Like Breathing Page 8

  “You’re such a great dog daddy,” Dev said, clearly half teasing, half admiring, so Leaf just smiled at him.

  “Thanks.” He waited until Dev had his seat belt on before starting the car and maneuvering it to the relatively busy suburban street. People were out walking dogs or just themselves. On one slightly safer driveway, young parents were teaching their child how to ride a bike. It was all so very normal, yet here Leaf was, taking a potential second boyfriend out for a date.

  “What are you smiling at?” Dev asked, then reached over to squeeze his forearm. “And hi. I forgot to say that because the kids distracted me.”

  Leaf shot him another smile. “Good morning. I’m smiling at the fact that all these people around here seem so all-American and wholesome, and here I am, going out on a date with a man half my age while my life partner waits at home for his turn with either or both of us.”

  Dev laughed, nodding. “It does sound a bit wilder than a lot of these people would see as normal. Whatever that is.”

  Once they were out of the neighborhood, Dev looked at him again. “So where are we going?”

  “I actually called a friend of mine. Someone whose guard dogs I helped train some years ago. He has a dude ranch in a nice spot by the mountains. It’s about an hour and a half drive, but since we’re going this early, I thought it’d be okay?” It suddenly struck him he had made that decision without really asking Dev, so he quickly amended, “Unless you’d rather go to a trail closer to home?”

  “Oh no, I have all day. And wouldn’t the dogs like to run free too?”

  Leaf felt his heart flutter. “Yeah, yeah they would.” His voice sounded more than a bit fond, and Dev picked up on it. Instead of saying anything, he reached his hand back to Leaf, but this time let it rest on his thigh.

  “So, who decides on the driving music?” Dev asked cheerfully.

  THEY ARRIVED at Dane and Erin’s ranch right around ten in the morning as Leaf had thought they would.

  “Wow, this place is gorgeous!” Dev said as they got out of the car.

  He was turning his head this way and that, and Leaf took in the place with new eyes also. He’d been there many times before, but to see it through Dev like this made him appreciate it more.

  “It’s a great location, and there’s plenty of room to do their thing.” Leaf went to the very back of the car to open the door there and let the dogs out. “Prepare yourself,” he called to Dev, who chuckled but still plopped down on his butt in the dusty parking spot.

  The dogs went nuts when they got to Dev, especially Missy. The others were more interested in their surroundings after the first nuzzles and kisses, but Missy continued to wiggle mostly on her back on top of her new favorite person.

  “Okay, okay, let’s get up, girl,” Dev told her, then looked at Leaf. “Is it okay if I give them commands if I need to?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine. Thanks for asking by the way. They might not respond to you as fast as they do to me or Seth, but they still obey people they like.”

  “Okay!” Dev looked at the dog in his lap. “Missy, quit it. Time to go,” he said firmly, pushing her gently so she rolled off him and onto her feet.

  She looked at him in a way Leaf would’ve described as “dumbly” with all the love he had for the little dog.

  Dev got up, mindful of the dog, then patted her rump. “Go on, find Grace,” he told her, and chuckled as she finally bounced to find the other dogs.

  “So, we’re on the ranch’s land now, but closer to the river and the guest cabins they have than the actual ranch buildings,” Leaf explained as they took the things they were going to need out of the vehicle.

  They stopped at the edge of the parking spot—too small to be called a lot—and Leaf pointed at a signpost at the edge of it.

  “Here, pick what sounds good to you. There aren’t that many guests around, and they’re at the stables and around the yard today. We can go anywhere and the dogs will be fine off leash.”

  Dev went closer to the signs and tilted his head as he considered them. “Well, the river sounds good. Have you been there?”

  “Yeah, there are several crossing points too, so we can go across and back in another spot.”

  “Sounds good to me!”

  “All right, then, let’s go.” Leaf whistled at the dogs and made sure they picked the path leading left through some bushes and trees.

  The route was wide enough for two people to ride horses side by side, so they had no trouble walking together.

  “They’re already having fun,” Dev said, chuckling at the dogs.

  Missy was quite literally bouncing between the humans and the other dogs, which never ceased to amuse Leaf.

