Chapter 3
MASON
Ididn’t think the guy was going to show.
I was doubting the whole story about an identical twin, to be honest. The guy had probably just been bullshitting me on that score, same as the guy on the phone I’d spoken to later.
But then, right after Kayla had left for the day, there was a knock at the door.
I’d just finished up bathing the dog. I eyed the tangles in his coat as I towel dried him.
With some elbow grease I could probably brush them out, but I had neither the energy nor the time.
I considered hacking them out with the clippers but dreaded the reaction I’d get from Kayla, who had banned me from all grooming attempts because she claimed I couldn’t cut straight to save my life.
To be fair, she had a point, and also I wasn’t dumb enough to piss off my tech.
So I settled for that being a problem for future me and put the dog in his cage just as the knocking started again.
I opened the door to find three guys standing there.
One was the cute asshole who’d dumped the dog.
He was staring hard at the boards of the porch like he’d never seen anything more interesting in his life.
A guy who looked exactly like him, except he was scowling, stood next to him.
I recognized his attitude from earlier today at the bakery.
The third guy was hot, with long blond hair.
He was wearing shorts and a tank top, and his biceps did impressive things when he lifted his hand to take his baseball cap off.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m Wilder, and this is Cash and Chase. We’re here about the, uh, the dog situation.”
“Mason Ross,” I said and shook his hand somewhat begrudgingly. “Come on in.”
“So, first of all,” Wilder said as they followed me into the waiting room, “it’s not our dog. Cash found it. Right, Cash?”
Cash nodded, gaze still on the floor.
“Second of all, Cash doesn’t talk,” Wilder said. “He can, but he doesn’t. Just putting that out there.”
Wilder’s tone was firm and there was a warning look in his eyes, as though he was expecting me to push back or call bullshit or something.
I wasn’t. Clearly, Wilder wasn’t going to elaborate on the no-talking thing, which was fair.
Whatever Cash’s deal was, we could all agree it was none of my business.
It helped that Chase was looking at me like he was going to rip my throat out with his teeth if I asked anything about it.
“That’s fine,” I said, and Cash darted a glance at me. He looked as anxious as he had last night, and I wondered if I’d done him a disservice by thinking all day that he was an asshole. “So the dog’s a stray?”
Wilder nodded, and Cash looked away again.
Would have been a hell of a lot easier if Cash had told me that last night, I thought, and then gave myself a mental kick. Wilder had just said that Cash didn’t talk.
“So, uh, what do we owe you?” Wilder asked. “It’s not our dog, like we said, but we’d like to make it right.”
I looked at the three of them again. Cash’s jeans had a rip at the knees and the rubber was peeling away from the toe of one sneaker, and the fabric of his tee was faded and worn thin.
I glanced out the window and took in the battered truck they’d arrived in.
I definitely wasn’t going to see any money here.
And it was my own goddamn fault. The second Cash had run off last night, I should have just arranged to take the dog to a shelter. But instead, I’d gone ahead and made space in my schedule this morning and fixed his ear.
I sighed and silently apologized to Uncle Jim. “Technically? Since he’s a stray, we usually don’t charge.”
Cash’s brow furrowed and he whispered something to his brother, casting me worried glances.
“Cash wants to know how much it would be if we did want to pay,” Chase said, glaring at his twin.
“Six hundred and eighty dollars,” I said.
“Jesus Christ!” Chase said. “That’s fucking robbery.”
Cash elbowed him, and Chase winced.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Just… we weren’t expecting it to be that much. For a torn ear, I mean,” Wilder said.
As though even a simple surgery didn’t include the costs of the blood work, the propofol, the oxygen, and the gas.
Of course these guys didn’t expect it to be that much.
I’d have bet they also hadn’t given much thought to the fact that the business also needed to pay my wage and Kayla’s, and cover things like the utilities and insurance.
Chase looked more and more unfriendly, which really shouldn’t have been physically possible. “Do you have like, a discount?” he asked.
“That is the discount,” I said. “If I was charging for the emergency consultation, it’d be an extra two hundred and fifty.”
Wilder winced this time. “Shit.”
Yeah, that summed it up. Not that it mattered. These guys weren’t obligated to hand over a dime.
Cash whispered to his brother again.
“He wants to know what happens to the dog,” Chase asked.
