Page 42 of Noah
She grabbed it and looked at me like I was some sort of idiot. “I need the light, dummy.”
She clicked the light on and turned back to the bush, searching through the undergrowth for something like forever. Then she gasped and dove further in.
When she came back out, she had a wriggling, furry bundle of brown and white in her arms. She looked up at me, her eyes big and wet with moisture, and held the bundle out.
“How in the hell did that get out here?” I asked, shocked.
It was the tiniest puppy I’d ever seen. Definitely too young to be away from its mom. And it was cold and soaking wet. I could see it shivering from here.
“No idea, but we can’t leave it out here,” she murmured.
She was right. I took the puppy carefully in my hands, tucked it against my body, and pulled my leather jacket over it. Then I grabbed her hand, turned, and ran for the hotel. We needed toget this puppy to where it was safe and dry. And then we needed to figure out what we were going to do with it.
Yes, I heard myself saying ‘we’ like Molly and I were a couple. I heard myself jumping right past the argument we’d just had.
And I was very specifically not looking at that right now.
Sort of like I wasn’t thinking about how good it felt to be back on the same team.
25
MOLLY
“What are you going to call him?” I asked gently.
Look, I know we had found the puppy together–I mean I was the one who actually crawled into the bush to get him–but there was no question about who he belonged to. Noah hadn’t put him down since we found him. We got him into his room and dried him off, then decided that we actually need to give him a bath, as he was covered with mud and sticks. That was quick enough, considering this dog was roughly the size of a guinea pig, and before long we were drying him again.
I had just returned from my room with my hair dryer, because Noah insisted that we dry the puppy as quickly as possible.
He turned the hair dryer on to the lowest setting and started moving it up and down to dry the puppy’s curly fur.
“Whiskey,” he said quickly. “I thought of it the moment I saw him.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Whiskey? Why?”
Noah picked the puppy up and turned him so I could see his face. He was brown and white, and had dark brown frecklesacross this tiny nose. I didn’t have a lot of experience with puppies, but he looked awfully young. I wondered if we needed to find his mother. Or milk.
“Look at his eyes,” Noah said firmly.
“His eyes?” I stared into him, unsure of what I was supposed to be seeing. “Are you going to use him to hypnotize me?”
“Yes, and give you ridiculous commands. No, stupid, look at what color they are.”
Oh. I stared harder, wondering what color they actually were. Not quite brown, but not blue, either. Something in between. “Um...”
“They’re the color of whiskey,” he said, like this was the most obvious thing in the world. “And whiskey is my favorite drink.”
I smiled and shook my head, too amused–and too charmed, honestly–to want to argue with him. He turned the hair dryer back on and continued drying his puppy while I watched and marveled at the change that had come over him. Under the tree he’d been furious at me, and even angrier when I called him out on his bullshit. To be fair, I’d been shouting just as loud as him, and had lost my temper. I didn’t blame him for being angry. But that had all changed as soon as we found Whiskey, and now...
Now he looked like a ten-year-old who had been given his first puppy. His face was open and full of wonder, and his voice had grown softer than I’d ever heard it. He was being very careful with the little puppy, but I could see that he was already making lists of the things he might need. It was a side of him I’d never seen before.
I liked it.
“We need to get him some food,” I said. “I bet he’s hungry.”
“And thirsty,” Noah agreed. “Here.”
He tossed me his phone like this was somehow going to answer all our problems.
