okay loves i need to talk to you for a sec — next week mr delaney and i are going on vacation with his entire family. THIRTEEN human beings under one roof 😳😳😳 please pray for my soul.
i adore them, that is genuinely not what this is about. here's the thing — mr delaney and i are very fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants vacation people. some of his family are wonderful, very organized, itinerary people 😅 and there is NOTHING wrong with either way!! we will happily go with the flow of whatever the plan is and you will not hear a single complaint out of us. i'm just a girl with a little vacation anxiety about a full week of schedules and 13 personalities sharing space. it's a me thing not a them thing 🤍
ALSO i am trying to finish this week's school work AND next week's school work before we leave so i don't have to think about it on vacation which means i am running on fumes and prayers over here 😩
i love that you and babygirlburrow have matching avatars!! your freindship is so cute with her, i always see you interacting together. same with cozygirljay nobodyhome (i can’t remember her full user). love that you guys (seem to) have a really sweet and solid friendship 💝
STOP i’m emotional now 😭🧡 i love those girls more than words. @babygirlburrow, @cozygirljay , @xoxonobodyhome AND @coffeebunnibee, @honeydippedfiction, @heavyhitterheaux @savannahcore27 — the absolute best of the best.
not to be tmi but i came to this app last may in a pretty rough spot, and those girlies genuinely changed my life for the better. i’m so lucky i get to call them friends 🥹 thank you for seeing the love between us 💝
i love that you and babygirlburrow have matching avatars!! your freindship is so cute with her, i always see you interacting together. same with cozygirljay nobodyhome (i can’t remember her full user). love that you guys (seem to) have a really sweet and solid friendship 💝
STOP i’m emotional now 😭🧡 i love those girls more than words. @babygirlburrow, @cozygirljay , @xoxonobodyhome AND @coffeebunnibee, @honeydippedfiction, @heavyhitterheaux @savannahcore27 — the absolute best of the best.
not to be tmi but i came to this app last may in a pretty rough spot, and those girlies genuinely changed my life for the better. i’m so lucky i get to call them friends 🥹 thank you for seeing the love between us 💝
i love everything that you write but riley and joe my god they have my whole heart those are my kids my babies my loves i think about them all the time
my baby this made me so happy. joe and riley were rattling around in my brain for a LONG time before i ever worked up the nerve to start posting, and hearing that they live in your head too?? it’s everything. thank you for loving them with me
venus opposite pluto today. translation: whatever you’ve been pretending isn’t bothering you is going to come up in conversation sometime between 2 and 7pm and you will not be ready
pairings: joe burrow x riley carter (oc)
wc: 2,600
a/n: y'all i genuinely have no explanation for this one. it just showed up in my brain and i had to get it out. wasn't even sure it'd ever see the light of day honestly. i have pages and pages of random joe and riley stuff sitting in docs. if you want to see any of it just holler, i'll post it.
new to the hide verse? start here.
masterlist here 💛
The whine came at three in the morning, low and unfamiliar, from the spare room off the kitchen.
He was awake before his brain got there. Beside him, Riley was already sitting up, hair everywhere, one hand finding his arm in the dark. "It's time," she said, like she'd been waiting on it her whole life. "Joey. It's time."
He'd known this was coming. A pregnant dog due any day, the rescue had said, and Riley said yes before they finished the sentence. Riley. Birdie. I wanted a quiet offseason. He'd asked for the one thing in return. We foster. That's it. We don't keep any of them. Riley had said scout's honor. Barbie, who could not be held to a verbal agreement, had said nothing.
In the spare room, Dolly was turning circles in the whelping box, panting, and Riley dropped to her knees beside her like she'd done this a hundred times. She had done it zero times. She had watched one video on her phone two days ago, narrated by a woman in Tennessee, and she had not stopped referencing it since.
"Okay. Okay, mama. We've got you."
There was a laundry basket in the corner that hadn't been there yesterday. Towels, the kitchen scale, a Sharpie, and a box of twelve tiny collars in twelve colors, staged like a go-bag. She'd been ready for days. She'd watched one video and built a field hospital.
"Hand me a towel," she said, hand out behind her, eyes on the dog, like a surgeon.
He handed her a towel.
The first one came twenty minutes later. By the time the sky in the window started going gray they had five, and Riley had a system: weigh, collar, record. Red, then purple, then yellow, the color and the time were written on a piece of paper taped to the wall in handwriting that got worse as the night went on. Barbie lay in the doorway with her chin on her paws, supervising, unbothered, sighing now and then the way she did when the house got loud.
Riley was lit up. Joe had watched her play to nine thousand people and she hadn't looked like this. There was puppy fluid on her sleep shirt and her knees were bruising from the floor and she kept saying you're doing so good, mama in a voice he'd never heard out of her.
By the time the fifth one was nursing and Dolly put her head down, it was almost five. Riley sat back on her heels and looked at the row of them lined up against their mother, all five collared and weighed and breathing.
