An excerpt from In a Dog’s World. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter.
The Redding Dorm lounge had two pinball machines in it. A poodle with a buzz cut, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, played one of them. The machine lit up in flashes of red and trebled with warbly happy sounds as the poodle rocked the levers frantically. One of the dogs in the crowd looked over as Katasha stepped through the door, but he turned right back to the pinball game after seeing her.
She walked across the room, littered with ancient looking, horribly abused plushy couches to the doors in the back. The door into the right hand arm of the dorm was ajar, so she figured she’d try that way first. After walking past half a dozen closed doors and a few that were open on rooms that didn’t have Howell in them, Katasha began to feel that she was on a fool’s errand. However, she decided that she may as well give the other arm of the dorm a try as well.
She went back through the lounge, opened the door into the other hallway, and there it was: Howell’s room. She could tell it was his, because he’d hung an etch-board on the door and carefully spelled out, “Howell’s Room,” in blocky letters on the top. Before gathering the courage to knock, Katasha reached up and traced delicate little curlicues in the fine lines of her needle-sharp retractable claw around the thick lines of the letters drawn by Howell’s blunt canine claw. Seeing the fine lines spring into place around the thicker ones reminded Katasha of the sensation of feeling her small paws grasped in Howell’s large rough paw pads. She sheathed her claw and pulled her paw away. But, as she turned to go, the door opened.
Howell’s expression when he saw Katasha at his door was as surprised and unguarded as at breakfast. Only, this time, his immediate, reflexive expression was one of delight. His soft brown eyes lit up, and his muzzle parted in a smile. Then, just as quickly, his face grew guarded, and he said, “Katasha, I wasn’t expecting… I mean… How was your first day of college?”
He looked flustered, and it made Katasha feel both very big and small to have that effect on a dog who was so much larger than her. She felt downright composed in comparison.
“The classes were all right,” Katasha said. “I liked applied physics best.” As she told him about Claire and her being lab partners, she noticed that Howell was looking at the new curlicues around his name on the etch-board, but she couldn’t read his expression. His floppy ears didn’t flicker or flatten like a cat’s would. His brushy blonde tail didn’t twitch minutely.
In his massive, stoic presence, Katasha felt both irritably blind and strangely peaceful. “We’ve all been hanging out still — me, Claire, Jimothy, and Preston. And now Claire’s roommate, too. Her name is Ivy.” She glanced upward at Howell, but he was still looking at the curlicues. “We’re calling ourselves Tesseract Suite,” she said and explained the pan-dimensional concept of their rooms all becoming conjoined if the Isleywood campus were folded up like a massive hypercube.
Howell smiled and said, “You came up with that.”
It wasn’t really a question, but Katasha nodded.
“I could tell you’d be an alpha,” Howell said as he wiped a paw pad lightly across the surface of the etch-board, carefully erasing Katasha’s curlicues.
“What do you mean?” Katasha asked, watching her signature on the door slowly disappear.
“You’re dynamic. They all follow you around,” Howell said. “How could they not?” He trailed off, and took a step back into his room. “Especially Jimothy.”
Howell put a paw on the door and moved as if to close the door on her. Then, almost as an afterthought, he paused. “Look,” he said, “If Jimothy doesn’t treat you right… Just let me know, okay?”
Katasha was confused. “You sound like my brother,” she said, remembering Dominic’s words when he arrived on campus. “He wanted to know if he should let you beat him up for me.”
Howell’s muzzle twisted in an amused expression. “Dominic, right?” he said. “The one without stripes.”
“Right,” Katasha said. “Dmitri has the stripes.”
The two of them looked at each other across mere inches of space, yet the silence that settled between them was a gulf of misunderstanding. Katasha’s ears skewed, one back and one forward. Howell’s brow furrowed. He was the one to break the silence, “Why would Dominic need me to beat him up?” he asked. “What did he do wrong?”
“Not him,” Katasha said. “You. It’s a joke — ’cause he’s too small to beat you up.”
Now Howell looked really confused. “What did I do wrong?”
Katasha blinked. Then her ears flattened. As she raised them, her tail began to swish. “Seriously?” she asked, barely constraining her voice to a socially acceptable meow instead of an angry hiss.
When Howell didn’t answer, she launched into the tirade that had been coming all week — if not longer.
The way he had ignored her on the hike; the lack of communication all summer; even the pained expression he’d given her that morning at breakfast — it all spilled out. For most of it, he stared at her, speechless. On the final point, though, he had an answer: “I wasn’t looking at you,” he said. “It was… Jimothy.”
“You hate Jimothy,” Katasha stated blankly, her tail keeping time with a steady, irritable twitch.
“No. I mean…” Howell stammered, “I guess, a little bit, yes…” He looked down at the ground, unable to hold his brown-eyed gaze on her glaring blue eyes any more. “I waited all summer for you to be a college girl. And, then, he turned up and charmed you away from me before you even started your classes. I never had a chance.”
Now Katasha was speechless. She hadn’t been a college girl in Howell’s eyes until this very day?
“I guess it’s better though,” he said. “I mean, I probably don’t have time for a girlfriend anyway.” Howell started to close the door again, but Katasha reached her small paw out to stop him. First, she laid her paw pads on the surface of the door; then she reached her other paw up to touch his arm. The feel of his fur on her paw pads was electric. The only words she could figure out to say were, “Jimothy has a girlfriend, a Basenji girl from his high school.”
The next few seconds felt very long. Katasha could feel her heart beating. When she raised her eyes from the blonde fur of Howell’s arm under her paw pads up to his eyes, the expression there was soft but confused.
“You’re not dating Jimothy,” he said.
She shook her head. Then, risking everything, she turned her eyes back down and pressed the crown of her head against the coarse blonde fur on Howell’s arm. Her ears flattened against his body as she leaned into him. A purr rumbled deep in her throat.
For a horrible few moments, Katasha feared she might have misread the situation, then she felt Howell’s large paws gently, ever so gently, rest on her shoulders. A moment later, they slid down her shoulder blades and onto her back. He pulled her against him, wrapping his arms around her the way he’d held her while they danced many months ago. She felt safe and warm. She felt strong enough to handle anything Isleywood threw at her — hard classes; noisy dogs, indifferent to the special needs of her smaller stature; complex cat politics. She could take it all.
Howell’s arms loosened, and he stepped back to look at her. Suddenly, Katasha felt shy and lowered her blue eyes. Her mind should have been racing, worrying about what this all meant and when Howell would hold her like that again. Would it be soon? Would it be often? Instead, she was calm, perhaps calmer than she’d ever been.
“I’m supposed to go study with Claire and the others,” she said. “They’ll be leaving for lunch soon.”
Howell nodded, but before Katasha could step away his paw grabbed hers. Their paw pads intertwined, pressing her smaller pads apart. “I’ll come with you,” he said, and the warmth in his brown eyes answered all the questions she hadn’t needed to ask.
The two of them walked out of Redding Dorm and across the quad to Greene together: a big yellow lab holding hands with a small Siamese cat.
Thank you for reading In a Dog’s World! If you’d like to read more in the same universe, check out Otters In Space. Or if you’d like to pick up an e-book version or paperback to share, learn more here.