Page 36 of Beware of Dog

Cass indulged the urge to turn her face into his chest. To let the heat of his skin bleed through his thin shirt and into her forehead, her cheek, her nose. He smelled wonderful up close like this. She could feel his pulse, steady and strong, moving through her like the steady ripples on a quiet pond.

She waited for him to pull away, to get brusque, and pretend the embrace hadn’t happened…but he didn’t. In fact, he cupped the back of her head, and, to her shock and delight, he stroked her hair.

“You’re being a good friend. I get that.” When he spoke while they were touching like this, his voice was a physical thing: a rumble against her skin in all the places where they were connected. “But this Jamie chick has to have other people in her life who could help her, too.”

“She’s ashamed,” Cass said, voice muffled against his shirt. “She doesn’t want to tell her parents, and the other girls in our dorm are furious, now.”

“Yeah, which is why you can’t take this on all by yourself.”

“I’m not. Melissa’s helping.”

He snorted, and stroked her hair some more. It was lovely. “Dixon’sinvestigating, because that’s her job. But she’s not gonna be there at school with you, when people are being assholes. It’s like I said: you need a shoulder to lean on.”

With reluctance, she lifted her head. His face was very close; hismouthwas very close. When he wasn’t sneering or smirking or grinning like a mean maniac, it was a nice shape.He had a pronounced bow on his top lip that nearly derailed her train of thought.

She reached up to pat his shoulder. “I’m currently leaning on a shoulder.”

When he huffed an annoyed exhale, it ruffled her hair. “Youknowwhat I’m saying.”

“I know.” She put her head back down. “I’ll talk to Raven.”

She didn’t have immediate plans to, just like she didn’t have plans to extricate herself from him. He didn’t seem to have those plans either, much to her delight.

“This is nice,” she said. “You’re comfortable.”

He snorted, and finally pulled away. “That’s what every man wants to hear,” he grumbled. But as he turned back toward the pot on the stove, she caught the blush on his face and his ears, and felt as though she’d won something.

~*~

The soup turned out decent. Shep was man enough to admit that he didn’t have a Food Network show in his future, but he’d learned how to tell when something was done, and whether it needed more salt or more thyme. He could start a meal from scratch, and cobble together something that might not be the most delicious thing anyone ever ate, but which was nutritious and fueling.

There was only one person whose opinion he valued, besides. When Cass took her first bite and pronounced it good, he felt victorious.

They ate on the couch, and Cass swapped the TV from ESPN to some Godawful dating reality show in which a lot of Botoxed people shed a lot of fake tears over the worst-scripted romances television could concoct.

“Why is this chick surprised that some douchebag who waxes his happy trail cheated on her?”

Cass snorted, set her bowl on the coffee table and then, devastatingly, drew her legs up onto the couch and tipped sideways to rest her head on his shoulder. “Is being well-groomed some sort of crime against masculinity?” she asked, heedless of the sudden lurch of his pulse.

“I’mgroomed. That jackass doesn’t have a single hair left on his body. He looks ten-years-old.”

She laughed, drowsy and easy, and wriggled in closer until he was forced to lift his arm and let her duck in beneath it. From this angle, with her head under his chin, he could smell the sweet, floral notes of her shampoo, a scent strong enough to cling to her scalp long after she’d washed her hair. Last summer he’d walked past a flowering section of park, and the scents of fat white blossoms had immediately brought Cass to mind.

Everything made him think of her. When he went to the grocery store, it was with the thought of preparing something she would like; better yet, something she would praise. He’d spent many a painstaking hour watching YouTube culinary tutorials simply because he’d begun to fret about feeding her nothing but pizza and Chinese takeout.

When he saw a fluffy dog on the sidewalk, he wanted to take a picture and send it to her. Sometimes he did, just to get back a string of big-eyed emojis.

When he heard a dirty joke, he asked himself if he could repeat it to her verbatim, or if he needed to edit it.

When he saw a mural or a bit of inspired graffiti, he wondered what it would look like through Cass’s artist eyes.

A better man would have said that he cared for her as he would a daughter, or a little sister, and a better man would have actually meant it. But no one had ever accused Shep of beingbetter.

His only experience having a girlfriend had been in high school, a nervous, sweaty-palmed, awkward affair that got himlaid in most unspectacular fashion. After, when he was in the Army, and then out of it again, his sex life was nothing but hookups. Physically satisfying, low stakes, without any emotional attachment from either party. Once he passed thirty-five, he wrote off marriage as a possibility, and didn’t look for anything substantial.

With Cass pressed against his side, he felt like that damp-handed, shaking teenager he’d once been. Like he was getting away with something. Like he was lucky.

He was. There were a lot of assignments he could have been given by his president, and this one, despite all his early complaining, had proved to be the best one possible. He looked forward to seeing her. Each time his phone pinged with a text, the back of his neck prickled with awareness, a little flare of hope alighting in his stomach that it was Cass.

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