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Shane had spent nearly an hour in the pet store. He was not proud of this, but it had not been entirely his fault.
Ilya had texted him a list. The list had six items on it, which was already excessive, but Shane had committed to the errand. He was not a man who left items unchecked. The problem was Anya. Anya, freshly collected from the groomers and smelling like oatmeal shampoo, had opinions about every aisle. She’d tried to nose three replacement seals into the trolley when Shane only needed one. She’d charmed treats out of two separate employees. A woman in the toy aisle had recognised him and asked for a photo, and he’d obliged because he was not an arsehole, and Anya had sat at his feet and smiled for the camera as though she’d been trained for press calls.
He’d come out with Ilya’s six items, a replacement for the stuffed seal Anya had eviscerated after months of dedicated chewing, a new rope toy, and something the cashier had called a “snuffle mat,” which was apparently designed to stimulate a dog’s brain during mealtimes. Shane had no idea if Anya needed her brain stimulated during mealtimes, but the packaging had a picture of an Australian Shepherd on it, and that had been enough.
Four hours. Gromers, groceries, pet store, then a stop at the Mediterranean place on Bank Street for grain bowls and a slice of dark chocolate hazelnut torte that he had bought for Ilya and fully intended to eat at least half of, though he planned to deny this even under oath.
The grocery bags and the takeaway occupied the back seat. The pet store bags were in the boot. Anya occupied the passenger seat, her head hanging out of the open window, the breeze ruffling her freshly groomed coat. She was sitting on a bag of salmon treats she had refused to surrender to the boot. The car smelled like warm dog and grilled chicken, and Shane was looking forward to a straightforward evening: feed Anya, feed Ilya, collapse on the sofa.
He pulled into the driveway and cut the engine. Summer. Ilya ran hot and refused to use the air conditioning before July, which meant every window in the house gaped wide from May onward. Shane had stopped arguing about it.
Anya jumped down from the passenger seat, shook herself until her tags jingled, and trotted ahead of him up the front path with her tail swinging. He looped the grocery bags over his forearms, hooked the dinner and the pet store bags in his fingers, and made it to the front door in one trip. Anya nosed through the front door the moment he opened it and disappeared down the hall, nails clicking on the hardwood.
From deeper in the house, Ilya’s voice drifted toward them, low and musical, speaking Russian in the sweet, lilting tone Shane had only ever heard him use with Anya. Drawn-out vowels and nonsense diminutives. Russian that could convince you the whole language had been invented purely for endearments.
Shane toed off his shoes and followed the sound of Ilya’s voice, still carrying all the shopping bags because putting them down first would have required a level of foresight he apparently no longer possessed.
He rounded the corner into the living room and found Anya first. She was three feet from Ilya and not moving. Ears pricked forward, legs locked, her whole body braced as if the floor might give way beneath her at any moment, forcing her to jump onto furniture. Her freshly groomed coat gleamed in the afternoon light, which made the contrast all the more absurd, because Ilya was on the floor cradling what appeared to be a damp towel.
Then Shane saw the face poking out of it.
Ilya was sitting cross-legged in front of the cold fireplace, his enormous frame curved inward. One of the good cream hand towels from the upstairs bathroom was bundled in his palms, and from its folds, a pair of green eyes blinked up at Shane. The rest of the creature was black, tiny, and had damp fur.
A kitten. The size of a baked potato.
“What in the—” Shane said.
Ilya looked up. Shane knew that face. It was the one Ilya wore when he thought no one was watching him with Anya. Total, ruinous softness. Eyes bright, mouth open in a goofy half-grin, every sharp edge of him smoothed to nothing. Ilya Rozanov, six-foot-three, two hundred and fifteen pounds, Stanley Cup champion, cradling a towel-wrapped smudge and looking like he’d been personally blessed by the universe.
“Shane.” Ilya whispered his name. “Look.”
“I’m looking.”
“Her name is Klyaksa.”
Shane closed his eyes. Opened them again. The kitten was still there. Ilya had already named her. Of course he had. He’d probably named her before his clothes had dried.