"That's it," she said. "That's the litter. She's done."
Joe didn't know if that was true. Neither did the woman from Tennessee, presumably. But Dolly had gone soft and tired the way they all did, and Riley said it with the authority of a person who had been a veterinarian for ninety minutes.
"I smell like a barn. I'm going to shower for four minutes and make coffee and then I'm going to sit here and look at them for the rest of my life." She kissed the top of his head on her way up. "Don't let her eat the collars."
The water started two rooms back.
For a while nothing happened. Joe sat with his back against the wall and watched five puppies he was not getting attached to. Dolly's breathing evened out. The coffee maker kicked on somewhere behind him. Gray light filled the window.
Then Dolly lifted her head and started panting again.
"Riley." He wasn't loud, and the water was running. He said it again and got the same nothing, and then Dolly's whole body went tight and there wasn't time to go get her.
It came fast. One more, smaller than the rest, still inside the sac, and it wasn't moving. He'd watched her do this five times in two hours. He'd handed her towels and held the scale and stayed out of the way. There was nobody to hand this one to.
He cleared the membrane off its face with his thumb the way she had, and it didn't move, and he wiped it down and it didn't move. His brain went somewhere sideways. His hands remembered her rubbing them brisk, head to tail, getting them mad about being alive. So he did that. He rubbed this nothing-sized animal in his two hands and said come on under his breath, not to Riley, not to anyone, and rubbed harder, and said it again. Come on.
It sneezed. A wet, furious little sound, and then it was squirming in his palms, mouth open, complaining, alive and apparently insulted about it.
He held it against his chest because he didn't know what else to do with his hands. It rooted at his shirt, blind, looking for something he didn't have. He could feel the heartbeat going. It was about the size of a deck of cards and it was soaking through his shirt and he was not getting attached to any of them.
"Okay," he told it. "Okay. I've got you."
He meant to put it in the box with the others. He sat there with it instead, in the gray light, counting the heartbeat while the complaining wound down into something smaller.
That was how Riley found him.
She came back through the kitchen with a coffee in each hand and her hair wet, four minutes exactly, and stopped in the doorway. Joe looked up. There was a sixth puppy on his chest that hadn't been there when she left, his hand flat over its back, and whatever his face was doing, he didn't have a public version of it.
Riley didn't say anything. She'd learned that much. She set the coffees on the dresser, slowly, and she didn't joke about calling it early, and she didn't ask to hold it, and she didn't make it a thing.
She sat down on the floor next to him, close enough that their shoulders touched.
"What number's that one," she said.
"Six."
"He's little."
"Yeah."
She leaned over to the kit and came back with the next collar in the row. Green. The size of a hair tie. She didn't put it on him. She handed it to Joe, and he worked it around the boy's neck one-handed, and the boy slept through his own christening.
Barbie got up from the doorway, crossed the room, and lay back down against Joe's other side with a sigh, like she'd already seen how this ended.
* * *
The runt needed feeding every few hours. He gained slower than the rest, so Riley pulled up the woman from Tennessee again, learned about supplemental bottles, made a chart, made a schedule, and set alarms on both their phones to split the night.
Joe turned her off the first night and did all of them.
He told her he was a light sleeper. He told her there was no point in both of them being up. What he didn't tell her was that he'd started knowing the number. Forty grams behind on Tuesday, thirty by Friday, the gap closing a little every morning, and he was the one who knew it. He was not getting attached. He was just the one who happened to be awake.
The rescue needed names for the paperwork. Riley named the other five in an afternoon, fast and unserious, after people she liked: a Stevie, a Janis, a Patti, two she couldn't tell apart so they were both Sister until somebody adopted one. Then she got to the runt and looked at Joe.
"What do you want to call him?"
"Bruce."
She put her pen down. "You did not just name that puppy Bruce."
"It's a name."
"It's Batman. Joey. You named him after Batman."
"I named him Bruce." He didn't look up from the boy. "It's a normal name. People are named Bruce all the time."
Riley wrote BRUCE in capital letters on the form, underlined it twice, and didn't argue. She knew about the Batmobile.
Barbie had tolerated all of it. Six new animals in her house and a tired stranger of a mother dog in the spare room, and Barbie had decided, in her standard-poodle way, that none of it was her problem so long as Joe was handling it. She supervised from doorways. She did not get involved.
Then, somewhere in the third week, she got involved with exactly one of them.
Joe found them on the kitchen floor one morning, Barbie stretched out long on the cool tile, and Bruce passed out against her stomach, rising and falling with her breathing. Barbie lifted her head, looked at Joe, and put it back down, like she'd cleared it with the right person. After that, she let the boy climb on her and chew her ears and sleep in the curve of her like he'd been assigned there. She didn't do it for the other five. She did it for Bruce, and Joe pretended not to notice.