  “Yeah, they really are.”

  The weather was lovely, and while it would probably get pretty hot after midday, the river would provide them with relief when needed.

  “So, tell me about the job you had in Utah?” Dev glanced at him and reached for his hand, carrying his cooler in the other one.

  Leaf smiled at him, enjoying the touch, and held on as he hummed thoughtfully. “Well, the shelter’s owner and I go way back, sort of. I mean, we’re not best friends or anything, but we’ve been bumping into each other a lot in the last fifteen years. So, when she founded her shelter, I promised to help them out if they needed me. I mostly go there if there’s a sudden influx of troubled dogs.”

  “Like dogfighting stuff?” Dev frowned.

  “Yeah, or a puppy mill or sometimes a pet hoarder. In any of those cases, there are always dogs that need to be rehabilitated mentally as well as physically, and not all of them make it anyway,” Leaf said and sighed.

  “You go in and help them reprogram the dogs into adoptable pets?” Dev peered at him through his fringe.

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “That’s so awesome,” Dev said in a very honest tone, and squeezed Leaf’s hand.

  They walked in silence for a while, just heading toward the river, keeping an eye on the ecstatic dogs that were running around them and the bushes along the way.

  “She looks so young.” Leaf smiled at Grace, who really did seem younger there for some reason.

  “She likes the great big outdoors, eh?”

  “Yeah, she’s the pack leader after me, so when it’s just the three of them, she’s in charge, always. Now that I’m here with them, looking over them, she can relax. At home she keeps an eye on the other dogs and Seth at all times, even when I’m home.”

  “You mean she thinks Seth is below her in the barking order?” Dev asked, sounding amused.

  Leaf chuckled. “Yeah, she does think that. And I get it. She’s the oldest dog, and while she obeys Seth, I think she sort of… humors him, maybe?”

  Devin snorted. He was about to say something when Missy came bouncing along the path to them and would’ve jumped on them both, but Dev beat her to it. “No, absolutely not,” he snapped firmly, yet kindly.

  Leaf’s heart lurched pleasantly when the overly enthusiastic dog dropped on her butt to sit in front of Dev.

  “Now that’s a good girl,” Dev cooed at her and leaned down to pet her, accepting a quick doggy kiss before sending her on her way. “Go on, then.”

  She wriggled her short, stocky body around them, then dashed to look for her siblings.

  “Did Seth tell you why she’s called Missy?” Leaf felt pleasantly surprised when Dev took his hand again.

  “No. There’s a reason?” Dev looked curiously at Leaf.

  “Yeah. See, she’s from a crappy shelter near Denver. We were driving past one day, on our way back from meeting some friends, and it was some sort of an open-doors thing at that place. Seth told me he wanted to stop by, that he felt like we should. This was a bit over a year ago now.”

  “Uh-huh?” Dev’s gaze was still firm on him, and he’d stopped walking to concentrate on the story properly. If possible, it endeared him to Leaf even more.

  “So, we park at the curb and go in, and it was….” Leaf
sighed at the memory. “It wasn’t that they weren’t trying, you know? They were a kill-shelter that was trying their best to keep from killing any dogs unless absolutely necessary. They were full to the brim, struggling to get some dogs out to make room, not to have to euthanize any of them.”

  “How did you end up taking Missy home?” Dev asked, his intense attention like a caress on Leaf’s skin.

  “One of the owners recognized me from somewhere and wanted to ask about couple of dogs. See if they were ones I thought had a chance to be rehomed. I spent a moment with them and saw that with right retraining and rehab, they would be. I told him that, and he seemed both relieved and annoyed at the same time.”

  “Because he would’ve had those dogs euthanized first?”

  “Bingo. So suddenly Seth asks what the dogs in the blacklist were now. Like, who took these dogs’ spots. And he takes us to this quiet back room, as quiet as it got there, which wasn’t that quiet, and pointed us to this large crate. He says this one is on top of the list, that she came in a few days before. Scared of everything. Doesn’t handle people well at all.”

  “Missy?” Dev’s tone was shocked, and it made Leaf smile.