“Klyaksa,” Ilya said again, soft and reverent. “Means ink blot. Because look at her, Shane. She is a little ink blot.”
The kitten mewed. It was less a sound than a suggestion of one, thin and reedy, the vocal equivalent of a single eyelash on a pillowcase.
“Ilya.”
“I saved her life, Shane.”
Shane looked at Ilya’s joggers. Damp from the knee down. He looked at the cream towel. He looked at the kitten. “Tell me.”
“I was on the deck. Reading. And I hear this sound from down by the water. Meowing. So quiet, I think maybe I am imagining.” Ilya shifted the towel bundle closer to his chest. “But I go down to the river and she is in the bushes, right at the edge. Tangled up. Crying.”
Shane said nothing.
“I try to reach her, but she panics and gets herself free and then she falls. Into the water, Shane. She goes under.”
He looked down at the kitten. She’d closed her eyes inside the towel.
“I went in after her.”
Shane looked at Ilya’s damp joggers again. At the waterline on the fabric, well above his knees. At the towel, the kitten, the whole situation his husband had assembled in the four hours Shane had been running errands.
“I see,” Shane said.
“You believe me?”
“I believe you.”
“Good. Because is true. Every word.”
“How do you know she’s a girl?”
Ilya looked at him as though the question was offensive. “Look at her face.”
“That’s not how that—”
“She has a girl face, Shane. Obviously.”
Shane did not pursue this. He was still carrying all the shopping bags. The grain bowls were getting cold and the dark chocolate hazelnut torte was getting warm and Anya was standing three feet away in the rigid posture of an animal whose entire world had just shifted on its axis.
Anya had not moved. She’d been rooted to that same spot since Shane walked in, frozen and watchful. But Anya was an Australian Shepherd, which meant she’d been blessed with a face capable of expressing the full spectrum of human emotion and several emotions that humans had not yet catalogued. Her ears were now pinned flat against her skull. Her head had tilted to a wounded angle. Her bright, clever, merle-and-brown eyes were locked on the kitten with an intensity that could only be described as divorce proceedings.
“Hey, girl,” Shane said softly.
Anya looked at Shane. Then at the kitten. Then back at Shane.
She whined. It was not her normal whine. This whine had a thesis statement.
“I know,” Shane said, because he felt, absurdly, that he did know.
“Anya,” Ilya called from the floor, still cupping Klyaksa against his chest. “Come meet your sister.”
Anya’s entire body stiffened. She took three cautious steps toward Ilya, and stretched her neck forward to sniff.
The kitten hissed.
It was not an impressive hiss. It was a hiss the way a leaky tap is a waterfall: aspirational, underpowered, absurd. But Anya recoiled as if her nose had been stung by a bee.
She backed up. Sat down. Looked at Shane.
The look said: Are you seeing this?
“Anya, is fine,” Ilya said. He’d already decided how this was going to go. That much was obvious. He lowered one hand to offer Anya a scratch behind the ears. She ducked away from his fingers as though they were contaminated. “Aww, come on. Don’t be jealous.”
“She’s not jealous,” Shane said, even though she was. Visibly, cataclysmically jealous.
Anya howled.
Not a bark. Barks were for the postman, for squirrels, for the sound of the treat bag crinkling. This was an Australian Shepherd howl, long and warbling, rising in pitch until it became a statement of existential grief. She threw her head back, opened her mouth, and let the whole neighbourhood know that an injustice had been committed in this house.
“Drama queen,” Ilya said fondly. He’d turned back to the kitten and was stroking Klyaksa’s tiny skull with one finger. “Takaya malen’kaya. Ty v bezopasnosti, malen’kaya klyaksa.” So small. You’re safe, little smudge.
Anya howled again, louder. She stared at Shane with her ears flattened and her brow furrowed into ridges and her whole body vibrating with an outrage so pure, so operatic, that Shane had to look away before he laughed.
“Nobody is replacing you,” Shane told her, which was a sentence he had never anticipated needing.
