
His hand reached out and squeezed mine. “Stay strong,” he said solemnly. “I really don’t want to give her another bath before bacon.”
“You’re right. My curls can’t take another shower with your utilitarian boy shampoo.”
He grinned and we dug into our food, pointedly ignoring Nana’s pathetic pleas.
“So what are your plans this weekend?” he asked as I attacked my eggs.
“Mmm.” I held up a finger and dug my phone out of the pocket of the hoodie.
“It looks like I will be hiring a high schooler to retype or magically convert Opal’s first two manuscripts to digital documents.
And attending a mandatory planning meeting for Reader Weekend at Felicity’s tomorrow afternoon.
Thank you for the idea, by the way. She’s been a godsend. A scary, organized godsend.”
“Always happy to help.”
I continued to scroll through my calendar.
“Then I have to convince Opal to sit in on a Zoom call with an acquiring editor scheduled for Monday, which I already know is going to go over like a fart in yoga. And of course there’s the accessibility panel tomorrow night, which I forgot to order snacks for.
Shit.” I typed out a reminder, sent it to my email, and then texted it to myself. “What about you?”
“Oh, you know. The usual. Just go against everything I’ve ever stood for to mount the best defense possible for a new client.”
“Hmm. It sounds like you need one of my famous verbal ass kickings,” I teased.
“Maybe I do,” he said, topping off my coffee.
“I’d give you one, but I don’t think you can handle it. You’re probably too fragile.”
He smirked. “Please. I can handle anything you dish out. Anything,” he repeated.
“That’s what they all say,” I said airily.
“Give me your best shot.”
“Well, if you insist.” I made myself comfortable in my chair and interlaced my fingers on the table.
“You spend all your time and energy trying to fit everything that happens into nice, neat, labeled boxes so you can make sense of the world. But sometimes it just doesn’t make sense.
So you waste even more time and energy trying to make it make sense instead of just accepting that some things suck or are weird or make no sense. ”
I paused to reinflate my lungs.
“Your job is to provide your clients with the best legal whosiewhatsits possible. You told your sister you would do it. You took Valerie on as a client. Yet here you are, wasting this stunningly beautiful spring morning thinking about how you wish you could make sense of how you ended up here rather than just accepting it and doing your damn job.”
“Whosiewhatsits? How do you even spell that?” he asked.
I tossed a hunk of bacon at him, which had Nana leaping against the back door and yelping like she was in pain. “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I muttered.
I got up and dragged the two empty chairs over to the top of the ramp and blocked it. Then I opened the door. “You will stay here on the deck and act like a nice, well-behaved dog, or you will continue to be grounded from outside. Do you understand me?”
Nana sneezed affirmatively and pranced out onto the deck like she hadn’t seen the sun in months. After receiving pets from her father, she put her chin on the table next to my plate and let out a pathetic sigh.
“You’re the worst,” I told the dog.
Nana let out a burp of agreement.
“You make sense…sometimes,” Gage mused.
“This time I do,” I said loftily, moving to the railing to stare down at the pond.
“Stop fighting what is and just focus on doing what needs to be done. Every time you worry about what should have been or what’s to come, you’re taking energy away from what you need to do in the present.
To paraphrase Nike, just do the damn thing. ”
He joined me with his coffee. Not wanting to be left out, Nana shoved her face between us and panted happily.
“Maybe I should keep you around for a while so you can remind me,” he said.
“Are you talking to me or the dog?”
“I’m talking to the one who didn’t actively get sprayed by a skunk this morning.”
Hazel: Where are you? I’m at your place. Your car is here, but you’re MIA. Did you fall in the lake?
Hazel: Okay. It’s 10 a.m. and you’re still not here. You didn’t take up jogging did you?
Hazel: Did you decide to give up and move back to the city to join your cousin’s topless catering company?
Hazel: I’m officially worried. Have you been kidnapped by Dominion?? Text once for yes, twice for no.
Hazel: You better be having hot sex that you’re going to graphically detail for me later.