Warmth Pt. 02

I was happy about that. I liked what we had going and didn't want it to change. I was glad Pine saw it the same way.

The rest of the evening was quiet. I did laundry and read a book while Pine sculpted something. After a bit I walked over to check in on him.

I could tell that he was sculpting a bed with two people in it. When I got closer I saw that it was our bed and the two people were us. We were just sleeping, spooning like we always did. I looked at Pine to see him grinning. It wasn't that little half smile he'd had before. It was full on and it was wonderful.

I came at him so fast that I managed to catch him off-guard. I assaulted him with a barrage of scratching and kissing that had us on the floor. When we were rolling around, Pine made a noise that gave me pause. It was quiet and extremely brief, but the sound was unmistakable.

Pine had let out a little laugh.

I tried to make him do it again. I scratched his favorite spot on his back until his eyes rolled back into his head, but to no avail. Oh, well. I had heard it once and figured that was enough for the time being. I looked at him, and he was panting and sated from all the contact. I realized then how much I had missed showing affection to Pine. I had gone almost week without it. I sat him up and held his chin so I could look in his eyes.

"I love you."

A few seconds later I realized that that was the first time I'd ever said those words aloud to him. I'm sure I'd felt that way for a while but I hadn't felt the need to verbalize it before then.

I enjoyed how saying that made me feel. I liked the way those words tasted. I said them again.

"I love you." I kissed the tip of his nose.

"I love you." I kissed his cheek.

"I love you." I cupped his face, kissed his forehead, and pulled him close to me. He nuzzled my ear.

I could have died right then and there with absolutely no regrets. At that moment, everything in my world was perfect.

It was late when we went to bed that night. I lay there with Pine in my arms and wondered what I had done to deserve so much happiness. My eyes were closed and I let my other senses explore. I could hear him breathing lightly. I smelled the shampoo in his hair. Most of all I just felt Pine's warmth.

It wasn't lost on me just how strange the relationship we had was. I didn't think anyone would understand it and I didn't expect them to. Even so I knew for a fact that I wouldn't give it up for anything.

For the first time in days I fell asleep with no worries clouding my mind.

IX

It was my hunger that woke me up. When I checked my phone, I was shocked to see that it was 3 PM. Even considering that we went to sleep late, that would mean we had slept for about fourteen hours. Damn. I guess the events had tired us out more than I had thought.

I got Pine up and fed him what would normally be lunch. I was on my laptop a few hours later and looked at the date. I thought back and realized that tomorrow would be one month to the day since I had found Pine up in the mountains.

I didn't know Pine's date of birth. Odds were I never would, but I see that day as something really special. I think I've grown to regard that date as the equivalent of his birthday. It had been a month, but considering how eventful that month had been, I wanted to do something. Not to mention, I'd finally gotten Pine back. He was right back to his old self now that his hormones stopped taking over. I knew that he would appreciate anything I did, but I wanted to make it special anyway. It's likely that the reason for that was it would at least make me happy.

I made a few calls that evening. The first one was to James.

He skipped the greetings. "How's Pine?"

"He's going to be okay."

I could tell that James wanted to press further and ask more questions, but thankfully he didn't. As much as I liked James, I was perfectly happy to keep the previous day's events to myself.

I told him that I wanted to do some things alone the next day and didn't want to leave Pine all by himself. I asked him if he would take Pine to the dog park with Flag and Comet. He said he'd love to.

I made a few other calls and set up an appointment the following afternoon. I had my work cut out for me.

The next day I set an alarm, just in case, but we both awoke at a reasonable hour. At around 10:00, James arrived with his dogs. Before Pine could barrel towards Comet at full speed, I grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him to face me.

"Listen, Pine. You're gonna go to the dog park without me today. Have fun but do what James says and behave yourself." Pine still had very little ability to understand words, but he seemed to pick up on tones okay. I think he got the message.

After Pine had left I went to my car and got started on the errands I had to complete before evening. I returned an hour later to an empty house.

I wanted to make Pine's favorite food for dinner, but it was kind of hard to tell what his favorite food was because I had never seen him reject anything. Even so, I decided that out of all the things I'd made, Pine had the best reaction to the spaghetti with meat sauce.

