The dog, sensing his opportunity to be even more annoying than his savior, trots over and launches up beside her.
Tessa half reaches to stop him, but it’s too late. Waffles is already there. Sprawled sideways across the cushions.
I narrow my eyes. “Get. Him. Off.”
“I will,” she says quickly, “but he just found a spot. And he’s basically a therapy beanbag, so if you think about it, this is healing.”
I say nothing.
Because everything I want to say is prosecutable.
Instead, I cross my arms and wait.
Tessa finally looks at me again, all nerves and guilt and something frantic underneath.
“Okay,” she says. “I get it. This is wildly inconvenient. I promise to make it up to you.”
“Will you?”
“I’ll walk him every morning. I’ll bring lint rollers. I’ll vacuum. I’ll Swiffer. I’ll dry-clean the air if you want me to.”
“No.”
I should show her back to the door. That’s the clean move. Just send her back into the hall with her hoodie and her contraband mutt and reclaim the thirty minutes of silence she already stole.
That’s what a sensible man would do.
Yet I don’t move.
“I’ll stay out of your way. I won’t talk. I’ll whisper.”
“Still no.”
“I’ll write your torts outline and throw in passive-aggressive footnotes just the way you like them.”
“No again.”
“I’ll organize your ties by threat level.”
“Tessa.”
She sits up now, finally, pressing her palms into the couch cushions. “I’ll do anything,” she says seriously. “Just please… Please don’t make me take him back.”
Fuck me.
I run the math and look for the angle because that’s what I do when I’m two seconds away from doing something stupid.
Letting the dog stay? Annoying, but containable. Four walls, one leash, and a finite lifespan. Noise, fur, and piss are variables I can monitor.
Letting her stay with it is the bigger risk. She doesn’t sit quietly in a corner. She fills space. She talks, she argues, she remembers things I’ve tried to forget. Which makes every minute she’s here a liability.
But if I force her out, she takes the dog, and the problem migrates to the shelter, her neighbors, and likely, her arrest warrant. It could escalate outside my reach and ruin my plans.
Here, I control it.
Containment always beats cleanup.
“Fine,” I say, because if she’s going to invade my apartment with a mutt and mismatched socks, then she’s going to do it on my conditions. “I’ll allow the dog under several conditions.”
