Chapter 1 Andrea #2
My face went red so fast I could feel the heat climbing from my neck to my ears. I pressed my palms to my cheeks like that would somehow contain it. “I do not have a massive crush on my boss.”
“You literally described his hands to me last week for four minutes. The way he holds a pen, Andrea. You talked about how a man holds a pen.”
“That was a medical observation. I was concerned about his grip posture.”
“You said, and I quote, ‘he writes with this focus that makes me forget what I was saying mid-sentence and I can’t look away.’”
“I said that in confidence and you are betraying the sacred bond of friendship right now.”
Peter walked in from the back carrying a bag of dog food over his shoulder.
He was thirty-four, tall, sandy-haired, and had been married to Mary for three years.
They ran Bonalisa together and they were the kind of couple that made you believe in love and also want to throw something at them, because Peter looked at Mary like she hung the moon every single time she walked into a room and it was disgusting and beautiful and I wanted it desperately.
“Are we talking about the boss again?” he asked, stacking the bag against the wall.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Maryjane said.
“He’s not even my type,” I tried, and even I could hear how weak it sounded. “My type is nerdy. Glasses. Harmless looking. Someone who smiles and reads books and doesn’t grunt at me like I’m inconveniencing him by existing.”
Maryjane propped her chin on her hand. “And yet.”
“Don’t ‘and yet’ me.”
“And yet.”
I groaned and dropped my head back onto the counter.
She was right and I hated it. My type, the theoretical type I had carefully constructed during college based on every romance novel I’d ever read, had absolutely nothing in common with Finneas Kingsley.
He was tall and broad and grumpy and had a stubble beard and sharp square jaws and communicated primarily through a series of grunts and hand gestures and somehow, despite all of that, had become the center of my entire stupid cardiovascular system.
“I’m going to go clean some litter boxes,” I announced, pushing myself up from the chair. “Because that is a more productive use of my time than this conversation.”
“Sure, honey,” Mary called after me. “Run from your feelings. The cats will understand.”
I spent the next hour helping around the shelter, feeding the cats, refilling water bowls, sweeping the back kennels.
A nervous terrier mix in the corner pen caught my attention because he wouldn’t let anyone else near him.
He pressed himself against the far wall when I opened the gate, so I just sat on the floor and talked softly until he crept close enough to sniff my hand.
Didn’t let me pet him, but he didn’t bolt either, and I counted that as progress.
Peter drove me partway home because it was close to midnight and he and Mary worried about me walking alone this late.
I told him I was fine and he drove me anyway, which was just Peter being Peter, and I loved them both for caring even though I’d never say it in those exact words because Maryjane would use it as emotional leverage for at least a month.
I got to my front porch and there he was.
Fin was sitting at the top of the steps, big and black and solid, his dark fur catching the dim glow from the porch light.
He had some streaks of gray through his coat and his eyes were so dark they were almost black, steady and watchful, and when he saw me his tail swept once across the wooden boards.
When I first saw him two years ago, I thought he was a wolf.
He was too big for a regular dog, too broad, with a way of holding himself that felt more wild than domestic.
But he never growled, never bared his teeth, never did anything remotely threatening.
He just showed up on my porch one night, around the same time I’d started working for Finneas and moved into this house that an old acquaintance of my grandma’s had rented to me, and he kept coming back.
I’d tried to find his owner. Asked around the neighborhood, put up flyers, checked for a chip at the vet.
Nothing. I’d tried keeping him inside, but he always found a way out and then showed up again a day or two later, well-fed and uninjured, like he had somewhere perfectly fine to go but chose to come back to me.
Eventually I stopped trying to contain him and just let him be.
I named him Fin because for some reason he reminded me of Finneas, and I had never told another living soul this. I would take it to my grave.
“Hey buddy.” I dropped my bag on the porch and sat down next to him. He was warm and solid and I buried my hand in his thick fur and let out a breath I felt like I’d been holding since 5:30 that morning. “Long day.”
He put his chin on my thigh and his body pressed heavy against my side and I felt some of the tension in my shoulders start to loosen, just from the weight and warmth of him being there. Fin always showed up on the bad days. I didn’t know how he knew, but he did, and tonight was no exception.
“He’s impossible, Fin.” I leaned my head back against the porch railing and stared up at the sky.
Not many stars visible from this part of Atlanta, but I looked anyway.
“The man runs on caffeine and rage. I gave him a flawless report today, color-coded, indexed, ahead of schedule, and he said ‘fine.’ One word. One syllable. I could’ve handed him a blank sheet of paper and gotten the same response. ”
I scratched at the spot behind his ears and he leaned into my hand.
“And the worst part?” I dropped my voice, even though there was nobody around to hear me except a dog.
“He looked at me today. Through the glass wall. He was reading something and he looked up and I was already looking at him, which is mortifying, and our eyes just met. And he looked away first, Fin. He looked away first. And my stupid stomach did this flip thing and I had to pretend I was busy so he didn’t see my face turning into a tomato. ”
Fin’s tail swept across the porch boards again, slow and steady.
“He’s not even my type,” I told him, quieter now.
“Rude and grunty and has never once said thank you for anything I’ve done.
But sometimes he looks at me and I just..
.” I trailed off. I didn’t know how to finish that sentence.
I’d been trying to finish it for two years and the words never came out right. “Forget it.”
He watched me with those dark steady eyes, not moving, not restless, just present. That was the thing about Fin. Never fidgeted, never got distracted, never wandered off while I was mid-sentence. Just stayed and listened like what I was saying actually mattered.
“You’re the only man who listens to me, you know that?” I smiled and scratched under his chin. “The only one.”
I stayed on the porch with him for a while longer, my hand in his fur, my head tilted back, the neighborhood quiet around us.
A car passed on the next block and somewhere a few houses down someone’s TV was still on, the blue light flickering through their curtains.
I should have gone inside because tomorrow was going to be another long day, the detailed report still needed to be finished and Finneas was going to be in one of his moods and I needed sleep.
But Fin was warm against me and the night air felt good after a day spent under fluorescent lights and I didn’t want to move yet.
“He did this thing today,” I said, because apparently I wasn’t done talking about Finneas Kingsley, which was a pattern I really needed to examine at some point.
“When I threatened him with the pink wallpaper. His jaw twitched. Right here.” I touched the corner of my own mouth.
“It wasn’t a smile. He doesn’t smile. But it was close, Fin.
It was so close. And I almost lost my mind over a jaw twitch.
That’s where I’m at. My whole life. Getting excited over micro-expressions from a man who thinks ‘fine’ is a compliment. ”
Fin didn’t move. Just watched me in a way that, if I were paying closer attention, I might have realized dogs didn’t usually look at people like that. But I was tired, and he was warm, and when I leaned into him and closed my eyes for just a second, I didn’t think about it at all.