Why did he walk so fast . . . and then I noticed his height. I hadn’t noticed it before. He was tall. Long legs and long arms. Each step he took was like three to me. When we got to the hotel, he stopped and looked at something on the wall. I leaned in too.
“Well, how about that,” he said, reading the handwritten note pasted on a pillar.
WARNING: Suspected jackal activity in town. Please keep windows and doors closed and make sure no food is left out.
I burst out laughing and he swung around and looked at me questioningly.
“There’s no jackal,” I said.
“There isn’t? How do you know?”
“Because,” I slipped the key into my door and pushed it open, “that’s the jackal.” I pointed at Cujo as we walked inside. He was lying on the carpet, fast asleep. His paws were crossed and his head was lying on them like a pillow and, for a moment, a split second, a tiny part of a split second, he actually looked a little cute.Cute?The bowl of food I’d put down for him earlier was completely gone; in fact, I had never seen anyone or anything eat so fast before. As if his life had depended on eating as fast as he could. As if he would never see food ever again. My heart had broken a little, wondering how long it had been since he’d eaten anything.
“He was mistaken for a jackal?” Video Store Guy asked.
“Well, I might have planted that seed.”
“You and your dog are troublemakers,” he said teasingly.
“Not my dog,” I replied. But at the sound of my voice, Cujo tipped his head up, opened his one eye and looked at me. He started wagging his tail so vigorously that it made a loud noise as it hit the wall.
“For a ‘not my dog’ he seems rather happy to see you.”
“Well, you know dogs. They will wag their tails for anything.” I eyeballed Cujo and then, suddenly, he was on his feet walking towards me. And before I knew what was happening, he’d pushed his face into my stomach and nuzzled it there.
“Totally your dog,” he said.
I shook my head again and gave Cujo a brief pat and then pushed his head away. “Yeah, yeah, that’s enough.” I looked at Video Store Guy and rolled my eyes; he gave me the slightest smile again. He actually had an incredibly nice smile. Perfect white, straight teeth. The way the corners of his mouth turned up and gave a little twitch. The way it wasn’t straight at all, the way it curved up on one side more than the other. His smile disappeared when he turned his back on me, picked up the DVD player and started fiddling. I watched curiously as he simply plugged one thing into the TV and then turned it on with a remote. It was that easy.
“Thanks. You didn’t have to come all this way and do this.”
“It’s okay, like I said, I was coming here to help you anyway, and I also wanted to give you some more DVDs.”
“Why?”
“I felt like I may have given you the wrong movies,” he said.
“Why?’ I asked again.
“I thought about your situation again, and thought that maybe you didn’t want to watch romance after all.” He pulled the old worn rucksack off his back and pulled some DVDs out.
“My situation?” I asked, making eye contact with him.
He paused. “Sorry, you told me you’d just broken up with someone?”
“Oh. That. Well, he broke up with me, actually,” I corrected.
“Sorry,” he offered. “That sucks.”
“Sucks,” I repeated, thinking about the word, and then I started nodding. Because it really did suck. It sucked big time. “You know! That is a really good word and it describes my situation perfectly. But I must say, him breaking up with me didn’t suck as much ashowhe did it. I didn’t even know I was being broken up with, can you believe that? Hundreds of thousands of people knew before me. And you want to know why he broke up with me?” It was a rhetorical question, I didn’t wait for an answer. “Because she was better for his personal brand than me.” That thought really, really stung. It made me feel so many things; mad and sad and not so glad and all the other emotions on my mood app. “Apparently, I’m now anobodyand she is a somebody, and now I have a strange dog living in my hotel room in the middle of the Karoo desert. And I’m going to have to internet date again and that is just such a minefield, and the creeps you come across are next level. I once went on a date with a guy and halfway through the meal, his fiancée came up to the table and poured his glass of wine over his head.”
“Uh . . .” He looked at me blankly.
“Sorry. Overshare. Sometimes I need to share. You know.”
He nodded.
“And I literally haven’t shared a thing in days which is making me feel a little crazy. So crazy that I have been talking to a dog.”
