Reign of Terrier Page 7

  “It feels good to get out of the house,” Eliza said at last, when the silence morphed from mildly awkward to genuinely painful. “My mom is being such a jerk right now.”

  Well, it was something, a thread Tessa could pull on, at least. And maybe once they were talking again, things would feel less weird. “Oh?”

  “Yeah. She’s harassing me about the company again. Doesn’t like me spending so much time with ‘dirty animals.’” She stared down at her armful of books, her nails running up and down across the pages so the books made noise as they opened and closed.

  This felt very far away from anything Tessa was prepared to handle, especially from a near-total stranger like Eliza was, but she felt bad for her, too. Animals were the only thing she’d always loved, from childhood on. “I’m sorry. That sucks.”

  “I shouldn’t even care. They’re all assholes. Rich, entitled assholes.”

  “Mmm.” Tessa kicked out against the coffee table in front of her and let her foot get lodged against the leg.

  Well, why not take a chance? Make her own offer of friendship? She could almost hear Livy’s voice in her head, urging her on. She always thought Tessa spent too much time isolated, always despaired of how she didn’t have nearly as many friends as she thought she should have.

  She’d want her to try with Eliza. She’d point out how friendly and eager Eliza had been to get together, how she’d offered the opening. How tucked there under the dismissive tone, there was real hurt singing through the words.

  Eliza was lonely, and she was reaching out. It was only sensible, only right, that Tessa reach out, too, and meet her halfway.

  So she looked up from her feet and half-smiled, a thin, understanding thing, because she knew about asshole family as well as anyone. “I haven’t spoken to my parents since I was seventeen. They … didn’t take it well when I came out.”

  Eliza made a noise that seemed situated halfway between a grunt and a snort, between her throat and her nose. “Assholes.”

  “Yeah. Well, what can you do?”

  “Not a thing but live your best life and prove them all wrong.”

  Tessa smiled again, broader this time, and nodded toward her own textbooks she’d collected and set on the coffee table. “That’s what this is about.”

  “Exactly.”

  They were quiet for a bit, out of things to say, and Tessa wished she understood what it was about some people that made silence a safe, familiar feeling, while with others it was deeply uncomfortable. She and Livy could sit in silence for hours, not doing anything but just being in each other’s presence, without any need to talk, but even a few seconds of quiet with Eliza had her toes curling and her hands fidgeting.

  She did sometimes fidget with Livy, too — maybe it was just that she would take her hands and hold them in hers whenever she got fidgety, so that was probably an unfair comparison.

  Still. Tessa was never really sure what made the difference between people she was comfortable with and those she wasn’t.

  A knock on the door made them both jump and sent Princess into a complete tizzy. “Relax, pup, that’s just the pizza,” Tessa said, half-laughing.

  Eliza smiled again, too, and a lot of the tension in their silence eased.

  Back in the living room with their pizza, Tessa tried to steer them back onto the topic. “So, what’re you working on?”

  “Studying for the semester exam. You?”

  “Refreshing, mostly. I took the semester exam this spring.”

  Eliza took a piece of pizza and lifted an eyebrow over it. “You’re already done?”

  “With the books? I guess. I mean, I haven’t graduated or taken the certification test yet, obviously…”

  “But you finished the course this spring and are only now looking for the externship? That’s some major procrastinating.”

  Her cheeks warmed as Tessa realized what she was surprised by. People weren’t supposed to wait until Harper Jones warned them they would be withdrawn from the program to actually take that next step. People weren’t supposed to spend six months making no progress.

  “I … well, I got a bit behind. My fiancée died in June.”

  The surprise, the burst of near-suspicion on her face, vanished almost before Tessa had a chance to see it. “Oh. Oh, no, Tessa, I’m sorry!” Eliza lowered the pizza, then frowned down at it like it had personally offended her. “God, I’m such a heel.”

  “No, it’s fine. I mean … no, it’s not fine. But it’s not your fault you didn’t know.”

  Her gaze went to Tessa’s hands, and Tessa suddenly felt the absence of her ring as a statement she never meant to make.