“I’ll take it to a shelter,” I said.
Which, again, I should have done last night because Uncle Jim’s hardship fund was currently sitting at a few hundred dollars and change. I’d known that before I’d done the surgery, just like I’d known that there was a damn good chance the practice would have to eat the cost, but I’d done it anyway.
I made the mistake of looking at Cash. His mouth was compressed into a thin, wavering line, and he quickly swiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand.
Chase wrapped an arm around his shoulders and glared at me, like this was my fault somehow.
Cash lifted his gaze and said, in a voice hardly louder than a whisper, “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” I said and, against my better judgment, asked, “Do you want to see him?”
Cash nodded, swallowing.
I took them through to the back, where the dog was curled up in his cage. As soon as he saw he had company, he stood up, tail wagging. I opened the cage door. The plastic of the E-collar scraped against the cage as he darted out.
Cash dropped down onto his knees for his reunion with the dog while Wilder watched uncomfortably.
“Hey,” Cash whispered to the dog as he squirmed and tried to lick his face. “Hey, there, dog. Look at you.”
It was more words than he’d managed to say to me.
Then he looked up at me, saw me watching, and immediately hunched over the dog and clamped his mouth shut.
Shit.
I rubbed my forehead where a tension headache was doing its best to form.
It didn’t get any better when his twin dropped to the floor next to him. The hard edges of his glare melted as he petted the dog, and he looked just as young and vulnerable as his brother.
“Cash,” Wilder said, crouching down beside them.
His voice cracked on Cash’s name, and he cleared his throat.
“You can’t keep the dog, buddy. Even if we figure out a way to pay Dr. Ross, it’s gonna have to go to the shelter.
You know that, right?” He shot me a look.
“You’d take it to a good shelter, right? A no-kill shelter?”
I was pretty sure Kayla had said the closest dog shelter was the municipal one in Lawrenceville. Given that it was run by Animal Control, I very much doubted it was no kill.
My expression must have told Wilder everything he needed to know because he mouthed an f-bomb that couldn’t have been any clearer if he’d used a bullhorn.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Here’s the thing. Nobody owns this dog, so we have to figure out what to do with him. And in the case of a stray, that would normally be the shelter—unless you can pull six hundred and eighty dollars out of thin air,” I added.
I didn’t really expect them to pay, and I steeled myself for the torrent of abuse that I was sure was coming my way, and that I’d heard a hundred times before when people had to hand over their hard-earned cash.
The ones who thought that I was only in this for the money and that I didn’t really care about the animals or—and this one was my personal favorite—that I was stealing the food out of the mouths of their children.
You know, the sort of comments that really made me and my student debt feel great about the choices we’d made.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, Cash scrambled to his feet, whispered to his brother, and dug out a battered wallet. He fished out a five, a ten, and a handful of quarters that came to a buck twenty-five and held it out to me wordlessly.
“Jesus Christ, Cash,” his twin grumbled. But he stood and pulled a handful of ones and a couple of fives out of his pocket and added them to the pile. “Cash wants to pay if it means the dog gets to find a new home.”
What the hell was I supposed to say to that?
Wilder sighed, then pulled out his wallet and added a fat stack of singles. One of them had traces of glitter clinging to it. “Is that enough to start with?”
I stared at the pile of crumpled bills, and of course Cash looked at me, his face pale and tear-stained and hopeful, and fuck it all, I was about to say something really fucking stupid, wasn’t I?
“He can stay with me for now,” I said. Yep, there it was. “I’ll look after him while you find him a good home, and we’ll put his picture on the practice Facebook page to see if his owner comes forward. But you don’t have forever. If you can’t figure anything out, he goes to a shelter.”
Wilder looked relieved, which I wasn’t sure was for the dog’s benefit as much as it was for Cash’s. Cash dropped to the floor and hugged the dog and buried his face in his wriggling, hairy body. His shoulders shook, and I pretended not to notice.
“What about the rest of the bill?” Chase asked, his brow creased, and I could see it was weighing heavily on him. On all of them.
“Let’s see where we are with this.” I counted the handful of bills and coins. Altogether it came to seventy-six dollars and twenty-five cents—there had been a lot of singles in that pile of Wilder’s. “Okay, so we can call that eighty,” I said. “Which leaves six hundred outstanding.”