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But she wasn’t Harlow. She wasn’t the cheese to my macaroni. She wasn’t the person that I called in the middle of the night when I thought of something random that we should do. Nor would she answer like Harlow would.
And, granted, I knew that wouldn’t change. We’d still see each other a lot.
I mean, she had a freakin’ boyfriend, and we still spent more time together than she and her boyfriend did, so I knew we’d make it work.
But the thought of her not being near literally wrecked me.
By the time I arrived home, even the enticement of watching the rest of the videos didn’t appeal to me.
But I watched them. For her.
At least, most of the other two videos.
I never did finish the second video.
Not until the next morning at least.
And boy, did I have a whole lot to talk to Harlow about when she arrived for her computer.
Sadly, not even the sexy, masturbating man could stop me from being sad that my best friend was leaving.
CHAPTER 2
Three things I wish:
1. A
2. Bitch
3. Would
Laric
“Sit.”
The dog, Alabaster, glared at me.
Alabaster was my newest dog.
I took in military working dogs that needed time to heal and time to reacclimate themselves into a routine.
Some of the dogs that I worked with had never seen a normal home life, either. They had no clue what ‘downtime’ was. They’d always had a purpose in life, and a lot of these dogs literally had no clue how to play.
This dog, Al, being one of them.
“Sit,” I repeated, calmly and authoritatively.
I was just about to ask him to do something else when he surprised me by sitting.
Al knew his commands. Knew them, and had followed them well, up until he’d been retired from the military about four months ago.
One, he’d lost the trainer that’d been with him for going on four years. His trainer had died as they’d been doing a sweep of a building. Al had been hurt right along with him, but where his trainer had perished in the bombing, Al had survived.
Now, Al lived with me.
I would now be the person that helped him reintegrate into society and hopefully find him a home.
The thing was, Al was a stubborn bastard, and I wasn’t sure that he’d get very far if he didn’t at least put a little effort in.
At this point, I wouldn’t allow even the strongest of men to get anywhere near him.
Hell, even I had to have a muzzle on him so he didn’t bite my ass when we were working.
He was aggressive, didn’t give a single fuck if he did anything, and honestly was on the verge of flunking out of even my program.
The sad thing was, the next step was euthanasia. Because if they couldn’t be helped on my end, the US government wouldn’t find the time on theirs.
I was the last resort.
And I didn’t want that life for Al.
I wanted him to be able to live a happy, full rest of his life with green grass under his paws and no bombs going off beside him.
The bad thing was, Al was a Golden Labrador Retriever. You wouldn’t think that Al would be as aggressive as he was.
But he was. And it made me sick to think about the long road ahead of him.
I’d given Al a good four months now of constant one-on-one attention. I’d tried everything that I could think of to help him, and there wasn’t a single thing extra that I could do to ease him over this hurdle.
“I’m going to take this muzzle off of you, Al,” I told the dog. “But I swear to God. If you lunge for me again, I’m going to be pissed.”
The dog surprisingly stayed exactly where he was, allowing me to take the muzzle off.
Which, honestly, was a surprise. The last few times I’d done this, he’d whipped his head around and tried to take my arm off.
After I got him bedded down, I did my usual of getting my shower in, combing my overly long hair—I really needed to cut it, yesterday—and getting a couple of slices of avocado toast before heading out the door.
I then did a U-turn to go back inside and grab my cut.
I was the world’s worst at remembering it.
Once upon a time, when Lynn came to Bruno and me with this idea of starting a motorcycle club to help victims of human trafficking, I’d thought that the cover story of an MC was a stupid idea.
I mean, I loved riding my motorcycle. I loved being alone with the wind in my hair and not being tied down anywhere.
But I hadn’t realized just what it would mean to have a club of brothers always at my back until I’d come to rely on them.
Like right now, I was headed down the road to Zach’s place where he could look at the wound on my hand. The wound that Al had given me the moment that I’d opened his kennel this morning and allowed him outside.