  “Yeah. She was maybe eight or nine months old, tops. A baby still by dog standards. She was malnourished and scared to death. She sort of zoned when she was scared, went still and signed out, that’s how the guy described it to us.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “Seth peeks into the crate, then at this clipboard on top and whirls around to the guy and shrieks at him, ‘You call her that? What the hell is wrong with you people?’ I could tell he was close to losing it. I’d never, ever seen him so pissed off. I calmed him down and went to look at the papers, and they’d fucking named her Misery.” The memory made him feel agitated even now.

  “What the fuck?” Dev looked at him, clearly enraged for his new dog friend.

  “Yeah, so the guy then makes some excuses that it was a joke and a volunteer was a Stephen King fan and so on. And Seth glares at him like he wants to murder the guy and just says, ‘We’re adopting her. Make sure the paperwork is ready in fifteen minutes, because that’s when we’re leaving with her.’”

  Dev burst out in surprised laughter, then shook his head. “Jesus, that sounds so… incredibly hot.”

  “I know!” Leaf laughed with him, still remembering the rush of pure sexual heat he’d felt at the assertiveness his normally easygoing partner had demonstrated. “It was so surprising. I knew he had it in him to be like that. He’s not the shy professor everyone thinks he is, you know? But I’d never seen him up in arms like that.”

  “Yet he did, for her.” Dev sounded awed, then tugged Leaf’s hand to get them moving again, because Husky peeked at him from around a bend in the path. “We’re making the kids worry. Let’s go. What happened next?”

  “The guy went to start the paperwork and we were left in that room with the puppy. Seth opened the crate and talked to her. At first she zoned out like we’d been told, but for some reason, Seth says he saw her kind of come online again. Like she looked at him from the corner of the crate and tried to decide whether he was worth it. It took us that fifteen minutes and then another fifteen to just get her to interact with us at all. As soon as she did, Seth took her out of the crate and carried her into the car.”

  They were finally coming to the river and were greeted by the sight of the dogs wading in a shallow spot, drinking and—in Missy’s case—bouncing and splashing the other dogs.

  Dev laughed at her antics, making her bound to them instead. He let go of Leaf’s hand and put the cooler down, then just cuddled the wet dog, seemingly not caring about his clothes getting soaked.

  “You’re such a goofball, aren’t ya?” he cooed at her and roughhoused with her for a moment before sending her back to her pack.

  “Wouldn’t believe she had that sort of a start, right?” Leaf looked at her play with Husky, smiling at the picture the happy dogs made in the stream.

  “Did they have any thoughts on where she’d come from? And how did you get her to, you know, become this?” Dev asked as he picked up the cooler and pointed at the bridge in the distance. “It looks shallow enough here, but let’s go over that instead of getting our shoes wet?”

  “Sure.” Leaf nodded and took the cooler from Dev. “My turn. Anyway, she’d been dumped at their door. Tied to the handle one night. They’d thought she was seriously injured because she seemed catatonic when they got to her, you know?”

  “The shutting-herself-off thing?”

  “Right. It was funny, almost, how quickly she became herself again. We decided to call her Missy, because we didn’t want to forget her roots and it seemed a good name in any case. By the time we were home, she actually ate some and walked around, glued to Seth’s foot. That lasted for a few days, and then she started to play with the others a bit.”

  “Was she scared of them at first?”

  “Not at all. We think she was just a neglect case and hadn’t been properly socialized or had at least been scared a lot by people. She doesn’t have any of the normal beaten-dog triggers either. She’s not afraid of sudden movements or gestures, and as I said, totally okay with other dogs. Grace took her under her wing and just showed her that she was safe. She turned into her goofy self in a few months, I think,” Leaf reminisced and smiled when the dogs came to them when they reached the bridge. “Go on, then, over the bridge. There’s a bit of a current around the bridges here with the water this high, so safer this way.”

  “I like this river,” Dev said thoughtfully. “I mean, it’s really shallow at parts, but then deep enough for currents in others. It’s pretty neat. Gives a lot of options for stuff to do.”

  “Yeah, there’s this spot upstream where they go swimming with the horses a lot. It’s more like a small lake that gets deep gradually and has a surprisingly firm bed.”

