Jeremy’s lips twitched. “He’s got puppy fever. Man, he’s so like his dad, isn’t he?”
“Initially, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise, but once he gets past the slight amount of reserve and shyness, that’s when the full force of his crazy hits you.”
“I heard that.” Jack started laughing at a puppy who was attacking his face.
“I think you’ll be adopting out a couple of these today, man. It looks like love at first sight.”
Jack rolled onto his side and tried to gather all of the wriggling bodies closer to him. “They’re all mine.”
Sevenpuppies…?
“Sorry, I’m taking one of those off your hands. Plus, think about what Colette would say if she had six puppies tripping her up or attacking her ankles.”
He didn’t even flinch at the thought. Instead, in a baby voice, he cooed at them, “I’ll see her on the weekends, won’t I? Yes, I will. Oh, yes, I will.”
I felt my upper lip curl as one of them licked his face and then moved to clean its crotch. Ack!
“They’re labeled male and female in case you had a preference,” Jeremy told me as he bent down to pick one up that’d walked away from the others to where we were still standing at the entrance. “Do you know what Layla wants?”
She’d never said a preference, so I went with mine. “One that’s not crazy, doesn’t even show an ounce of being slightly tonto, and who behaves. The gender is dependent on those qualities.”
Tiny paws landed on my shoulder, and I turned around to see a little cream-colored puppy face only inches away from my own. “Meet Zeus, he’s the one that fits that brief.”
The puppy’s head tilted slightly as his tongue fell out the side of his mouth. “Are you sure? That tongue thing doesn’t seem normal to me.”
Jeremy didn’t say anything, but Zeus had an opinion of his own. With a low whine, he tilted his head down and then looked up at me, giving me the saddest eyes I’d ever seen.
“Oh, shit.”
“Got you, did he?” Jeremy guessed correctly, just as the puppy scrambled out of his arms and into mine.
Okay, so I’d held my hands out to him, prompting him to do it, but I swear he was begging me to do it.
“Can I take them home today?” Jack called from the cage.
“Sure can. We know your home, your lifestyles, and everything we need, so we won’t do the home checks on you guys. All you have to do is fill out the appropriate paperwork, and that’s about it.”
Jack scrambled to his feet and was out the door and making his way toward where the office was before I could say anything.
“Colette’s going to lose her shit when he gets home,” I sighed as I waited for Jeremy to close the door to the cage.
“Yup.”
The crash and thud told me Layla had managed to get out of bed while I watched a movie downstairs.
When we'd gotten home, Zeus had sniffed his new home and had made friends with the rabbit, Skippy. I’d been a bit wary of them meeting, but Jeremy had said to do it slowly and not to leave them alone, and now we were past the first hurdle. I wasn’t stupid enough to think it was all okay between them, but I was a bit more hopeful about it than I’d been on the way back.
Because the rabbit had the whole of the pantry to himself as his safe space, I made sure Zeus didn’t go near it and put up a kiddy fence in front of it for the time being. I had to figure if my parents had brought a strange kid home and let him in my room and my bed, I’d have been pissed, too. It just made sense.
With the divider in place, I’d let him explore and sat down while I waited for the alarm on my phone to beep to remind me to give Layla the next dose of meds. She’d woken up before that could happen.
Making my way up the stairs, I stopped when I saw her lying on the floor in her bedroom, with Zeus excitedly crawling all over her.
Once he was on her chest, she smiled delightedly up at him as he stood watching her, his tail wagging like crazy.
“I don’t care who you belong to,” she croaked, “I’m not giving you back.”
Zeus pounced and bumped his nose against hers with a yap.