  She didn’t wear her ring anymore. Livy had insisted on giving her one, of proposing to her like she’d once admitted to her she hoped someone might, with a ring and on one knee like Tessa was the heroine of a rom-com, and while it had been a little bit embarrassing because Livy deserved to be proposed to, too, Tessa couldn’t find it in her heart to wish she hadn’t. It was arcane and unnecessary, a gesture and a gift left over from when men literally owned the women they married, but it was just so bloody cute that she couldn’t stop being thrilled by it.

  But though Tessa had a ring and had worn it, after Livy died, she couldn’t bear to look at it, given how it reminded her so hard of what she’d lost when Livy died.

  “What was she like? Your fiancée?”

  Tessa blinked, surprised by the question. No one had ever asked that — no one had ever needed to. She’d never told anyone about Livy who didn’t already know her. That wasn’t how their lives worked.

  “Livy. She was … wonderful. I mean, everyone says that about their loved ones, but it’s true. Smart, strong, funny, beautiful, the whole package.”

  The ache in her throat felt like tears. She swallowed hard and smiled and shoved a corner of pizza into her mouth to cover up the sensation.

  Eliza leaned toward her. Her eyes were soft, brows drawn into a frown. “What happened to her?”

  This was harder. Much, much harder. Tessa expected she could shake her head, dismiss the question, and Eliza wouldn’t press, because who presses with a question a barely-a-friend doesn’t want to answer? But the words had started now, and they weren’t interested in stopping, no matter how much it hurt to actually say them.

  She ran her fingers through Princess’ fur, and Princess pressed back against her hand, enjoying the touch. “Killed. By a hit-and-run.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “We never even found out who it was. Police figured it was a drunk driver.”

  Eliza breathed in, let it out. There were almost words in the sigh, something that sounded suspiciously like her previous “asshole.” Her hand hesitated for a moment near Tessa’s arm, then slowly, she touched her sleeve, a soft, grounding sort of pressure that Tessa felt through her whole body.

  “I’m sorry. Really, I am. That sucks.” She snorted. “Well, ‘sucks’ barely even scratches the surface, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Tessa looked up from her hand and smiled, a twisted and wry thing, but it was there, and that’s what mattered. “It’s been a long few months.”

  “I can’t even imagine.”

  “But I’m getting back on track.”

  “Good. If there’s anything I can do to help, you’ll let me know?”

  “Yeah. Thank you.”

  She smiled, and Tessa let herself echo the expression back to her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “We didn’t get much studying done, did we?”

  Tessa glanced over at the living room, where her barely opened books still sat in their neat little pile on the coffee table, surrounded by the paper plates and napkins they’d used for the pizza, and grinned. “Not much, no.”

  Eliza huffed softly, a noise that was probably intended to be unhappy but mostly came out sounding teasing. “Right. Maybe tomorrow we can get something done?”

  “T-tomorrow?”

  “Is that good for you? Your i
nterview’s on Monday, and I’ve got to take the test next week. We need the study time.”

  “Oh. Yeah. No, of course. Tomorrow’s good.”

  “I’m free after two.”

  “Well, then.” Tessa smiled. “Come by at two, and we’ll actually study this time.”

  “Great. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Eliza crouched down and held out her hand to Princess, who glared at it like it was covered in poison.

  Tessa bumped Princess with her foot, not sure if she was trying to encourage her to stop being weird or just telling her being weird was fine as long as she didn’t bite anyone.

  Eliza stood, shaking her head. “Silly dog.”

  Tessa bumped her again, and this time, she looked at her. Her tail swept left and right, just once, but with enough force that it flicked against her pant leg. “I like ‘er.”

  “Good. She needed a home.”

  They waved, and Tessa shut the door.

  Relief flooded through her, and her next breath came out as a massive sigh.

  It was a dumb reaction to have to Eliza leaving because it wasn’t like Tessa was overly panicked with her around. Things were a bit tense sometimes, an awkwardness to the silences and uncertainty to the conversation, but Eliza was nice, and they had a good time.

