Spare Key After Midnight — Bonus Scene

The Dog Argument
by Jace Wilder

The Dog Argument

Stuart

There was a dog on my fiancé.

I’ll back up. It was the second Thursday in May, I got home at 3:20, and the truck went in crooked because I was looking at the front window instead of the driveway. Neil’s off Thursdays. He spends them at the kitchen table with the co-op binder and a pot of the good tea, and you could set a clock by it.

He wasn’t at the table. He was on the couch, flat on his back, out cold, in the gray shirt that says LOCAL 1146. And on his chest, going up and down with him, chin parked on his collarbone, was seventeen pounds of gray terrier.

Gerald opened one eye at me. He didn’t lift his head. He had the look of a tenant with a lease.

I stood in the doorway with my lunch pail and didn’t breathe. I’ve wanted a lot of things in that room. I don’t know that I ever wanted one as bad as I wanted that picture to hold still.

Neil sleeps light for a man with a clear conscience. His eyes came open, went to me, went to the dog, and came back.

“This isn’t what it looks like,” he said.

“It looks like a dog.”

“He’s a guest. Lorraine’s sister in Utica had a hip done. It’s four nights.” He hadn’t moved a muscle. Neither had Gerald. “She asked at the mailbox.”

“She asked you.”

“She said he’d expressed a preference. He sat on my boot once, a year ago April. It’s been entered as a relationship.”

“How long’s he been up there?”

“I’m told he doesn’t care for the floor.” A pause. “Since about one.”

Two hours and twenty minutes. This is a man who wouldn’t let me bring a second pillow into his apartment without a text first.

I’ll catch you up on the dog.

I asked him the first time on a mattress on the floor, a year ago, and he said no. I said we’d circle back. I asked in June and he said, “I won’t.” It went on the plan in October as item nine. Under the number, in my capitals, it says WE’LL CIRCLE BACK. Under that, in his hand, it says Noted. No.

Milton runs a pool on it. Five dollars a square. My mother has Christmas. Wes has “tomorrow,” every week, and pays up in quarters. Milton has “never,” which he calls the smart money, and he’s sat on it for a year with the face of somebody holding a deed.

So I didn’t say one word. I went and washed up to the elbows and changed my shirt, and I took my time about it.

When I came back, Neil was at the kitchen table. Hair flat. Legal pad squared up in front of him, pen uncapped. In the front room the dog had been moved to the couch cushion, and he was asleep on a navy jacket.

Neil owns three of those. He’d given one to a dog.

“Sit down,” he said. “I’ve drafted my objections.”

“When?”

“October. I’ve been waiting for you to raise it.” He turned to a fresh page. It wasn’t fresh. It was numbered. “There are six.”

I didn’t sit.

“One,” Neil said. “Hours. A dog needs somebody in the house, and I work an overnight—”

I went around behind his chair and put my hands on his shoulders. “One night a week. I’m home at 3:20. You’re home by five three days out of five and all day the other two. Lorraine’s upstairs. Wes would walk a dog to Canada if you let him.” I leaned down. “Next.”

There’s a mark behind his right ear, where the headset sits. It’s nearly gone now that he’s only on the floor Saturdays. I keep an eye on it. I put my mouth there.

His pen stopped.

“That isn’t a rebuttal.”

“It’s a site visit. Read me two.”

“Two.” His voice had dropped a notch. “Hair. I own three jackets, all of them navy, and a gray animal—”

“You’re wearing my shirt with half that dog on it. You slept two hours under him and you never slept better.” I ran my hand down inside his collar, over his chest, flat, and felt his heart going. “Next.”

“Stuart.”

“Here’s how this goes.” I took hold of the chair by its back and turned it around, him in it. It’s a heavy chair. He looked up at me with that level gray look, and his ears were pink, and he was already hard in his sweatpants. I could see the line of it. “You read. I listen. You quit reading, I quit.”

“Quit what?”

I went down on my knees on the kitchen floor.

“That,” I said.

I got his waistband down under his balls and took him in my hand. He’s long and straight and exact, same as the rest of him, and he was hot as a kettle, and when I put my tongue flat on the underside and dragged it up, the legal pad shook.

“Three,” Neil said, to the ceiling. “Expense.”

I took the head in my mouth and sucked.

“Veterinary costs are—Stuart—are not predictable. I’ve priced it. A dental cleaning alone—”

I went down on him. All the way, till my nose was in the hair and he was in my throat. Fifteen months ago I gagged on half of that. I’ve put in the hours.

He lost the rest of the sentence.

I pulled off. His cock stood there wet and twitching, an inch from my mouth.

“You quit,” I said.

“I was breathing.“

“Read.”