Weaning took the night feeds with it, and the first night, the boy didn't need a bottle; he cried in the spare room until Joe went and got him. One night, he told Riley, so the rest of the litter could sleep. The towel he had folded on the floor on his side of the bed was still there a week later. Then it was a bed. Joe had no memory of buying the bed. Riley said nothing about the bed, which was its own kind of comment.
At six weeks, the rescue called, and Riley took it in the other room. When she came back, she had a look on her face that he didn't like.
"Good news," she said, like she was testing the words on the way out. "There's a family for Bruce. A perfect one. Fenced yard, two kids, they did all the goldendoodle research, and they want the smallest one specifically. They're ready whenever he hits eight weeks."
Joe was rinsing one of the puppies' dishes at the sink. He kept rinsing it.
"That's good," he said.
"It's really good. They sound great."
"Good." He set the dish in the rack and picked up the next one. "When's eight weeks."
"Two weeks."
"Okay."
He didn't say anything else. He washed every dish in the sink, including the clean ones, and he could feel Riley in the doorway the whole time, watching him not look at her. She didn't say anything. She didn't say anything so loudly he almost turned around.
* * *
The family came on a Sunday. They were exactly as advertised. A mom, a dad, two kids, a leash and collar still in the packaging, a list of questions written on the back of a receipt. The little girl had already decided to call him Biscuit. They were, by every measure, perfect.
Joe hated them on sight; in the specific way you hate people who haven't done anything wrong.
He was holding Bruce when they came in, and he did not put him down. He meant to. He meant to be normal about it. But the dad reached out to take him, and Joe heard himself start talking instead.
"He was the smallest of the litter. He's catching up, he's almost there, but he eats slowly, so you've got to keep the others from crowding him off the food. And he likes to be held against your chest, not out in front like that. He doesn't like being out in front; he'll cry." He shifted Bruce away from the dad's hands without seeming to decide to. "He sleeps in our room, against our other dog. He's used to that, so the first few nights he might have a hard time."
"Joey," Riley said from the couch, mildly.
"He had a rough start. He came last, and he wasn't breathing at first." Still going. "So you want to watch the breathing, early on. He has a checkup on Thursday. I can send you what they say."
The mom was nodding the way people nod when they stopped following a while ago. The dad still had his hands out, empty.
"We'll take such good care of him," the mom said.
"I know," Joe said, and didn't hand him over.
Riley got up. She walked them through the easy parts, the food they'd been using, the records the rescue would send, and she walked them to the door warm and fast, like a woman getting people out of a building before something went off. The little girl waved at Bruce. Bruce, asleep on Joe's chest, did not wave back. He didn't know he was leaving. That was the part Joe couldn't get past, standing in the doorway watching the car back down the street. The boy didn't know.
The house went quiet. Riley shut the door and leaned against it and looked at him.
"You told them he doesn't like the blue blanket," she said.
"He doesn't."
"I know he doesn't, Joey. I'm saying you told them. You handed those people a forty-minute manual on a dog you're not attached to."
He didn't answer. He had Bruce against his chest, his hand over the boy's back where it had lived for most of eight weeks, and he looked down at him instead of at her.
"You made a rule." She came over and stood in front of him, close. "First night. Don't fall in love with any of them."
"I remember."
"Scout's honor, you said."
"That was you. You said scout's honor."
"Joe." She put her hand on the back of Bruce's head, next to his. "Baby. Look at me."
He looked at her. His face was doing the thing again, the one without a public version, and this time there was no family in the room to hold it for.
"I don't." He stopped. Started over. "I'm not good at the." He stopped again, and she waited, because she'd learned to wait. "I didn't think I'd be the one."
"I know."
"He almost didn't make it. I had him before anybody did." He shook his head, the words not coming out the size they were inside him. "I can't put him in a car, Riley."
She didn't say I told you so. She didn't say it took you eight weeks. She put her arms around both of them, Joe and the dog, and pressed her face into his shoulder, and when she pulled back, she was smiling at him like he'd done something instead of admitting something.
"So call them," she said. "Tell them you changed your mind."
"They're a good family."
"They'll find another dog."
He called the rescue himself, standing in the kitchen where Riley could hear him. He apologized to the woman on the phone twice and didn't mean it either time. We're going to keep him. It came out easier than anything else had all day. When he hung up, Bruce was awake and chewing the collar of his shirt, and Barbie had come to sit at his feet like she'd heard the verdict and approved of it.
"Biscuit," Riley said. "She wanted to name him Biscuit."
"His name's Bruce."
"I know. I'm just saying. We dodged Biscuit."
He almost smiled. He sat down at the counter, pulled up collars on his phone, and ordered a real one. Green, to match the band the boy had worn since the morning he was born. And a brass tag. BRUCE, all caps, the way Riley had written it on the form. That was the closest he came to saying any of it out loud.
So, this week I wrote the most random thing for Found ever, and I'm a little on the fence about if it should see the light of day. I'll give you a hint. It involves Barbs getting another fur sibling. Would you want to read that?