  And yet, the only thing she could feel as she left the house was an intense, bone-melting relief, as though a vice had been suddenly removed from every inch of her body.

  Tessa collapsed back onto the couch. Princess hopped onto her lap and sprawled onto her chest. “Hey, pup.”

  Princess rested her chin against Tessa’s breastbone and stared up at her.

  “I dunno,” Tessa mumbled like her gesture was a question. “I like her, I do. She’s nice. Really, really nice. We had a good time. But … I dunno. There’s just some people who are harder to be around, y’know?” She sighed again, a shallower, more frustrated breath, and scratched her nails through the short hairs on Princess’ neck. Her eyes half-closed with obvious pleasure. “I don’t get it. Why it is that I can click with some people and not others? Eliza’s nice. I wanna be friends. I … it’s been lonely since Livy. All my friends were her friends first, and being with them now … it’s weird. And since June stopped talking to me, well, it’s even weirder. So, I need to make my own friends now, and Eliza would be a good one, I know it. She’s nice.”

  She laughed, a single short syllable, sharper than a laugh ought to be, and the noise made Princess lift her head and blink. “Why am I even telling you this? You’re a dog. You can’t understand me. But, I dunno. Maybe you do. I like to think that you understand me.”

  Princess’ head dropped back down to her chest, and she whined softly. It wasn’t a whiny noise like the cry of an upset dog, but a gentle sound, a sort of word without a word. An agreement.

  Tessa was projecting. Anthropomorphizing, because she wanted to see understanding in those bright amber eyes. It was an impossible thing not to do with a warm little mammal basking in pets and attention on a person’s chest, but still rather silly.

  Princess was a dog. A dog Tessa liked, a dog that seemed to understand her in ways that people often didn’t, on that innate level that dogs did seem to have, but a dog regardless. She didn’t understand English. She couldn’t speak.

  So how was it that Tessa felt like she could do all those just the same?

  “I’m being ridiculous.” Still, the words kept coming out of her mouth, aloud because Princess kept looking at her like she might actually understand them. “You don’t need to say it. I know that. But it’s so easy to talk to you. Maybe just because I know you can’t interrupt. You can’t judge. You’re just a dog. Why is it so much easier to talk to you? Why is the quiet with you so comfortable, and quiet with Eliza so … not?”

  Princess sighed. Her eyes fell half-closed again under the motions of her hand.

  “Why did I feel the click with you and not with so many people? Livy and I — we clicked. Right away. Like, the first time we talked, I knew. Not that I loved her, exactly, but that we’d be the sort of people who could sit in silence for hours and not mind it. And then there are other people where four seconds feels like four hours, and I don’t get it.

  “People are strange.”

  Which was probably the world’s largest understatement of the whole phenomenon, but Princess didn’t mind. Because she was a dog. She couldn’t understand Tessa’s rambling.

  “Anyway. Bedtime?”

  They got up. Tessa changed into her fluffiest pajamas, and they curled up together on the bed.

  “You don’t have to listen to me, pup,” Tessa whispered, stroking Princess’ ear. The hair there was short and soft, the softest place on her body, and Princess closed her eyes all the way when Tessa rubbed the tip gently between thumb and forefinger. (She remembered hearing somewhere that some dogs liked that, and it seemed that Princess was one of them.) “I appreciate it, but you can always just tell me to shut up. Bark twice or something.”

  She just nuzzled a little further into her arms, and they drifted off to sleep.

  Morning dawned gray and cold, full of snow-heavy clouds. Tessa half-hoped it would snow, hard, so hard that it would be stupid for Eliza to drive here from wherever she was this morning, that she would realize no study date was worth risking her life and cancel on her.

  It was possible for Tessa to cancel — claim a nasty headache or way too much work to do — but that wouldn’t be right. It would be a lie, and a cowardly one at that.

  Eliza was nice. Tessa liked her. Just because they didn’t click couldn’t stop them from being friends, and Tessa needed friends.

