“No.”
“Peaches! Look at him!”
“I will do no such thing.” Maya steadfastly refuses to turn her head, instead paying a lot more attention than required to the pot of pasta sauce she’s currently stirring.
There’s a high-pitched yelp, and then something’s pawing at the legs of her pajama pants.
“Aww, he likes you!”
“Don’t care!”
It takes another second, but then Riley’s standing at her shoulder, leaning down to kiss her gently on the head, which, in Maya’s opinion, is an unfair and also illegal move.
“You’re bringing him to the clinic to check for a microchip, right?”
It’s just like Riley to have taken someone else’s dog off the street, Maya absolutely would not put it past her.
“Yeah, tomorrow, so you’re going to have to put up with him for at least one night.”
Maya sighs, turns the stove off, and reaches for the plates. “You know, I’ve always been more of a cat person, anyway.”
Riley gasps. “Peaches! Don’t talk like that in front of him!”
*
“So, the doctor said he doesn’t have a microchip, but the shelter’s full at the moment so we have to keep him for while.”
Maya slides her pencil behind her ear, pushing her sketchbook away as she looks up, squinting at Riley in the low light. “And how long is a while?”
“Like, a week or two?”
“Well, for the week or two, he’s your dog, not mine.”
“Is this what it’s gonna be like when we have kids?”
Maya, who is absolutely not blushing, no way, elects to stand up and pad into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of apple juice. She can hear Riley laughing in the living room, but decides not to give her anymore fuel for conversation.
*
“Riles, where’d you put the dog?”
“Hmm, what?”
“The dog, honey, did you bring him back to the shelter?”
Riley pops her head out of the kitchen, brows furrowed in confusion. “No? That’s tomorrow, why?”
“Well, he’s gone.”
“What?”
Maya had been busy sketching out some designs for the new project that’s just landed in her lap when she’d realized that the house had been way quieter than normal, and then she’d realized why. “He’s disappeared,” she says, “like, poof! Gone.”
“What do you mean poof, gone? Where’d he go?”
“Well, I don’t know, who am I, the dog whisperer?”
“Peaches! We have to find him! What if he ran into the street or something?” Riley’s rattling pots and pans around the kitchen in what sounds like the potential for multiple fire hazards, and Maya would really like to get her deposit back on this apartment, thank you very much.
“Okay, okay, I’ll go look for him, you just stay here and finish making dinner.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, if I’m not back in twenty minutes just assume I’m dead.”
“Peaches!”
“Sorry! Okay, I’m going now, see you later.”
*
Maya is almost completely drenched when she returns, because it’d started raining while she was out and she hadn’t had the foresight to bring an umbrella. The good news is she has one, very wet dog under her arm, so mission accomplished.
“Honey? I’m home, also I found the dog, also we’re both almost definitely going to catch a cold.”
Riley throws towels around the both of them and turns the heater up so high that steam starts to rise from Maya’s wet clothes. They’re both squashed up against each other on the couch, huddle for warmth, and in that second Maya decides that having a dog isn’t so bad after all.
“Hey, Riles?”
“Hmm?”
“What do you say we keep the little guy?”
Riley, who had been busy shoving Maya’s wet shoes into the corner, looks up with a blinding grin. “Really?”
And, well, who can say no to that?”
“Yeah, really.”