Every so often I'd make a big batch of meat sauce, enough so that I would have leftovers. It was back during that first week that I had heated up some of a previous batch and gave it to him. It was the only food where I actually got the impression that Pine was tasting it instead of just stuffing it in his mouth as quickly as possible. He also liked the smell a lot.

The sauce is very time consuming to make, but most of the time is spent leaving it on low heat and letting it simmer. After I had finished all my prep work and put it in the fridge, I set out to finish my to-do list for the day. I had already told James to just take Pine back to his place when he was done at the dog park, let him and Comet have all the fun they wanted, and I'd call James when I got back home so he could drop off Pine.

I'm glad I had planned that, because the two stops I took had me out for almost four hours. When I got back I put the ingredients into a big pot and turned on the heat. When James came back with Pine I thanked him.

"It's no trouble at all. Pine's a lot of fun. I'm starting to think that Comet sees him as her boyfriend, though."

I laughed, and a thought occurred to me. "Hey, wanna come over for dinner later? There's more than enough food."

He grinned. "If you're serving up whatever it is I'm smelling right now, sure."

I told him to come back at 6 PM.

After James left, I went to the kitchen to stir the pot. I saw that Pine was hovering near the burner, deeply drinking in the scent of the sauce cooking. He seemed to enjoy it almost as much as he liked that candle he was named after.

The time leading up to dinner was peaceful. I gave the two of us a shower but we both spent a majority of the time relaxing. Pine was on the kitchen floor, right next to the pot bubbling on the stove. I prepared a big pot of spaghetti and heated up some bread. By the time James arrived the stage had been set.

Before I started dinner, in my head I thanked God for bringing Pine into my life. Maybe it was coincidence that I had found Pine, but I think we had met for a reason.

I served both me and Pine before scooting my chair over next to his. I grabbed a bite from his plate with a fork and fed it to him. I then ate some from my plate. I repeated the two actions until both plates were empty. Afterwards I realized that I had invited James for dinner and spent the first ten minutes of the meal ignoring him. When I turned to him I saw that he was smirking.

"What's that look for?"

"Oh, nothing. I'm just thinking about how adorable you two are, like a mother feeding a baby."

I glared at him and he laughed. I gave Pine a piece of bread to nibble on and turned so I could talk to James properly.

He grabbed some bread of his own and used it to mop up the sauce on his plate.

"I have to say, Zach, I understand why he likes this stuff so much. You're a pretty good cook."

I snorted. "Yeah, I wish. I still can't get this sauce right, and I've been trying for years."

His mouth was full of bread, so he just looked at me quizzically.

"This is just my attempt to recreate the sauce my mom makes. She says she doesn't use a recipe and I've seen her make it so many times, but I can't replicate it."

He swallowed. "Well, if it's even better than this I'll have to try it someday." He glanced at Pine, then back to me. "And if she's even half the mom you are to Pine, you're a lucky man."

I decided to take that as a compliment but kept up appearances by giving him the stink-eye again.

His expression became more solemn. "All joking aside, you're, like, weirdly good with him."

"Well, I've had some help along the way."

He laughed sarcastically. "Hardly. It's easy to imagine Pine as just a dog in the body of a human, but there's more to it than that. There's some nuance to him that you need to learn with time and you met that challenge like a champ."

I winced at the compliment. "I'm just playing it by ear. In all honesty, I don't think I deserve him."

He leaned forward, his face the most serious I'd ever seen it.

"Zach, you're gonna need to stop with the self-deprecation. It's annoying and not true."

My face burned, and I knew I was turning red.

He smiled and got back to his playful nature. "You're a good guy, really. You just think too much."

I swallowed, trying to fend off the embarrassment. I turned to Pine, who was done with his bread. I had two more things to give to him and now seemed like an appropriate time. I got up and asked James to keep Pine busy for a few minutes. I came back after a brief moment with two items. I got Pine's attention and looked him square in the eye.

"Pine, you probably don't care about this, but I found you up in the woods exactly one month ago. You've been a blessing in my life since then and I wanted to thank you for that."

