All In (Firsts and Forever 2)

Peaches was waiting patiently in the hall, and as soon as I opened the door, he stood up and started growling again. Dante reached into the bag and tossed the dog all the buns he’d been saving. And when he saw my disapproving expression, he said, “Your parents totally deserve a giant case of explosive diarrhea. They deserve far, far worse than that, actually.”

“That’s just mean,” I told him, shutting off the overhead light in my room and pulling the door shut behind me.

“I don’t have a problem with mean,” Dante said as he jogged down the stairs after me.

We left through the kitchen door since my parents were likely to pull up to the front of the house at any moment, locking it behind us. We made it outside without incident, because Peaches was still busy giving himself diarrhea. When we reached the back fence, both of us laced our fingers together and bent down to give the other a boost. “Go ahead,” he said.

“No, you go ahead,” I told him, still in position to give him a leg up.

Dante straightened up and said, fists on his hips, the paper bag still clutched in one hand, “I can make it over this fence without assistance, thank you very much.”

“No you can’t. You barely made it over with the aid of a trash can.”

He laughed at that and said indignantly, “That is not true.”

“It is true,” I teased. “And at your advanced age, you might break a hip or something. So come on, Dombruso, take the leg up.” I still held my hands laced together for him to step into.

“Advanced age! How old do you think I am?”

“I dunno. Twenty eight, twenty nine?”

He grinned at me and said, “That’s actually right. I’m twenty nine. Still young enough to do this.” And he turned from me and tossed the fast food bag over the fence before grabbing the top of the wooden slats and pulling himself up gracefully. When he was sitting on the top of the fence, he looked down at me with a smug expression and said, “See?”

“If you can do that, why was it so hard to jump over the fence in the first place?”

“I was out of practice.” Something caught Dante’s eye, and he turned his head to the left, squinting into the darkness. “Hey, what do you suppose is in all those bags over there?”

I turned to look, and only now noticed about a dozen big, black garbage bags lined up along the edge of the yard. I jogged over to them and untangled one of the drawstrings, and took a look inside. “Holy crap, this is some of my stuff,” I exclaimed. I checked another bag and announced, “So’s this. I guess my parents hadn’t gotten around to hauling it to the dump yet.”

He smiled at that. “So, in other words, we just spent all that time breaking into your parents’ house and facing off against the zombie lap dog from hell for absolutely no reason.”

“Yeah, pretty much,” I said, carrying a couple bags over to the back gate. “Out of curiosity, how do you figure Peaches is a zombie?”

“It smells like it’s rotting.”

“That’s just his breath. He won’t let anyone brush his teeth, not even my mom.” I handed the bags up to him as I said, “Could you please lower these to the other side? I don’t know what’s breakable in here, so I don’t just want to chuck them over.”

When we got the eleven bags up and over the fence, Dante jumped into the alley, pulling his suit jacket down with him. When I climbed over the fence and landed in front of him, he kissed the tip of my nose and then went back to rolling down his sleeves and buttoning his cuffs.

“I’m going to go bring my truck around. Could you please stay here and keep an eye on my stuff?” I asked him.

“Sure.”

When I pulled up beside him a couple minutes later, Dante pointed his phone’s screen at me and said, “Turns out ‘Affenpinscher’ is a real breed.” A picture of a small, black, apelike dog was on the screen. “Did you know ‘aff’ means monkey in German?”

“I told you so. And yes, I did actually know that. Peaches isn’t a purebred, though. We don’t really know what else he is, since he was an unclaimed stray that my parents got at the pound.”

“Imagine that, such a sweet animal going unclaimed,” Dante deadpanned as he put his phone away and hoisted a couple bags into the bed of my pickup.

“It was my fault they got him in the first place. I pestered them to get a dog for years. Finally, they went to the shelter and picked that out.”

“How did you live with a dog that vicious?”

I shrugged and said, “I just dealt with it. He usually didn’t try to kill me when my parents were around. And if I was alone, I’d mostly just stay in my bedroom with the door closed, so it wasn’t so bad.”