“She is being dramatic,” Ilya said. He’d set Klyaksa down on the rug between his legs now, his calves bracketing her like a pen. The kitten wobbled forward, sniffed his knee, and began to investigate the drawstring of his joggers with grim focus. Ilya watched her, grinning in a way that made him look about twelve years old. “This is good thing. Anya needs a friend.”
“Anya has friends.”
“Animal friends.”
“She has Chiron.”
“Chiron is too big. And too golden retriever about everything. Klyaksa is perfect. She is tiny and she will fit in my pocket and Anya will learn to love her.”
Shane looked at Anya. Anya looked at Shane.
Neither of them believed any of this.
Shane was still clutching every single bag, having held them all throughout the entirety of their conversation. His fingers had passed through pain into numbness and were approaching a kind of philosophical acceptance. “I’m going to put dinner away,” he said, because someone in this house had to maintain a grip on reality, and he was already calculating how many aisles of the pet store Ilya was going to drag him through before the week was out. Litter tray. Kitten food. A bed. Toys. Scratching post. Knowing Ilya, a cat tree the size of an actual tree. The bill would be in the four figures. At least. Shane could feel it in his bones.
He crossed to the kitchen island and set the bags on the counter. The living room and kitchen were one vast, open space, which meant he had a clear sightline to Ilya on the rug and Anya beside the fireplace. He started unpacking. Salmon. Sweet potatoes. Asparagus. Avocados. The good olive oil Ilya liked.
He was reaching for the grain bowls when he heard it. A soft thump, then dragging.
Shane looked up.
Anya had her dog bed clamped between her teeth.
Her luxurious, oversized, memory-foam dog bed that Ilya had ordered from some organic pet boutique in Toronto because “Anya deserves the best, Shane, she is not a regular dog.” Anya had one corner of it locked in her jaws and she was hauling it across the living room, her body braced low, her legs working in short, furious strides.
She dragged it past the fireplace. Past Ilya, who was sitting up now with Klyaksa perched on his thigh, both of them watching the procession. Ilya’s brow creased in confusion. Klyaksa blinked, indifferent to the drama unfolding around her.
Anya dragged the bed past the kitchen island, close enough that Shane could have reached down and touched her. She did not look at him.
She dragged it to the open sliding doors. Over the threshold. Across the deck.
She dropped it on the grass, turned around once, and lay down on it with her back to the house.
The message was unmistakable. Anya was moving out.
Silence. Shane stood at the kitchen island with the snuffle mat in one hand and a bag of salmon treats in the other.
Ilya looked at him. Klyaksa mewed.
“She’ll come back,” Ilya said.
Through the open doors, Anya sighed. It carried across the garden and into the house and settled between them with the weight of a closing argument.
A beat. Then Ilya’s face changed. “She will come back, right?”
He was already getting up, Klyaksa cupped in one hand, crossing the living room toward Shane. “Here. Hold her.”
“Don’t hand me the—”
The kitten was in his hands. She weighed nothing. She was warm and boneless against his palm and she looked up at him with those green eyes and sneezed directly into his face.
Ilya was at the sliding doors, crouching on the deck. “Anya. Anechka. Papa is sorry. Come inside.”
From the garden, a pointed silence.
Ilya came back in, looking wounded. He scooped Klyaksa out of Shane’s hands and sat down on the rug again. “I need to go to the pet store.”
“No.”
“She needs things, Shane. A litter tray. Food. A little bed.”
“No.”
“Toys.”
“No.” Shane could already see it: Ilya loose in the pet store with no supervision and a creature to spoil. He’d come back with the car full, half of it for the kitten and the other half for Anya as a guilt offering, and the receipt would fund a small country.
Ilya looked up at him from the floor, Klyaksa tucked under his chin, and smiled.
Shane looked at his husband on the rug with a kitten under his chin. He looked at their dog in the garden, prostrate on her memory-foam bed, suffering beautifully in the late afternoon light. He looked down at the snuffle mat and the salmon treats he’d bought to spoil a dog who had now emigrated to the lawn.
He sighed. “I’ll head to the pet store. I think they’re open late tonight.”
Ilya beamed at him.
From the garden, another howl.