I gave him the first item, which was a crucifix necklace. It was the same one I would wear in my teenage years, so it had sentimental value to me. It just had one change: the word PINE was now engraved on it.

James whistled. "Is that why you were for gone so long today?"

I nodded. "I've got a coworker named Mitch who's pretty crafty. He helped me out."

Mitch was in the same department as I was, and we were closer to what one would call "friends" than I was with most of my other coworkers. He was always interested in crafting and making new things. I had called him up yesterday and asked him to help me engrave a necklace. He invited me over to his house and we spent a couple hours in his garage figuring it out. I could tell that Mitch didn't see it as an inconvenience. He was just interested in the challenge. He hadn't even asked me what the necklace was for.

I put the necklace on Pine and smiled. It was a happy moment, at least until James interjected.

"You do realize that you basically just gave him a collar, right?"

That had legitimately never crossed my mind. I felt myself turn red again and James burst out laughing.

I smiled sheepishly, trying to push down the discomfort. I gave Pine the second gift, which was a set of simple sculpting tools. I thought that I would have to demonstrate to Pine what they were for, but he got a gleam in his eye when he held one in his hand. He got up and carried them all to his spot on the counter and started trying the tools against the clay.

James rose. "Well, I think it's time for me to take my leave." We said our goodbyes and he left.

I walked over to Pine, seeing him wearing the necklace and using the tools. Contentment filled me.

I got the candle, lit it and set it down next to him before leaving him to his work.

*****

The first half of October was tumultuous, but the second half was peaceful. Pine was enjoying his gifts. I'll fully admit that the necklace was mostly for me and not for him. I even tried my best to prepare myself for him not wanting to wear it, but to my surprise he almost never took it off.

I think he wore it because that meant he would always have something to put in his hands. It became one of his playthings, like his hair or my entire body. He even wore it to bed, and I'd have to take it off myself before he had a shower. He seemed to love it, and I'd like to think that that was at least partly because it was a gift from me.

He had much more utility from the sculpting tools I'd given him, though. Back when he was using only his hands, there wasn't much detail he could make, but with the tools he could make very fine textures. It also meant that he wouldn't get his hands as dirty, which was definitely a plus from my point of view.

What's funny is that when I bought the tools, I didn't know what most of them were for. There were wire loops and rakes and pieces of wood and so many other things. I just bought it because I assumed that Pine would be able to figure it out, and I was right. As a sculptor he was self-taught and a quick learner.

He also got deeply into his work. The first night he had the tools, I had to drag him away from them so he could go to bed. I'm sure that if I hadn't done that he would have stayed there until he passed out in his chair. He could sit there sculpting with that candle burning next to him for hours.

He started getting really good, improving his technique and making things that matched reality. One time he made Comet's head and it matched so well that it was actually sort of creepy. The texture was right and the shape was spot on. The only thing that looked wrong were the eyes, which were the right shape but looked dead without any pupils on them. Still, it was a really close match, and James agreed when I sent him a picture of it.

The main thing I remember when I look back to the last part of October was the weather starting to cool. I had noticed that Pine seemed to get cold easily but that wasn't something I could fully appreciate until the temperature started dipping down. He hated the cold with a passion.

On those mornings where the temperature got down to the thirties he would flat-out refuse to get out of bed. He would just lay there, curled up into a ball with the blankets wrapped around him until I had to drag him out of bed. He actually got into the habit of carrying the bedding around with him, just walking around the house with a blanket around himself. He looked kind of pathetic. In order to avoid cranking up my heating bill, I bought him a thick blue anorak, something that would be overkill for literally anyone else. Thankfully he could actually function normally around the house, and even go outside occasionally while he was wearing it.

The fireplace became his favorite thing in the house at that time. Once I'd get a blaze going, he'd be laying in front of it, so happy he looked like he would melt down into the carpet. That fireplace also worked as a powerful sedative for Pine. Nearly every night I had a fire going, by the end of it I'd find him passed out in front of the hearth, and when I say passed out I mean out cold. I'd taken to just slinging him over my shoulder and carrying him to our bed. He'd be so far gone he wouldn't even notice.

