a mini blurb from an idea i had…
He put his phone back in his pocket… walked down the hall, and froze at the bedroom doorway, partially in shock but in exasperation.
There were stairs on your side of the bed.
Little carpeted stairs.
Three of them, wooden with grip pads on the ledges, short and leading up to the mattress.
Michael shrugged the carry-on from his shoulder and set it down on the bedroom floor very carefully, the way a man does when he’s trying not to throw something.
He was standing at the edge of the bed, still in his travel clothes, staring at the stairs like they’d personally wronged him — when he heard the front door open.
The jingle of a leash, accompanied by nails scraping against hardwood.
Your voice, soft and animated, rang through the house amid the silence, talking to something. “Good boy. Yes you are. You walked so good, didn’t you?”
He was back in the living room doorway by the time you looked up, and the expression on your face told him everything he needed to know — because it was the expression of someone who had planned for this moment and was still not fully ready for it.
“Hey, baby,” you said, a little too warm, a little too bright.
On the end of the leash, a puppy sat and looked up at him: big dark eyes, one ear perked up and the other flopped, curly caramel fur disheveled from the outside wind. Its tongue was already lolling like he hadn’t a single care in the world.
Michael looked at the dog.
Then looked at you.
Then, agonizingly slowly. at the rope toy on the floor. “What,” he said, one hand gesturing around the general vicinity, the other propped on his hip, “is this?”
You unclipped the leash, which Michael immediately regretted because now the dog was free, and you straightened up with the energy of a woman who had rehearsed this.
“This is Adonis.”
