“Ugh, you’re a terrible person,” she groans. “Why do I hang out with you again?” She’s joking, I know she is. But her words still make something jerk inside me. Because right now, she’s the only one I’ve got, and as amazing as Star is, that still really fucking sucks.

I step forward in the darkness, and go barreling into her unexpectedly. I grab her before we both go tumbling to the ground, and when we right ourselves, my arm is wound tightly around her waist. “Woah,” I say once we’re steady on our feet again. “Are you okay?”

“Ash?” There’s something in her voice that makes me freeze up. Something’s wrong.

“Yeah?”

“Were you being serious about the wolves?”

“What?”

She looks over her shoulder at me. Her eyes are like saucers. “Are there really wolves in Avenue?”

“Why?” She takes another step back, until her back is pressed hard up against my chest. She’s shaking. Her entire body is trembling in my arms.

“Because I think there’s something in the backyard.” Her voice cracks on the last word. It takes a second for her words to filter through my brain enough for me to make sense of them. As soon as I realize what she’s trying to tell me, I pull her back, putting my body between her and the gate to the backyard.

“Whoa, are you fucking serious?” I ask. I have my hand flat against her stomach, and I keep my arm extended, keeping her well behind me. I can feel her muscles jump beneath my fingers. I take a careful step forward, trying to see into the backyard while still keeping my distance. But it’s too dark. I can’t see. The only light out now is the glow from the streetlights, and it isn’t quite making it to the backyard. Fuck.

I realize I’m still holding the grocery bag, so I hand it back to Star. She takes it without a word, and together we edge closer to the backyard. We’re almost at the gate when, out of the corner of my eye, I see something move along the back fence, disappearing into the shadows under the oak tree. “There!” Star hisses, reaching out and jabbing a finger toward the shadow. “Did you see it? It was right there?” She takes a step forward, and I reach out and catch her by the arm, pulling her back.

“I saw it,” I say. “At least, I think I did.” It is too dark, too fucking dark. I can’t see anything clearly. My free hand darts out, and snags the flashlight out of the box that we’d dumped by the side of the house. I flick the switch and a beam of light shoots out. I flash it over the fence, scanning the light back and forth, gazing hard into the darkness.

Where is it? Where the fuck is it?

There!

My eyes catch on it. Yes! I inch closer, squinting at the dark shape, Star’s question about wolves looping over and over in my mind.

“Hey!” I yell out, waving the light back and forth, trying to get its attention. “Get out of here!”

But as the words leave my mouth, the thing steps out of the shadows, and I catch it in the beam of the flashlight, and my entire body fucking freezes.

Holy. Shit.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

Bruiser?

Star

Oh. My. God.

I’ve never seen anything like this.

I thought for sure that the way Ash had tensed up, the way his eyes had darted back and forth across the yard, searching, meant that he was going to turn to me and tell me to get in the house and call animal control. But when his eyes landed on the creature, his grip on my arm didn’t tighten, and he didn’t start pulling me back to the car. Instead his grip loosened until his hand fell from my arm to hang limp at his side, and his eyes turned into dinner plates.

He murmured something and shot forward, through the back gate, straight toward the animal. I opened my mouth to stop him, to scream, to do something. But instead of growling or snarling or backing away—or any number of things the animal could have done—it let out a series of high pitched barks and then raced forward, straight into Ash’s arms.

Holy. Shit.

I’m on the back porch now, but even from here I can see the look on Ash’s face. He’s laughing but at the same time he looks like he’s about a second and a half away from bawling his eyes out. He turns and buries his face in the dog’s neck, even though its dark brown fur is filthy and probably stinks just as bad as anything we’ve found in the yard. He’s on his knees in the patchy grass, the still-damp fabric sinking into the dirt, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He just wraps the massive dog up in his arms, and starts squeezing it like there’s no tomorrow.

The dog, on the other hand, is the image of pure joy. It’s squirming in Ash’s arms like all of its Christmases have come at once, and just the sight of it is making my eyes start to burn.

Fuck.

I didn’t cry when CPS knocked on my mother’s door and took me away. I didn’t cry when I got the call that my mother had died. And there’s no way in hell I’m going to start crying over whatever the hell is going on in front of me, no matter how much my throat is choking up right now.

I turn away and scrub my hands over my face, though. Just in case.

***

Ash starts making his way back over to me once he and the mutt—who actually has a much sweeter disposition than his appearance led me to believe—have calmed down enough for him to introduce us, and I can’t stop thinking about it. About how happy they both look.

Ash can’t stop grinning, and the dog is staring up at him like Ash is the true source of happiness, like he’s got sunbeams and unicorns coming out his butt. It’s . . . pretty cute, actually.

I guess this is what people mean when they say they’re dog people. I’d never seen the appeal before, not after my less than stellar past with my foster mom’s Pomeranian. But I have to admit, I’m starting to come around. Especially when Ash walks over to me, the dog plastered to his side, and introduces us with tears still shining in his eyes. He kind of sniffs and tries to scowl them away, like he’d gotten something in his eye, but we both know why they are there.

“So,” I say. “Not a wolf.”

Ash barks out a kind of strangled-sounding laugh, and scrubs his hands over his face. “Yeah,” he says. “Not so much.”

I let the smile I’ve been trying to tamp down start to sneak through, and plant my free hand on my hip. “You know, you still haven’t answered my were-you-serious-about-the-wolves question.”

“It doesn’t matter, anyway.” He reaches down to give the dog an affectionate slap on the side. “We’ve got this big guy to protect us.”

“And I’m guessing you know each other,” I say, smirking at him.

“Yeah . . . yeah. Star, this is Bruiser,” he says, and ruffles the mutt’s ears. The dog’s entire body shakes with joy. “He’s my dog.”

The night has cooled down enough that we can actually use the fire pit that we’d unearthed from the ton of junk in the backyard, and Ash tells me the whole story as we get a campfire going. The dog is his, he tells me, as we settle in and start building the sandwiches from the stuff we picked up from the grocery store. He’d left Bruiser with his parents when he’d been put away for the accident—the crash, he called it, because for some reason, he never seems to use the word accident, even though I know that’s what it was—and they hadn’t told him the dog had gotten out and gone missing until he’d gotten back to Avenue.

“I’ve been so fucking angry,” he says, pulling a sliver of roast beef out of his sandwich and tossing it to the dog, who snaps it out of the air like it is nothing. “It’s like . . . I know I’m a fuck-up, okay? But Bruiser? He didn’t do anything. And I just . . . ” He trails off, staring into the fire.