As dramatic as he tended to be about the cold, his reaction never made sense to me. That was because no matter how cold he acted like he was, his entire body would always be warm to the touch. That was something that I exploited shamelessly. He was a godsend at night. I'd push my body against his and go to sleep nice and warm. I owned an electric blanket that I had used prior to meeting Pine and it went unused for that entire fall and winter.

It wasn't just that, though. Unlike Pine's, when my body got cold, it stayed cold. Instead of bundling up, though, I'd taken to just using Pine's body to warm my own. We did an awful lot of cuddling. Actually, scratch that, cuddling isn't the right word for it; I used Pine as a heating pad, but he didn't mind.

Both Pine and I were indoor people, so the cold didn't change our lifestyles much. The rest of October was pretty quiet.

That Halloween I did something that I still think is genius and refuse to apologize for. I went to one of the pop-up Halloween stores and bought a simple, two-piece costume: dog ears and a matching tail. They looked like they belonged to a wolf or a husky. After an early dinner on the 31^st, I attached the ears to Pine and clipped the tail to his belt, on the side so it would be visible from the front.

The entire evening the two of us just sat next to each other on the porch. I'd scratch him and let him touch and nuzzle me like normal, even when I was giving out candy to the trick-or-treaters. Several of the kids would ask who Pine was, or what his costume was supposed to be, and I would always respond the same way.

"He's just my dog."

The children thought it was delightful and some of them even petted Pine, which he absolutely loved. Most of the parents that were walking with them weren't as enchanted. I'd been living in that neighborhood for two years, after I moved out of my first apartment in West Virginia. Most of my neighbors knew me by sight but didn't really talk with me, which I wasn't unhappy about. I also knew that some of my closer neighbors were aware that a younger man had been living in my house with me for a while at that point, but they didn't know what our relationship was. I knew what I would have guessed if I were in their shoes.

Because of that, most of the adults didn't know what to make of the display. Some of them gave us strange looks. Not enough that I thought they'd do anything, but definitely enough for me to find it hilarious. Normally I would be the one feeling uncomfortable during interactions, but it was fun to be on the other side of that, if for only one night.

I was genuinely disappointed when the deluge of visitors slowed to a trickle. After things had been quiet for a while, I left the bowl of candy on my porch just in case and got us both inside.

X

It was on the first Saturday in November that an intense storm hit my area, likely the last time before the rain was replaced with snow. Before that Pine didn't have much experience with rain. I was curious to see what his reaction to thunder and lightning would be. James told me that most dogs didn't handle sounds like fireworks and thunder very well. Pine was pretty calm most of the time, but I knew from his nightmares that he had some demons. Thankfully his reaction to close thunder was pretty mild. He'd jump a little bit and get startled, but he didn't freak out like when he had a night terror.

The storm was a decent one though. It never made the power go out, but there was strong wind and the rain came down in sheets. It also made me realize that it had been almost a full year since I'd last cleaned out my gutters. As unappealing as it was, I knew I had to do it. I didn't technically own the house, I was renting it, and I didn't want there to be any water damage.

The next afternoon I set out to do it and just get it over with. Pine followed me out and watched what I was doing at first, but after a few minutes he got bored and cold enough to go back inside.

I had been up there for a while and was cleaning out the gutters at the back of the house when I needed to climb back down to get something. My shoes were wet, the ladder was metal and I wasn't paying attention. When I took my first step on it, it was like the ladder fell away and I slipped.

I don't remember falling, the very next sensation I was aware of was feeling like somebody had hit my left arm with a baseball bat. Almost the instant after I felt my head hit the ground hard.

It's kind of hard to describe what happened next. I didn't feel too much pain, and I didn't lose consciousness, at least not for long. After what felt like only a few seconds of black I was in gray instead. I'm pretty sure I was semiconscious, but I wasn't really able to get up or do much. I remember a few sensations from that period of time. I remember looking up at the sky. I remember hearing the birds. I remember feeling a strange sensation on my thigh, but nothing was continuous. Things faded in and out of the fog. I was only vaguely aware of what was happening until I heard the screaming.