“A dental cleaning alone runs four hundred dollars,” Neil said, fast and flat, in the voice that tells strangers where to put their hands, and I took him back down as his reward and felt his thighs jump under my palms.

He read me every line of three. I’ll give him that. He read it with one hand white on the pad and the other sunk in my hair, and I worked him slow and wet and deep while he did. I know that cock better than I know my own truck. I know the place under the head that makes his left eyelid go. I know that if I hum, his hips come up off the chair, so I hummed. He got through a sentence about pet insurance with his voice going up at the end like a question.

“Four,” he said. He was panting. “It would sleep on the bed.”

I came off him long enough to say, “That’s not an objection. That’s a forecast,” and went back down.

“It would—oh, fuck—it would sleep between us—”

I sucked him hard, cheeks hollow, and got a thumb in behind his balls and pressed. He made a sound I felt in my knees. His hand left my hair and hit my shoulder. Two taps.

I stopped. I let him slide out of my mouth, slow, and sat back on my heels and looked at him. Flushed to the chest. Shaking. So close I could see his pulse in it.

“I tapped,” he said.

“I know what two taps means. Means I’ve got time to go to the drawer.”

It’s the junk drawer. It has a typed label on it now that says JUNK. The bottle’s where it’s always been, under the roller-skate wheel.

“Up,” I said. “Hands on the table.”

He stood. His knees weren’t a hundred percent. He looked at the table and then at me.

“The plan is on that table.”

“I know where the plan is.”

“It’s a governing document, Stu.”

“Then you’d best hold it down.”

I pulled the shirt off over his head. I pushed the sweatpants down to his ankles and he stepped out of them, and I put my hand between his shoulder blades and bent him over the kitchen table, chest to the wood, cheek by the legal pad.

He kept the pen. Bare-assed across a table at a quarter to four on a Thursday, and the man would not put down the pen.

I got back on my knees.

I’ve done this a fair number of times now and it has never once felt like a regular thing to be allowed. I spread him with both thumbs and put my mouth on him. I licked over him flat and slow, then pointed, then I pushed my tongue in, and his whole back bowed.

He’s got no quiet left in him. I took it out of him a year ago and never put it back. He groaned into the tabletop, long and low, and pushed his ass back on my face, and I held him open and ate him until my jaw ached and he was up on his toes.

“Five,” I said, against him.

“I can’t.”

“You quit, I quit.”

“Five.” It came out in pieces. “Noise.”

I slicked two fingers and gave him one. One first, always. He took it to the knuckle and breathed out.

“A dog barks,” Neil said. “At night. When—”

Two. I crooked them and found the spot, and his hand slapped flat on the table.

“—when someone comes in late.”

“Somebody does come in late.” I stroked over it, steady. “2:13, Sunday mornings. Every week. You know what a dog does about that?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Goes to the door,” I said. “Glad.”

He was quiet a long time for a man with two fingers in him. Then a third, and he wasn’t quiet.

“Read me six.”

“No.”

That stopped me. I can count on one hand the times he’s told me no in the middle.

“There’s a six. I can see it from here.”

“I’m not reading six with your hand in me.”

“Then I’ll take it out.”

“Don’t you dare.“

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I stood up and got my jeans open and slicked myself, and I laid my left hand on the small of his back, where the two dents are, and lined up and pushed in.

Bare. Slow. All the way, till my hips were against his ass and he had every bit of me. He’s tight and scalding and he grips going in, and after fifteen months it still takes the top of my head clean off.

“There,” Neil said, into the wood.

I fucked him. Long strokes, out to the head and back to the root, my thumbs in those two dents and his skin sliding under my hands. He pushed back to meet every one. The table started to walk. It went across the floor toward the stove an inch at a time, and the salt shaker went with it, and I watched my cock sink into him over and over, shining, and thought I was the luckiest son of a bitch in the county.

“Harder,” he said. “I’m not going to come off the hinges.”

I gave it to him harder. The table legs barked on the floor. He was loud; he was saying my name and God’s and a few things about my dick that I’m going to remember at the next board meeting. I got a hand under him and wrapped it around his cock, and he was dripping, and I stroked him in time until I felt him start to clamp down.

The pen hit the table. Twice.

I stopped dead. Buried in him, hand still, both of us shaking.

“You bastard,” Neil said.

“Six, Ramsey.”

I said it low and level, in his own voice. I’ve had it a year. I try not to wear it out.

His ribs went in and out. He turned his face on the table so I could see the side of it.

“It can’t be divided,” he said.

“Say again?”

“Everything we have, there’s two of. I saw to that. Two shares. Two certificates, in two folders. Two keys on two hooks. If it ever went wrong, I could tell you to the dollar which half was mine.” He swallowed. “I built it that way on purpose, and you let me. You can’t put a dog in two folders, Stuart. There isn’t a version where I walk out with half.”

