Page 43 of Fire
“Fuck the what-ifs!” he barks into the phone. “Do you love Evan?”
“Yes.”
“Does he love you?”
I hesitate. “I don’t think so, not yet.”
“Then stop fucking around wondering if you deserve him or not. You want to deserve Evan? Make him feel so safe, happy, and cum drunk, that he can’t help falling in love with you. Then repeat that formula every day and each one of those days know it in your bones, how goddamned lucky you are to have him.”
Maybe I want a simple fix to my question, but I find an easy wisdom to his answer. “That’s good advice.”
“It’s worked for me,” Grave says simply. “And now I plan on following my own advice and hang up so I can go wake up my boyfriend in a way that he’ll find very deserving.”
He ends the call leaving me to think over the conversation. Grave is right
Eli left a text last night that Grave’s old boss and buddy Archie Hendrix has his lawyers negotiating an interview between Evan and the FBI about what happened at Freedom Fest. While Evan has been officially cleared of all charges, we need to make sure that Patriots Now won’t use the interview with the FBI as a way of getting rid of a witness who can tie them to Digger’s assassination attempt.
That gives me time.
Time to spend with Evan when every second doesn’t have the potential to be life and death. Time to break through some of his self-doubts and convince himself how special he is. Time to make him see me as more than someone to share orgasms with. Time to make him love me.
I walk in the door carrying a big dog crate and set it carefully on the floor.
Evan, who is in the kitchen pouring a cup of coffee, sets his mug down and hurries over to look inside. “Is this your dog?” Evan says, peering into the dog crate, at the scared pit bull who is shaking and whimpering inside.
“Is he okay?”
“He will be. He’s just scared, and with his past, he’s sensitive to any upheaval. The vet called me this morning and told me he was healthy enough for me to finally take home.”
“Poor baby.” Evan pets the crate as if it were the scared dog itself.
“I thought maybe you could help me make him feel more comfortable.”
Evan grins at me, clearly on board with helping me take care of the scared puppy. “Maybe we could take him on some walks together.”
Snapshots of Evan and me taking the dog for walks fill my head. Holding each other’s hands as we walk in the woods with the dog. Me, stopping to kiss Evan against a tree while the dog runs around our heels. The dog playing in the leaves as I fuck Evan against the tree. “That’s a really good idea,” I manage to rasp.
Delilah stalks out from under the bed to come check out what can only be a home invasion in her feline mind. “Do you think Delilah will be safe with him?” Evan asks worriedly.
“The vet said he was fine around cats,” I tell Evan, but knowing how much he loves his cat, I rush to assure him that I’d never put Delilah in any danger. “But we’ll make sure of it by introducing them slowly to each other.”
Determined to contradict me, Delilah sticks her nose curiously into the cage’s wire-meshed window and starts licking the puppy’s snout. He immediately stops whimpering.
By midafternoon the “slow” introduction between cat and dog is complete. Once Delilah establishes that the dog’s full-time job will be to worship her, and he enthusiastically agrees by rolling over and acknowledging Delilah as the official leader of their pack of two, she settles into sharing her space with him. Quite comfortably, as she’s currently lying curled up on the pitbull, using him as a heated cat bed while the dog looks at her adoringly.
“What are you going to name him?” Evan asks, sitting cross-legged on the bed where we’d gone to sit to watch the two animals figure each other out.
“I don’t know. I haven’t given a name to anything before. It’s seems kinda important.” I give him, my best flirtiest smile. “Care to help?”
He turns to me. “You never had a pet before?”
“I always wanted one growing up, but I knew better than to bring animals around my cruel family, and once I moved out the only dogs you could have as a Reiver were fighting dogs, and I hated that shit.”
“What about after you left the Reivers?”
“Been a rolling stone since then, always moving on to the next place on the map. I like to travel light, but the night I saw him,” I nod to the dog, “I knew I couldn’t just drop him off at the shelter.” I shrug. “Figured I could take him with me wherever I go.”
Evan makes a funny little frown at my last few sentences. I’m about to ask him what I said wrong when Delilah stretches in her sleep and the dog contorts himself to keep the cat balanced so she doesn’t fall.
