Some of you may notice that the man who used to be Jamie is now Noah. It started out as just a need to limit the names with the -ee sound at the end - we had quite a lot - and turned into a new layer of depth on the character. But it’s still the same guy… mostly. Enjoy!

“Bailey, heel!”

Daisy jerked on the leash as seventeen pounds of Jack Russell terror dragged her to the grassy patch behind the step temple, aggravating her tiny person’s complex. It was hard enough being four foot eleven without losing a tug of war to a dog the size of a Cabbage Patch doll. She leaned back and dug in her heels, trying to balance her purse, the ceramic bottle, Bailey, and her sanity.

“Heel! Heel! Heel!” Something snapped under her left foot. “What the– HEEL!”

Bailey stopped straining against the leash and danced back to her. Daisy dumped her bottle and purse on the ground and sat, then pulled off her left sandal. The heel had broken clean off. Bailey sniffed at it and then licked Daisy’s hand.

“Don’t kiss up now, dog.” She held the broken heel to her sandal, checking for a way to fix it just to get home, because walking on one heel while being attached to Bailey was a suicide mission. She picked up the ceramic bottle and pulled out the cork. Maybe she could substitute it for the heel… no. Too short.

“This is what you get when you buy shoes at a store that sells rice by the bushel.” She took a breath, catching the sharp scent of the temple tonic wafting up from the open bottle. She glanced at it, focusing on the pretty carnelian flower embossed on the side, the rich orange-red coloring almost swirling under the glossy surface. She lifted the bottle and took a generous swig. Damn, that stuff was good, sharp and exotic like an umbrella drink on a beach. It made her feel… not drunk. Relaxed. Calm. Happy, as if her life was better than she remembered it being. She took another drink, then looked at Bailey who was doing his signature LET’S GO! LET’S GO! shuffle-dance two-step.

“Can’t sit still for a second, can you?” She re-corked the bottle and turned her attention back to the sandal. “I know it’s not your fault you’re a nightmare, Bail. You’re my mother’s dog. It was bound to happen. But these classes need to work, or I’m going to throw myself in the river. Do you understand?”

“Yes!” Bailey barked. “River!”

Daisy’s grip tightened on the sandals in her hands. “What?”

“Daisy in the river!” Bailey barked again.

“Holy crap!” Daisy screamed and shot up.

Bailey shot up as well, hopping straight up in the air. “Crap! Crap! Crap!”

She felt a snap in her hand and looked down to see she’d snapped the toe off the good sandal. “Crap.”

“Everything okay?”

Daisy twirled to see Noah, the cute trainer from the doggy class, walking toward them. Great.

“I heard a scream.” Noah’s eyes locked on Daisy and he smiled as he recognized her. “Hey there. You okay?”

“Yep.” Daisy looked down at Bailey. “Saw a spider.”

Noah moved closer and glanced around. “Big spider?”

“No,” she said. “Just… an unsettling spider. A terrifying, but likely imaginary, spider. I think it’s gone now.” She tightened her hold on Bailey’s leash, then knelt down to pick up her purse and — her whole body relaxed as she saw it — the ceramic bottle.

Right. She wasn’t crazy. She was sauced. Whew.

“Everything’s okay.” She straightened up. “I think maybe I drank too much.”

“Drank too much!” Bailey said as he hopped.

Daisy turned the bottle in her hands, searching for some kind of labeling. “This has got to be… what? Seventy, eighty proof?”

“I don’t think there’s any alcohol in that,” Noah said.

“No?” She glanced down at Bailey. “Yes, there is.” She raised her head and her breath caught as she looked in Noah’s sharp blue eyes, all warm and…

Whoa. Daisy wasn’t sure if the sudden whoosh she felt was from the guy or the bottle, but either way, it was time to go home.

“Well, it was nice meeting–” Daisy started, but then Bailey jumped straight up into the air, snapped at either a hallucination or a wish, and landed like a circus performer waiting for applause.

“Ta-da!” he barked.

“–you,” she finished, then jerked on Bailey’s leash. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?” Noah said.

“Not you. Him. He keeps –” She stopped herself before she could say, “talking,” and then Bailey leapt into the air again, and she said, “–doing that.”

“What? The jumping?”

Daisy took in a deep breath. “And… other stuff. I think he might be driving me literally insane. Can a dog do that? It would explain a lot.”

“Come on.” Noah angled his head and smiled down at her. “It can’t be that bad.”

“Oh, really? He doesn’t listen, he doesn’t sleep, and he leaves little scratch marks on my wood floors. I can’t leave him at home because he’ll mark my couch as his territory, but I can’t bring him to work with me because he won’t sit still long enough for me to finish a thought.” She swallowed, feeling the frustration of her daily existence so acutely, she thought she might start to cry. “I promised my mother I wouldn’t kennel him, but I just don’t know what to do.”

