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She scrambled towards me.
"Let me check the hallway for you," she said. “To make sure nobody sees Bagel.” She was being even more paranoid than I would have been on my own, but I appreciated it.
"Okay," she said. "The coast is clear. Let's go."
“One second,” I said. I pulled Bagel’s leash and harness out of one of the drawers along with her poop bags. Now she started to get excited, dancing in circles, as I tried to get the harness on her.
“You’re only making this take longer,” I told my dog, but she was energized and couldn’t contain it. Before too long, I managed to get her into the harness and snapped the clips securely to her. I attached the leash and looked up to Mila. “Still clear?”
“Yep!”
“Let’s go.”
We walked out the door and Bagel shot down the hall, pulling me behind her as we descended the stairs and exited out the front.
Bagel loved her walks, and it was obvious that she needed one after being cramped up inside all day. She made a beeline for the first bush she could find and spent a solid thirty seconds or so marking her territory.
Upon finishing, she bolted forward, smelling everything within sight in this neighborhood, which was still so new to her.
"How was she?" I asked.
"She was a dream come true once I went in to join her," Mila said. “She mostly just slept and cuddled with me, but I don't think she can be left alone for very long."
"I was afraid of that,” I told her. "It was always something I wanted to train her to do — be okay on her own — but there was never a need with Hannah being home all the time. Now, it’ll probably be tougher than it would have been when she was just a puppy.”
“You got her when she was a puppy?” Mila asked.
“When she was about six months,” I said. “From a shelter about thirty minutes north of here. They were doing an adoption event, and Hannah had puppy fever, so we had to go take a look. I wasn’t expecting to come home with a dog. It was noisy inside there with all the dogs barking at each other, and the hard walls echoed, making everything worse. But when we walked past Bagel’s kennel, she was just sitting there, looking up at us with curiosity. When I walked forward, she jumped up and put her big paws against the cage.
“One of the volunteers walked by at that moment and was in complete shock. She said that this dog spent all day cowered in the corner with her tail between her legs, but something about me drew her out. One thing led to another and, within an hour, we ended up adopting her.”
“It was love at first sight,” Mila said.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
It seemed so trite when she said it that way, but there was no better way to put it. Maybe it was just the nostalgia of hindsight, but it was practically a religious experience when I met Bagel. I wasn’t one to make impulse decisions like bringing home a puppy without thinking about it — that was more of a Hannah thing — but, in this case, I was the one pushing for the adoption and giving her a “fur-ever” home. And there wasn’t a day since then that I’d had an ounce of regret. Not even when she ate my new running shoes or tore up the couch while Hannah and I were fighting in the other room.
We could replace the couch. Bagel was a one in a million kind of dog.
I wondered if I would ever have that kind of feeling again. That feeling of absolute certainty to do something that made no logical sense, purely out of the way it made me feel.
Something like when I tried to kiss Mila the night before.
I shook the thought from out of my head. This was an unkissable woman from here on out. She was off-limits completely.
And, yet, at that moment, I noticed her lips and wanted to try kissing them again.
“I can work from home, you know,” Mila said. “Probably three days a week. Maybe even four as long as my team doesn’t let my supervisor know I’m not coming in.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can dog sit.”
Bagel stopped dead on the sidewalk as she looked across the street at a squirrel. I tightened my grip on the leash, ready for her to bolt.
“You’d do that?” I asked.
“Four days a week,” she said. “I was actually much more productive working in your apartment than I’ve ever been in the office.”