I didn’t move for a second.

Then I pulled out of him. He made a sound about it. I turned him over and laid him down on his back on our kitchen table, right across the legal pad.

“I’m on the plan.”

“I know it.”

I lifted his knees over my arms and went back into him, face to face, deep, and watched his mouth open.

“Look at me,” I said.

He did.

“That’s no objection. That’s the whole reason to do it.”

“I know what it is.” His eyes were wet. He was half laughing. “Why do you think it took me seven months to say out loud?”

“I don’t want half of anything, Neil. I never did. I let you keep your two folders because that’s what let you stay. I’d sign you the truck tomorrow.”

“I don’t want the truck.”

“Nobody wants the truck.”

He laughed all the way, and he clenched around me doing it, and we both groaned.

“Ask me properly,” he said.

I had him folded in half on a table with my cock in him to the root. I asked him properly.

“Neil Ramsey. Will you get a dog with me?”

“Yes.”

Under a second. He’s never once made me wait.

“Obviously, yes. I’ve had the county shelter’s hours open on my phone since March.”

“Since—”

“Move, Stuart, for God’s sake.”

I moved.

I gave him everything I had. I drove into him so hard the table went the rest of the way and fetched up against the stove, and after that it had nowhere to go and neither did he. He got his left hand up over his head and grabbed the far edge, with the gold on it, and he got the other one around the back of my neck, where it’s lived since a set of stairs two Junes ago, and he held on and took it and hollered.

I got my fist around him again. The left. The scar, and the band he kept in a drawer marked SPARE for four months, going up and down the length of him.

“Stay with me,” I said.

“I’m here, I’m—fuck—right there, don’t stop—”

“Not stopping. Not ever. Let go.”

He went. He came with his back clean off the table and his head thrown back, shouting, striping himself to the collarbone, and he squeezed down on me so hard I saw white. I got three more strokes. Then I was gone too, buried in him and pouring, and the noise I made rattled the glass in the key cabinet.

In the front room, a dog barked. Once.

“Gerald,” Neil said, when he could.

“Gerald lives over our vent. He’s heard worse.”

“He’s never had the picture to go with it.”

I stayed in him a minute. I like to. Then I ran a washcloth warm and tested it on my wrist and cleaned him up where he lay, his stomach, his chest, between his legs, careful, and he let me, flat out on the table with his arm over his eyes and the pink going down his neck.

He sat up, finally. The legal pad came up with him. It had stuck to his back. I peeled it off, and I’ll tell you now that item four is never going to be legible again.

He found the pen on the floor under the stove. He sat there naked on the edge of our kitchen table with his hair every which way and my come running out of him, and he turned to the plan, and he struck out Noted. No. with one ruled line. He initialed the strike. He dated it.

Then he wrote, under it. His hand shook so bad it looked like mine.

9. One dog. Held jointly. Not divisible. — N.R.

He held out the pen. I took it and put mine underneath, in capitals.

RECIPROCATED. — S.B.

“Milton’s out five dollars,” I said.

“Milton will claim he had May.”

“Who’s got May?”

Neil capped the pen.

“Neil.“

“I placed it in March. Through Asha. It seemed probable I’d have inside information.”

“That’s fraud.”

“It’s a hedge.”

Something sighed. We both looked. Gerald was sitting in the kitchen doorway with the navy jacket dragged halfway across the floor behind him, and he was looking at the two of us the way Milton looks at the minutes.

“How long’s he been there?” I asked.

“I don’t think,” said Neil. “I look.” He looked. “A while.”

We went out to the county shelter three Saturdays later, before his shift. He walked past nine dogs without breaking stride. At the last run there was a brindle thing about the size of a toolbox, one ear up, one ear down, sitting with her back to the whole room and her eyes on the door.

“She’s monitoring,” Neil said, and that was the end of that.

I got the name. That was the deal; he got the vet, the food, the schedule, and a binder with tabs. I named her Lug.

“That’s a code violation,” he said.

“Two wires, one lug. It’s how we met.”

He didn’t have anything to say to that. He picked her up instead. She put her chin on his collarbone, and he stood there in a county building with his careful face gone to pieces, and I had to go look at a bulletin board.

She sleeps on the bed. Between us, till about midnight, and then on his feet. It was a good forecast.

The leash hangs in the cabinet by the back door, on the sixth hook, on a brass ring I made to fit. Six of six. He stood and looked at it through the glass for a good while the first night.

“That’s symmetrical,” he said.

And on Sunday mornings at 2:13 the lock goes over, same clack as ever, and there’s two of us in that bed who lift our heads.

Only one of us goes to the door. I’ve got some dignity.

Not much. I’m usually right behind her.

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