Her leash hand started jerking back and forth as Bailey whipped his head from side to side, starting yet another session of Is my tail still there? Yep, it’s still there! She tried to pull in the leash the way her mother had told her to, but, like everything else she’d tried in the past two days, it didn’t work.

“Jack Russells are challenging dogs, but you can handle it.” Noah looked so certain that she almost believed him.

“Thank you, but you’re wrong. I can’t. But if I come back for Tuesday’s class, can you fix him? Because I have to tell you…” She shot a look at Bailey, daring him to speak again. “…I’m not sure anything we picked up tonight has been all that helpful.”

“Training takes time. You’ll get it.”

Daisy noticed the crinkles around Noah’s eyes deepening as he smiled down at her, and felt a flutter of excitement, and then Bailey barked, “Daisy in the river!” and she remembered she was insane and that perhaps now wasn’t the best time to be striking up a flirtation.

“Well, I’d better get him home,” she said. “It’s been hours since he’s humped my couch pillows. I wait any longer, he’s gonna get the shakes.”

“Wait.” Noah motioned down at her feet, then met her eyes again. “I can’t let you just walk off barefoot. Where are you going?”

“I’m on Temple Street, right over the cafe.”

“Then you’re right on my way.” He nodded in the direction of town. “Let me walk you, make sure your feet get home safe. If you don’t mind taking the scenic route through the park, we can get to Temple Street without touching pavement.”

“Park!” Bailey said. “Park! Park!”

Daisy shot a look at Bailey, then looked up at Noah and said, “I like the park.” She gave him the bottle to hold for her, held onto Bailey’s leash with one hand and tucked the other in the crook of his arm. As she did, everything in her world seemed to pop with life and color. The grass was greener, the dusky sky was a brighter purple, and her body felt light and happy and warm in all the right places.

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s nice of you to be so concerned about my feet.”

“Well, it’s not just that,” he said. “I hate to see a couch pillow get lonely.”

Daisy laughed, and Bailey hopped up and twirled. “I like him.”

“Me, too,” Daisy said.

They made their way across the rolling green of campus, the grass tickling Daisy’s feet, keeping them cool, making her feel powerful and connected. I need to walk barefoot more often, she thought. As they walked, Noah showed her how to get Bailey to heel, and it almost worked. Then he told her a joke she’d already heard, but it was so funny when he told it that she had to stop to catch her breath. She didn’t get her first uh-oh until they were almost through the park, when he mentioned that crazy-eyed Mina was his cousin.

“You’re related to Mina?” she asked. “By blood?”

“That’s usually how it’s done.”

“No, I mean–” She shot him an exasperated look. “You know what I mean. She’s just… no offense, but she seems–”

“Insane?” Noah nodded. “She is. My father got out of the family with his sanity mostly intact, although he’s doing this combover thing that has me concerned.” He nudged her with his elbow. “Your turn.”

Daisy looked up at him. “To lose my sanity?” She glanced at Bailey. One step ahead of you there.

“I just threw my family’s crazy closet wide open for you. I usually don’t let women meet Mina until never. Now it’s your turn. Fair’s fair.”

“Well,” she said, “my mother believes there’s no outfit in the world that can’t be made better by a pillbox hat. I haven’t seen the top of her head since 1982.”

Noah stopped walking and looked down at Daisy. Daisy stopped walking and looked up at him. Bailey leapt in the air and barked, “Pillbox!”

“That’s the best you’ve got?” Noah said. “Hats?”

“Well, it starts with the hats, revs up with her total lack of boundaries, and ends with her pretending to have allergies so she can dump her dog and me and go shopping in New York under the guise of seeing a specialist. It’s a whole gestalt of crazy.”

He hesitated, then nodded and started walking again. “All right, I’ll give you a pass. Plus bonus points for coining ‘gestalt of crazy.’ Can I use that?”

“In what?”

He looked at her. “Another dirty little secret. I write songs.”

“You’re a musician?” Uh-oh.

“Depends on how you define musician. I write songs. Play when I can. The rest of the time, it’s odd jobs to pay the rent.”

“Like dog training?”

“Like whatever. Dog training is the flavor of the week.” He shrugged. “I’m good with dogs, and my aunt Miriam - Dad’s sister, Mina’s mom, the source of all batshit - asked me to help out her old college roommate with the class, so I figured, why not? I’m not one to turn down a job that pays.”

Daisy tried to picture Kammani in college, but couldn’t do it. “Don’t you want… I don’t know. Something more stable?”

“No.”

Daisy went quiet as the uh-ohs flew fast and furious around her. No goals, no real job, family tree full of nuts. Great. Well, she didn’t have to marry him. She could just sleep with him.