  They crossed the bridge and walked a bit on the path leading away from the river.

  “This one goes around those boulders on that small hill there. It comes back to the river then, closer to a bridge you can’t see from here.”

  “A good picnic place somewhere around?” Dev looked at their surroundings, scanning the landscape thoughtfully.

  “Yeah, we can sit on the smaller rocks on the hill. Around that tree, actually.” Leaf pointed at the large oak in the distance.

  “Sound good!” Dev smiled at him, and off they went again.

  They weren’t talking much on the way to the rest spot, mostly just taking in the scenery. Everything was so green and beautiful, and the partially cloudy sky gave some respite from the sun, which Leaf appreciated.

  Soon they rounded the little hill and the boulders on top of it.

  “Oh, that’s nice!” Dev walked around the bigger rocks, while Leaf went to the picnic spot by the tree.

  Once upon a time, someone had moved a flat rock closer to the tree to serve as a table and made couple of benches out of what looked like very old yet sturdy wood. Leaf loved the spot and felt happy that Dev had chosen to go this way.

  “So, I never asked, but how do you spell your name? Like the things plants have or like the Scandinavian name?”

  “Leaf,” he said, smiling as he sat down on one of the benches. “As in the plant. My full name is Leaf Oakley DeWitt.”

  “Very hippie, that,” Dev mused out loud, walking to him and rounding the bench even though he didn’t have to. It just seemed like he wanted to touch Leaf in passing, which he did by running one long-fingered hand up Leaf’s right arm, across his shoulders, and down his left arm. It felt nice.

  Dev opened the cooler and took out some Tupperware, gesturing at Leaf to open them. The contents varied from cut-up fruit and cheese cubes, to what looked like homemade cinnamon-sugar cookies.

  Dev unwrapped a couple of large sandwiches. “They’re both made with turkey. I hope that’s fine?”

  “Yeah, this is awesome, Dev. Thanks for putting it together.”

 
Ducking his head a bit, Dev took two bottles of water out of the cooler and handed one to Leaf.

  “I like to take care of my people by providing sustenance,” Dev said and smiled slightly. “This is nice, though. Lovely spot, good company—oh, speaking of which….” He rummaged through the very bottom of the cooler. “I got some organic dog treats for the kiddos, if that’s okay?”

  Leaf stared at Dev, kind of speechless, until Dev fidgeted.

  “I mean, if it’s not okay—”

  “No, no!” Leaf said quickly. “I’m just…. You’re pretty fucking awesome, Dev. You know that, right?”

  Again, Dev ducked his head, blushed, and avoided Leaf’s gaze for a few moments.

  “Not used to hearing that?”

  “It’s… weird. Good weird, though.” Dev peered at him.

  “You look like such a kid right now, not that it’s a bad thing, really.”

  “Well, I am—”

  “Half my age, yes, I know.” Leaf rolled his eyes.

  They smiled at each other and dug into the food. Leaf told Dev to wait with the dog treats so the dogs wouldn’t associate them with the human mealtime. Right then, the dogs were lying on the shadow of the rocks, close to one another, enjoying the shade.

  “How did you end up with dogs as your job?” Dev asked eventually, between nibbling on a cheese cube.

  Leaf drank some water and smiled at him. “Long or short version?”

  “Whichever you’re comfortable with.”

  He appreciated the thought, the courtesy of letting him choose what to tell, for sure. “I’m not sure if I told you exactly how I grew up?”

  “I think Seth called it something like ‘unconventional’?” Dev made the quotation marks with his fingers, and Leaf chuckled.

  “My parents weren’t really hippies, despite the fact I’m called Leaf and my sister is Rainbow,” he started, and now it was Dev laughing.

  “Oh my God, Rainbow, really?”

  “Rainbow Serenity, to be exact.” Leaf smiled as Dev got another bout of giggles under control and gestured for him to continue. “Yeah, so they weren’t hippies really, just… I don’t know. Young and impressionable, and when Rain and I were just toddlers, they met these people who charmed them off their feet, got them to relocate us to their commune, and so on. We were less than ten years old when I first heard the word ‘cult’ mentioned.”