26. Bethany
Chapter twenty-six
Bethany
My truck tires crunch into the gravel outside of Lestor Lodge. It seems louder than they used to when my mornings here came with contractor calls and three separate emergencies.
My work bag rides shotgun with nothing urgent inside it.
This is supposed to feel calmer.
Mostly, it does.
"You chose this," I say out loud, to the cold air.
I actually miss the contractor drama. Either that's growth or it's lunacy.
Congratulations, Bethany. You protected your precious independence. Now live with the consequences.
I wonder if Timothy's inside.
I don't have to wonder long. He's on the porch when I walk up, hands shoved deep in his pockets.
He smiles at me and asks about the drive. The roads. Whether I hit ice on the pass.
He doesn't come down the last two steps to meet me. I notice that. I notice myself noticing it, too.
Space, I tell myself. Respect. That's all that is. That's not a man quietly backing his way out of something.
I don't fully buy it, but I answer him anyway. "Little bit of black ice near the turnoff. Nothing bad."
He nods and mentions the roof inspection.
"Do you want to go to dinner and a movie with me tonight—"
A scraping sound cuts across the porch, followed by a pitiful whine.
He looks at me. I look at him. Something passes between us that just says, plain as anything, you heard that too.
We move without a word toward the sound.
Behind the shed, jammed into a gap barely bigger than a shoebox, a puppy shivers against the boards. Its ribs show through fur that's matted and filthy, and my chest does something painful and immediate.
"Hey. Hey, it's okay." I crouch, I reach, I do every single thing you're supposed to do.
The puppy presses itself smaller into the corner.
Great. Kneeling in the snow. World-class at spreadsheets, apparently a walking nightmare to small dogs.
"Maybe don't loom," Timothy says quietly.
"You're built like a doorframe," I mutter, but he's already lowering himself down into the snow, slow and unhurried. He tugs off one glove and lays his bare hand flat on the ground, palm up.
I sit back on my heels, arms crossed against the cold, and just watch him wait. His voice drops into something low and soft, almost embarrassingly gentle, and he doesn't seem to care one bit that I can hear it.
I catch myself staring at his mouth instead of the dog and look away.
He makes trusting him look easy.
The thought catches somewhere tender, so I stand and brush off my pants.
"Okay. Food. I'll get food." I jog to the back door and dig through the refrigerator, looking for the sandwich meat I left in there earlier this week.
Back at the shed, I tear deli turkey into pieces while Timothy holds out his palm.
"Slow," he murmurs.
"I'm being slow," I whisper back, even though he's talking to the dog and not to me.
We lay a little trail of turkey scraps toward his knee, both of us hunched over it like we're defusing a bomb.
My fingers go numb around the meat and I don't care, which surprises me.
The puppy creeps forward inch by inch, nose twitching, and stops right at his hand. It sniffs his fingers. Hesitates.
Then it climbs straight into his lap.
Apparently, even half-frozen puppies love Timothy.
"Guess patience is your secret weapon," I say, light as I can manage.
"Turns out sitting still for hours beats being handsome," he says, and I laugh before I can stop myself.
He tucks the shivering thing inside his jacket, zips it up to its chin. "Purely practical. Body heat." His finger strokes slow circles on its head the whole time.
"Uh huh. Very practical. Very clinical. Very much not you falling in love with a jacket dog."
He doesn't argue. Which is somehow more damning than if he had.
I nearly melt watching him look down at it, then roll my eyes at myself for melting over a man and a zipper.
"We are not naming it," I say, already fully preparing to name it.
"Sir Bartholomew Snugglesworth," he offers, deadpan.
"Absolutely not. Way too much dignity for a dog that was living in a shed."
“Spot,” Timothy says.
“Spot is a surrender. Spot is what you name a dog when imagination has left the building.”
“Sir Bartholomew Snugglesworth, then.”
“That is worse than Spot.”
We walk to the truck bickering over names like we're christening a baby instead of a stray. The puppy's nose pokes out of his collar the whole way.
"Vet first," I say, all business. "Then food. Then a microchip scan."
He folds into the passenger seat with the dog still zipped against his chest, careful with the door.
The heater rattles to life, and for a second it's just warmth and quiet and his hand resting near the console. I glance over and let myself picture it, one unguarded second, him in this seat, a dog between us, both of us headed somewhere together.
Then the old fear elbows in. This isn't forever. When I'm not useful anymore, he'll be gone.
No. Not letting that one finish.
"So what happens after the vet?" I ask, eyes on the road instead of on him.
"We'll figure it out."
The puppy sighs and goes fully limp against his chest, out cold, worn out from the drama of its own rescue.
"You were thinking Bartholomew," he says, out of nowhere, smug.
"I was not."
"Lord Snuggleworth has moved into first place," he says. I laugh and the puppy's ear twitches.
My hands are on the wheel. My eyes are on the road ahead. But Tim's eyes are down on the small sleeping weight against him.
And I only wonder how long this feeling gets to stick around.