“Daisy?”

“Hmmm?” She looked up at him.

“I asked you what you do for a living.”

“Oh. Sorry. I write web code for the Humanities Department. It’s pretty boring.”

He eyed her sideways. “But stable.”

She gently squeezed his arm. “Is that a dig?”

“No,” he said. “I’m just saying everyone makes choices. You can’t have it all.”

They moved closer to cut through a line of buckeye trees, and then they were at Temple Street, almost home. Despite the fact that she saw Temple umpteen times a day, Daisy found herself suddenly awed by its colorful strip of storefronts and bars, its streetlights just starting to break into the haze of dusk. How could she have lived there so long, and never noticed how pretty it was? She made a mental note to find out what Kammani put in that temple tonic.

“So, hey,” she said, “getting back to Kammani, I have to ask - is she full-on nuts or just suffering from delusions of goddess?”

Noah stopped short at the sidewalk and handed her the bottle, then turned his back to her and lowered down a bit. “Hop on.”

Bailey jumped up in the air. “Hop on, hop on, hop on!”

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Noah glanced over his shoulder at her. “Piggyback. Let’s go.”

She laughed, then noticed he didn’t laugh with her. “You’re serious?”

Noah straightened. “This is a bar street in a college town. The sidewalk is made of broken beer bottles. You’re going piggyback.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because…” She flushed and looked down the street. “It’s childish. And embarrassing.”

“Half the fun in life is doing things that are childish and embarrassing.”

“But–”

He put his hand on her shoulder, and the warmth shot through her so strongly that she almost felt dizzy just from his touch. He lowered his head and spoke quietly, his eyes on hers.

“Trust me, okay? I’ll never let anything bad happen to you.”

She looked up at him, and without understanding how or why, she knew it was true. “Okay.”

Noah’s smile widened and her heart quickened and Bailey flew up in the air and barked, “Yay!!!”

She handed Bailey’s leash to Noah, then took the bottle and her purse in one hand as she grabbed onto his shoulder with the other and crawled onto his back. She tightened her legs around his hips and he straightened, bouncing her into place and…

“Hoo boy,” she said as the sensations shot through her.

“You okay?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Yeah,” she squeaked, then cleared her throat. “I’m fine.”

Noah started down the street and on each movement, each breath, a fresh wave of pure want shot through her. The energy pooled within her, tightening in her abdomen, and everything around her seemed to pop and crackle. They crossed the street just as a warm summer wind shot down the street, taking a handful of colorful flyers from the hands of a woman who chased after them, cursing. The colors dancing on the air made Daisy feel woozy, and she closed her eyes, but then the wind on her face made her feel a little too warm in certain places, so she opened them again and tightened her grip on Noah, and–

Oh. Wow.

They passed by a car and Bailey must have jumped up or something, because a loud, rhythmic alarm went off, bursts of sound matching the pacing of her heart, her breath, her desire. The heat rode up her legs, her core, to her face and she took in a deep breath of air just as Noah bounced her again on his hips to get a better hold of her.

“Oh, hey,” Daisy said, gripping the cool bottle, anchoring herself to it and to Noah, holding on to what control she had left.

And then, finally, Noah stopped in front of the cafe. He settled her down gently on the sidewalk, and the warm cement shot another wave of sensation through her body. She looked again at the bottle in her hand; what the hell was in that stuff?

“Well,” Noah said. “I’ll see you Tuesday at class?”

Daisy looked up, feeling bereft. Tuesday? Five whole days?

“Actually,” she said quickly, “hell of a coincidence with you being a musician and all, Abby’s having an open mic night here tomorrow night.”

“Yeah?” Noah looked at the bakery door, where the giant CLOSED sign sat in the dusty window. “It’s not… closed?”

“No. Well, yes. But no.” God, but she was a bad liar. “Abby needs to bring in a little extra cash, so she’s having an open mic night. You know, like Bea used to have?” She smiled up at him, hoping her face wasn’t as flushed as it felt. “I’d love to hear you play.”

“Then I’ll be there.” He waved goodbye to Bailey and a moment later, he’d disappeared around the corner. Daisy leaned against the cool glass of the old storefront, watching him go.

“Daisy happy!” Bailey yipped, hopping into the air. “Happy, happy, happy!”

Daisy looked down, and felt a rush of affection for the little furball. She knelt down and rubbed his head.

“Daisy happy.” She stood up, corked the bottle and pulled open the stairwell door. “Come on. You go say hi to my couch pillow while I drum up the nerve to tell Abby I’ve booked her an open mic tomorrow.”

“Yay!” Bailey barked, darting up the steps, and Daisy followed, laughing.