When we arrived at my apartment building, I sneaked the dog into the elevator and up to my floor. My apartment was silent: I share it with three other women, but we’re all on different shifts at the call center so we barely see each other, and because people don’t stay at this sort of job long, there’s no time to get to know them. Some of my flatmates I see literally once every few weeks: if it wasn’t for notes on the refrigerator, they wouldn’t know I was still there.
I fetched the first aid kit, then sat down cross-legged on the kitchen floor and went to work on the dog’s wounds, gently cleaning and bandaging them. The dog seemed to trust me now, and let me work, occasionally pushing its head at me so I could scratch behind its silky ears. When I’d finished, I dug in the refrigerator and found it some raw steak I’d been saving for the weekend, which it wolfed down, and gave it a bowl full of water which it noisily drank. Then I laid some towels on the couch to make a bed. “You can sleep there,” I told it, yawning.
I stumbled into my room, stripped off my clothes, and fell into bed, exhausted. I’m sure I remember sleep being pleasant when I was a kid, a slow drift into warm peace. But ever since things went south, I don’t so much sleep as pass out when my body runs out of energy. I wake up exhausted, like I’ve slept with one eye open, afraid that something bad might happen if I sleep too heavily. Maybe it’s the shift work or maybe it’s something deeper, something to do with everything in my life being so temporary. Maybe I don’t sleep well because I never feel truly safe.
Just as my eyes closed, I heard a pattering and the creak of my door opening, and then the whole bed bounced as something warm and heavy landed on it.
“Oh...no,” I told it half-heartedly. “No, wait, you can’t sleep—”
The dog turned around three times and then sank down and curled up in a determined warm croissant against my legs.
I sighed and relented. It was a cold night and the warmth of it was very comforting. “Okay,” I said. “Just for tonight.”
* * *
I had the next day off and I’d been planning to spend it catching up on sleep. But I needed to find the dog’s owner and I figured the alley was a good place to start. Maybe in the daylight, the dog would be able to retrace its steps.
But I’d barely pulled up and let the dog out of the back door when it pricked up its ears, sniffed the air and bolted off, a furry missile. Its wounds didn’t seem to slow it down at all: it raced down the street and disappeared around the corner. I sprinted after it, rounded the corner, and whumped straight into someone.
A flash of impressions. The huge size of him: a wall of warm, hard muscle. A red and black plaid shirt. The scent of him: pine needles and freshly-chopped wood, dark earth and clean air.
I fell on my ass for the second time in twenty-four hours and looked up….
And up.
He was taller than me by a full head. What was he, 6’8”?! But he wasn’t lanky, he was big. His biceps stretched out his plaid shirt like boulders. Lower down, the fabric was rolled up to reveal caramel-tanned forearms loaded with muscle and they led down to huge, powerful hands with fingers twice the size of mine. His legs, in faded black jeans and muddy boots, were as sturdy as giant redwoods. He looked like he could wrestle a freakin’ bear. But it wasn’t his size that made me gaze up in wonder. It was his spirit, his attitude: it affected everything, from his clothes to the way he stood.
He was wild. The polar opposite of everything I was. He didn’t sit in an office, or commute by car, or worry about customer satisfaction surveys. He lived out there, someplace far from the city, where you had to hunt and kill to survive. It throbbed from his soul and when it hit me, I could feel my whole body reacting in a way I didn’t understand. It was like running your hand over rough tree bark when you’ve only ever felt smooth plastic. It was like mountain air when you’ve only ever breathed air conditioning.
Then I became aware of the dog, up on its hind legs and frantically trying to lick the man’s face. Its big, furry tail was wagging so hard I could feel the breeze. It was ecstatic. And the relief in the man’s eyes as he ruffled the dog’s fur and scratched behind his ears made my throat close up. This was who the dog had been running to. This was its owner.