16. Rafe #2
We stayed there for a long while. The driver set the food basket near the stone wall and then discreetly returned to the van.
Max ran until he needed to rest, then drank water before going off to find another stick.
Quinn took off her jacket and spread it on the grass before sitting, knees bent, face tilted toward the sun.
She looked younger in the open air, more relaxed.
Eventually Max decided that fetching was no longer sufficient and began prancing near me with the branch in his mouth, barking around it.
“He wants you to chase him,” Quinn said.
“I don’t chase dogs.”
Max barked again, then darted away and looked back.
Quinn said nothing, but she didn’t need to. Her face contained far too much satisfaction.
I removed my jacket and folded it over the stone wall.
Quinn sat up straighter. “Wait. Are you actually?—”
Max barked.
I took one step toward him.
He bolted.
It was absurd and undignified. An activity better suited to children, dogs, and men who hadn’t spent decades cultivating composure as a survival mechanism.
I ran anyway, not at full speed, but enough to make Max believe the chase was sincere.
He bounded through the grass, circling, doubling back, inviting me close and then veering away.
Quinn laughed, and I tried not to let that become the reason I kept going.
Max let me get close once, then juked left.
“He worked for a living,” Quinn called. “You’ll have to earn it.”
“I’m aware.”
“Are you? Because he just embarrassed your bloodline.”
I changed direction before Max expected it and cut him off near the stream. He stopped, eyes bright, tail wagging hard. For a second, we faced each other across the grass.
Then he dropped the branch and lunged at me.
Not aggressively, of course. Joyfully. A play tackle from a seventy-pound dog who had apparently decided my dignity needed to be knocked down a peg. I caught him around the shoulders as he crashed into my legs, and we both went down onto the grass.
Quinn made a sound halfway between a laugh and a gasp. “Oh my god.”
Max stood over me, panting triumphantly.
I looked up at the sky through moving leaves and found myself laughing hard.
The sound seemed to surprise Quinn as much as it surprised me. When I turned my head, she was staring at me, her face so open, the world seemed to stop around us.
Then Max licked my chin, restoring my perspective.
“Absolutely not,” I said, turning my face away.
Quinn dissolved into laughter again.
Max, having established dominance over a dragon, trotted back toward the water bowl.
I sat up, grass clinging to my sleeves. “He has poor sportsmanship.”
Quinn wiped at her eyes, still laughing. “That was affection.”
I brushed grass from my sleeve and stood, aware that my shirt had pulled loose at one side and my hair was no longer as it had been when we arrived.
Quinn glanced at me for one second too long, then turned decisively toward the basket. “Food?”
“Subtle.”
“No,” she said. “But effective.”
We ate sitting in the grass near the stone wall, Max lying in the shade between us, one paw touching Quinn’s ankle and his eyes half closed. The conversation came more easily there. Perhaps because the air was clean. Perhaps because the dog’s happiness had made a quiet treaty between us.
Quinn told me about Avery Teddington’s townhouse and the absurdity and generosity of rehabilitation dogs occupying real estate worth more than several law degrees.
She spoke of her friend with affection threaded through exasperation: the buzz cut, the bluntness, the way she pretended supplies for Max were “extras” when both of them knew she ordered them deliberately.
“She sounds like a loyal friend,” I said.
“She is. Aggressively. She once threatened to fight a delivery guy because he called Max ‘old boy’ in a tone she didn’t like.”
“Did she fight him?”
“No. I distracted her with a Malinois emergency.”
“Those occur often?”
“At Avery’s? Hourly.”
I told her more about my parents than I intended.
Not the worst of the Fog. Not the private griefs that belonged to my mother.
But I told her about the terrace we had altered so she could walk without fear, the phonograph, the way my father moved through rooms ahead of her to remove anything that might catch her foot or unsettle her before she reached it.
Quinn listened without the anxious softness people often adopted around illness. She didn’t make sorrow the center of the conversation, though she honored it. She asked about my mother’s tea, her music, and whether she liked dogs.
“She likes dogs,” I said. “When she remembers they are dogs.”
Quinn nodded. “Max is flexible about identity.”
I smiled. “I think she would like him.”
Quinn looked down at Max, then back at the field. “I think he’d like her.”
The simple certainty of it affected me more than it should have.
Later, after another run and a long rest in the shade, the conversation turned toward the firm. I didn’t intend it to. It happened when Quinn mentioned the Friday memo and joked that Helena Wallace had given her a deadline so precise it felt legally enforceable.
“You’re doing valuable work,” I said.
She took a drink of water, then lowered the bottle slowly. “That’s the dream.”
“It shouldn’t be only a dream.”
Her mouth twisted to the side. “You’re doing the thing again.”
“What thing?”
“Assuming valuable work gets valued because that would be logical.”
I looked at her.
She smiled faintly. “The internship is paid. It just doesn’t pay enough to make rent, student loans, and Max’s prescriptions stop their siege on my checking account.”
I frowned toward the field, where Max had gotten bored with our conversation and discovered another stick but was now only resting his chin on it. “If interns produce work the firm relies on, they should be compensated properly.”
“They should.”
“Then why aren’t they?”
“Because wanting something badly makes people very available for exploitation.”
The sentence sat in the open air between us. I disliked it immensely.
“I’ll speak to Helena Wallace,” I said.
“No.”
The refusal came instantly.
I turned to her.
She set her water bottle down. “Rafe.”
“It’s not acceptable.”
“I know, but that’s how it works.”
“If the firm bills client work supported by interns, then the?—”
“I know.” Her voice stayed calm, but there was firmness underneath it. “And I know you mean well. But I can’t be the intern whose billionaire dragon client gets involved in compensation policy because I made a sad face near a sandwich.”
“You didn’t make a sad face.”
“Good. At least my dignity is intact, then.”
“It’s a systemic issue.”