lifted his head, he kissed the tip of her nose and said, “Are you forgetting something?”
“I couldn’t find them,” she said, assuming he meant her panties.
He looked at her funny. “I meant your dog.”
“Baxter!” she cried and scooped down to give him some love. “I’d be lost without you.”
She stood up and kissed Max once more, then she and Baxter trotted off together to her car. Halfway there, she turned and walked backward, unable to take her eyes from this man. Unable to believe this had actually happened to her, the unluckiest person she knew. Maybe this was her reward for having done everything right. Maybe at long last, she’d found the right guy. “Hey,” she said. “This?” She gestured between them. “It’s really awesome.”
Max leaned against the post. “It really fucking is.”
She beamed with delight. “This is really happening, isn’t it?”
“Happened, baby. It’s already embedded in your hippocampus.”
Carly laughed. She got in her car, waved once more, and drove away. She was on top of the world. She was flying over everything, looking down at all the poor schlubs who hadn’t had their dogs mixed up with Hazel and a gorgeous scientist. This was what it felt like to fall in love, wasn’t it? She was falling in love. She was in love with life.
This she decided, was going to be a gorgeous, beautiful day.
Sixteen
After Carly left, Max picked up his mail. He hadn’t looked at it in a few days, and as he was sorting through, he found the DVDs of previous years of the National Dog Show he’d ordered for Jamie when they were in Chicago. He decided he would drop them off at his dad’s house on his way to work. Jamie would already be at work, and his dad would probably be off having coffee with the guys.
At his dad’s house, he parked in the street and jogged up to the side door they always used when the garage door was closed. Predictably, his father had left it unlocked. Max carried the mailer with the DVDs into the kitchen and was looking around for something to write a note with when he heard what he thought was someone in the throes of sex.
Stunned, he paused a moment, listening. That was definitely the sound of sexual escapades. He put the package down on the bar and wondered what he should do. Was it a party of one? Jesus, was his dad into porn?
A woman cried out, and Max jumped. That was a living, breathing, moaning woman behind the closed door of his father’s bedroom.
Max backed up so quickly that he hit the wall, and with alarm and adrenaline shooting through him, he vacated his dad’s house so quickly that he forgot to leave a note.
In his car, he sat in the driver’s seat, staring blindly through the windshield, his heart pumping with adrenaline. Who was she? His dad said he had a friend, but . . . but this was highly unexpected.
He put the car into gear and drove away from his father’s house, surprised and unsettled by this sudden turn of events.
His mind was still racing when he reached his office, and he sat down behind his desk and put his head in his hands. It wasn’t that he didn’t want this for his father. He very much wanted his dad to be happy. But what about Jamie? What about . . . what about the picture of Mom in Dad’s room? And the pillows on Dad’s bed that Mom had embroidered? And shouldn’t they at least have Jamie in a group home before something like this happened? Shouldn’t that be the natural order of things?
Max’s computer pinged, yanking him back to the moment. He glanced at his screen. It was an email from Dr. O’Malley.
Dr. Sheffington:
Please consider this to be your formal invitation to present a summary of your tenure dossier to the Department of Natural Sciences Tenure Committee for consideration. The committee will determine whether or not your request for tenure and the supporting work should be forwarded to the dean and the campus tenure committee for further review. You will have thirty minutes to summarize and take questions from seven committee members. Time and date to follow in a separate email.
Yours, Dr. O’Malley, Department Chair
This was the last thing he wanted to think about right now. What he needed was days of preparation, to ask Drake to workshop the presentation with him so that it was as concise and informative as