Chapter Twenty #2
Playing in the snow with Aggie is ridiculously fun.
She loves to roll in the soft, powdery areas with her feet in the air and her tail carving arcs like a windshield wiper.
She also loves to bury her entire face, following mystery scents until she emerges with her nose, ears, and lashes flecked in white.
She catches snowballs that break apart in her mouth.
She barks at a teetering snowman someone made overnight.
Then she pulls out the carrot nose and trots away to a snow mound where she attempts to eat the carrot, realizes she doesn’t like it, and lets me take it from her so I can perform an embarrassing and ineffective snowman rhinoplasty.
She’s joyful, she’s silly, and she has the time of her life, which means I have the time of mine.
However, it doesn’t take long for me to recognize the differences between filming with an eye toward marketing and filming entirely for fun.
If I didn’t agree to highlight the booties, I could post our first shot, in which Aggie takes two steps into the snow and promptly lies down to tug off a bootie and flick it aside.
It’s funny and it’s her being herself. No filters.
No faking. And while she’s walking on her own now, she’s still carrying a lot of excess weight on bones that’ve been overstressed for years, so she has a tendency to lie down after a minute or two if I’m not walking with her on a leash or she’s not chasing a ball.
We try the ball and it helps, but we end up with several shots of her out of frame or turning away or distracted by footprints to sniff or with her feet too deep in the snow for the booties to show up clearly on camera.
Also, I’m not an actress by even the farthest stretch of the word, so when Aggie grows tired, I grow tired.
It shows, and even the world’s cutest colorful puff-ball hat can’t save us.
“Anything?” I ask as Everett scrolls his phone while Aggie rests in her wagon.
“Maybe?” He attempts a smile, but his brows are pinched together behind his glasses and his attention stays on his phone. He’s in work mode, which I can recognize pretty quickly now.
“It doesn’t need to be professional standard,” I remind him.
“I know. But we still want to sell a story here.”
I hide a wince while he’s not looking. Sell a story.
Not tell a story. I know they might mean the same thing to him in this context, they probably should, and I’m so grateful for his marketing eye, but the longer we struggle to get usable video, the more I miss the time I spent with Aggie yesterday, just the two of us, slowly walking to the corner and back while she sniffed footprints and I watched giant snowflakes collect on her eyelashes, and none of this mattered.
“Sorry,” Everett says without looking up. “I just want to make this good for you. I want it to reflect you, Aggie, and the product. If we can do that, and continue to build your engagement and follower count, you can make more money from the same amount of work.”
“I know,” I tell him, and I do, even though my heart’s not in it.
“Give me another minute,” he says. “Let me make sure we have something.”
“Everett—”
“One minute. I swear.” He pleads with his pretty hazel eyes.
I frown at him, wondering if I should push back, but deciding there isn’t much point.
“Okay. Thank you.” I kiss his cheek and leave him to it as I trudge over to join Aggie at her wagon, crouching down to adjust her hood so I can give her neck a good long scratch.
When considerably more than a minute passes and my patience dwindles, I lean in and whisper, “What do you think? Should we remind him this is supposed to be fun?”
She bunts my nose with hers, panting out little clouds of warm, meaty dog breath. It’s an ambiguous reply but I take it as a definitive yes, and make a snowball I toss at Everett’s back. It hits his neck instead, bursting on impact and spraying his bare neck above his scarf.
He spins toward us, wide-eyed. “What the—”
I point at Aggie. “I tried to stop her. But you know how much she likes to flirt with you.”
He pockets his phone as a sly smile dimples his cheeks. “So that was flirting, huh?”
I pretend to consider. “I mean... it wasn’t not flirting.”
His eyes narrow. “Oh, you’re going down, Goode.”
With a swiftness I didn’t see coming, he lunges toward me, his arms spread wide until they clamp around me and we topple into the snow.
I shriek with surprise as we roll over one another.
Aggie barks from her wagon, pushing into a seated position before easing herself off the open side so she can trot over to join us.
I usually help her with level changes, but she manages this one on her own, just like she’s been growing more comfortable getting on and off the futon on her own.
It makes me so happy to see her becoming more mobile and independent, and when she pushes her nose between our faces like she’s determined to be part of the game, we invite her in, laughing and teasing, until all three of us are rolling in the snow like little kids.
Everett gets me back for my snowball by sneaking one in as I scramble away from him.
It hits the side of my face with a shock of cold that makes me shriek again.
I duck around the tree and fire back, missing Everett completely.
He hides behind Aggie—who seems to have taken his side, to no one’s surprise—readying another snowball and sending it my way.
It smacks the tree at shoulder height, dusting my face with snow for the second time.
We end up chasing each other around the tree, the bench, the wagon, and Aggie, madly making snowballs and pitching them as we run while Aggie wags her tail and barks encouragement at us, sometimes joining the fray but mostly spurring on our mischief from a gentle mound of snow.
It’s chaos. It’s fun. It’s joy. It’s perfect.
And when Everett catches me by the hem of my coat and pins me against the tree for a long, hot, knee-buckling kiss while Aggie pulls off her front booties like she’s done being both a cheerleader and a spokesperson, it’s even better.
This is her being herself, and us being ourselves, and all of it is for no one’s eyes but our own.
“I vote we hit pause on the sponsorship video for the rest of the day and head home for towels, belly rubs, hot cocoa, and gingerbread cookies,” I say when the kiss ends.
Everett’s brow furrows with confusion. “You have cocoa and cookies?”
I give his chest a light shove as I push off from the tree and sidle past him.
“ Someone stocked my entire kitchen a week ago,” I say.
He looks over at Aggie, lying peacefully in the snow with her front booties off.
“What a sweet idea, Aggie!” he says. “I knew you’d take good care of my girl.”
I roll my eyes because it’s the intended response, but I can’t help smiling.
My girl.
Two simple words.
A million complicated feelings.
A heart that somehow has room for all of them, and for even more to come.