  She grinned, a little grimly, up at the ceiling of her bedroom, not quite willing to get out of bed yet. Livy had been appalled by the number of people Tessa had to send wedding invites to. “Just four? Good God, Tessa, what is your life?”

  “All my friends are already on your list!”

  “You need a life outside of me.”

  “I don’t want that.”

  “And what if something happens to me? You need friends.”

  All right, Livy, you were right. I’m working on it.

  She hoped Livy would be pleased.

  It was a quiet morning. Most mornings were, and that’s the way she liked them. Coffee and space heater, numbers on a spreadsheet, and Princess curled up under her desk.

  Pleasant, predictable, and productive.

  Lunch was a leftover slice of last night’s pizza, cold because Tessa preferred leftover pizza cold rather than the mushy too-hot of microwaved. She hadn’t bothered moving her textbooks off the coffee table, since they’d be needed in the afternoon, so after eating the pizza and sharing the crust with Princess, she plucked the anatomy and physiology book off the top of the pile and settled in to browse it before Eliza got there.

  It started snowing shortly before two, and when she opened the door to Eliza’s knock, Eliza had snowflakes sticking to her red hair. She ruffled them away as she came inside.

  “Afternoon,” she said, smiling.

  “Hey.”

  “No distractions today.” She sat down on the couch like she owned the place, and Tessa tried not to wince. “We’re going to get right to it.”

  “I made a point of already cracking A&P.”

  Eliza shuddered dramatically. “Ugh, A&P. Can’t wait to not need that anymore.”

  Tessa frowned. “As a tech, I’d think you’d need it a lot.”

  “The vet needs it a lot. We just have to do what they tell us.”

  “And when the vet tells you to give an injection in the subscapular adductor?”

  “That’s not a thing.”

  Tessa sat down and grabbed for the A&P text. “But it could be.”

  “It’s not.”

  “But it could be.”

  Eliza rolled her eyes, but there was a grin tugging at the corners of her lips. “Then I guess I’ll just have to ask the vet to speak English.”

  She was making a joke of it, and while,
yes, Tessa was joking, she was being serious, too. Surely a tech — at least a useful, competent one — would need to know what the doctor was asking for at all times, whether they spoke in plain English or medical jargon.

  They were supposed to know that medical jargon.

  “Look,” Eliza began, seeing the frown, “I know Dr. Dale. He’s not the sort of person to be unclear for the sake of it. If he wants me to give something in the hip, he’d say hip. None of this ‘subscapular adductor’ nonsense.”

  “Shoulder,” Tessa corrected.

  Eliza blinked.

  “Subscapular. That’d be beneath the shoulder blade.”

  “Shoulder, hip. Doesn’t matter. It’s not a thing.”

  “You should still know it.”

  “Whatever will help pass the test.”

  “Not just for the test. Because it’s important.”

  “What’s important is doing the job. There’s not going to be any call for the proper Latinate words for a hip. Or a shoulder. Or the, I dunno, dorsal-ventral clavicle.”

  “Now look who’s making things up?”

  Eliza rolled her eyes again. This time, she wasn’t grinning underneath it.

  Tessa flipped through a couple of pages of her textbook, suddenly fighting down the urge to pull it up to her face and hide behind it. “Maybe we should study.”

  “Yeah. Probably.” Eliza turned to her own books that she’d brought with her and paged slowly through one of them.

  They were quiet for a long while, no noise but the rustle of textbook pages or the creak of the couch as one of them adjusted positions, and the longer they sat, the more difficult it was to concentrate on the text.

  Tessa didn’t want to admit that the awkwardness of their silences was making it hard to study, but that was undeniably the truth. Most of her attention kept getting distracted by Eliza sitting a foot to her right, turning pages not very quickly, but certainly too fast to be taking in what was written on them. She was frowning properly now, a half-frustrated sort of expression that made Tessa sure she’d done or said something that genuinely upset her, but she wasn’t sure what. Most of what she’d said a few minutes ago had been teasing, an attempt at banter, something to engage and entertain that was a mite more fun than labored observations of the weather.