Night Walk Networking
Feb. 9th, 2016 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thetrapper posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
hauntedbostonrpg“It’ll be thirty-one degrees tonight, but no rain is predicted, so the streets will likely be safe in the morning. Clear and cold, that’s the prediction for the next few days.”
Jules left the television in the store window behind, having caught the last of the weather forecast as she paused under the awning to get out of the sudden gust of wind. Cold, the girl with the too-big hair had said. More like frigid, above freezing or not. And McQueen refused to do his business, although Weasel had done his. The dog’s badly-chewed left ear twitched as he snuffled at yet another newspaper kiosk.
She’d quit smoking for the third time - or was it the fourth? - so maybe that wasn’t helping her mood. The money she’d save might make her feel better if she thought about that instead. A bus rumbled past on the street, the lighted interior revealing commuters on their way home from work. Jules watched it turn the corner and disappear, pulled a plastic bag from her coat pocket as the pit bull mercifully elected to do what she’d brought him out here to do. The city had elected to announce a fine for keeping the sidewalks tidy, so she’d brought along clean-up tools.
Danny had once hated the winter, cold grey skies and chill in the air enough to seep down to your bones, but it had started to grown on him. It was mild for this time of year, the night hovering just below freezing and the skies clear and bright; the dim yellow light of the streetlamps helped drown out most of the stars, but the moon was there, pale and staring and nearly full. Walking helped drown out the sort of thoughts that would keep him awake at night, so when the needling little whispers would begin in the back of his mind, Danny took to the stretching his legs over miles of sidewalk.
Mild or not, the cold would eventually wear on anyone out in it, and he shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his brown leather jacket, clenching and unclenching his fingers in an attempt to alleviate the stiffness the cold brought out in his hands. Danny watched his breath form into steam in the air, eyes following the rhythm of each exhale and not really seeing the world around him. He didn’t notice the woman and her dogs, sidestepping all three at the last moment and nearly landing himself in the gutter for his trouble.
“Whoa,” he muttered, more to himself than to the stranger, and stumbled a moment on broken pavement before righting his boots on the sidewalk.
Instinctively, the former officer tightened her grasp on both leashes, reining the mutts in before disaster struck. Rescue dogs could be skittish, and although she’d made sure to get their shots current, taking a chunk out of some stranger’s calf would end in tears, not to mention lawsuits. She sidled back towards the far edge of the walkway.
“Hope you weren’t trying to catch that bus,” she said, indicating the corner the vehicle had just rounded. A blue-gray puff of exhaust still lingered in the cold post-dusk air. She should have been re-accustomed to the cold by now, since she’d returned home over a year ago.
Jules realized she was still holding the befouled plastic bag, and she tossed it into the already-full trash can that was nailed to a telephone pole. In the suddenly windless evening, the smaller of the mutts butted his squarish head against her leg and whined.
“Bus?”
Danny’s head whipped back, catching a glimpse of dissipating exhaust in the air and twin red taillights burning like the eyes of some hulking beast from within the cloud of smoke. The world came back to him, pulled from the numbing solitude of his own mind: the whine and growl of traffic, obnoxious radio noise from passing cars, and the skittering of canine toenails on the sidewalk. He blinked once or twice to clear the last of the cobwebs, and turned back to the woman who spoke.
“Oh… no, I wasn’t,” he relented with a shrug. “Just walking. Sorry, guess I wasn’t paying attention. Didn’t see you or your friends there.”
Space cadet.
Then again, a thousand yard stare hadn’t been uncommon in the field, and the stranger was the right age to have served somewhere or other. Or not. Sometimes spacy was just spacy.
Keeping a good grip on the leashes, Jules said, “It’s good night for a walk if you like the cold and a view of the moon.” She’d tried earlier to pick out Orion, to find the Hunter where he stood night watch over Boston, but she’d only been able to see the dimmest outline of his left hand. Damned light pollution. She’d become re-accustomed to that more quickly than the weather.
“Don’t mind the pups,” she added, because Weasel had taken a very cautious step towards the guy, his mauled ears twitching. “Once they figure out they aren’t about to get kicked, they’re pretty chill.”
Danny crouched, his fondness for friends of the four-legged variety outweighing his recently acquired distaste for strangers he wasn’t conning. His family had always had pets growing up, anything furry, feathery, or scaly that didn’t present any danger was always welcome in their home. He and his wife had been toying with the idea of getting their daughter a puppy, just before the accident; he had been the one against it, citing the apartment life that would require regular walks, but Annie had persisted. Danny always found himself wishing he had relented, just to have the memories, and someone left behind to come home to.
He wanted to reach out but stopped himself, remembering what little he could from bring home strays as a child, not to approach without permission.
He glanced up to the woman holding the leash. “Are they friendly?” he asked.
“They’re learning to be, but they’re fast learners.”
McQueen was the bigger of the pair, and Jules watched as he edged towards the stranger. She’d had him for eight months, and technically she’d stolen him, having unclipped his lead from a chain link fence a dozen blocks from the house. She suspected abuse, and possibly even dog-fighting, because of the state of his ears and the scars on his flanks. The rehabilitation was a work in progress, but he’d learned to trust her.
“He’s a good one,” she said, looking down at the top of the man’s brown head. “Pit bulls get a bad rap because they get beaten into being mean, but it’s never really the dogs, it’s the owners. If you treat ‘em gentle, they’ll follow you anywhere.”
“Yeah, I know. My brother pulled a couple out of a shelter a few years back, great dogs,” Danny agreed with a nod. He extended a hesitant hand, palm up and not invading the animal’s space, for him to investigate.
“They don’t have a mean bone in their bodies, until people get their grimy hands on ’em,” he said with a sigh. “Never understood how people could do that, honestly. That kind of cruelty, on an innocent animal, that wants nothing but to be loved? People, I can understand. People are cruel, vindictive. Ruining lives… taking lives. All for selfish, stupid reasons. Can see how that’d bring it out, that kind of bone-deep evil, against other people. Some deserve it, really. But animals? A dog?”
He sighed and shook his head, and glanced up at the woman. “Worse when it’s a dog, a pet. Something we taught to look to us for care and safety. There’d be a special place in hell for someone like that. If there was a hell, anyway.”
Danny sighed again and turned his gaze back to the dog, its ragged ear drawing his attention. People seemed less and less worthy of the title of ‘human’, he seemed to believe more and more lately. The battered pooch was living proof.
The blonde nodded her approval, both of the stranger’s words and of the dog’s behavior, because McQueen had tentatively sniffed the man’s fingers, then his palm. Through patience and positive reinforcement, she’d broken through the animal’s wariness about being touched, and she made a mental note to reward him when they got back to the house. An extra piece of jerky with his kibble said he’d done well.
“You live around here?” she asked, waving behind her at the street where a few cars passed back and forth. Having established that they were both dog people, there was enough common ground to see if he was a regular around here. Anyone who was partial to canines couldn’t be all bad.
“From the way you’re bundled up, I’m guessing you’re familiar with Boston winters.”
“Moved out this way a few years back,” Danny responded, smiling just enough to cause his eyes to crinkle at the dog’s apparent approval. He slowly reached out and gave the pup a good long scratch behind the ears, smiling more fully at the way the animals eyes closed, enjoying the contact.
He stood with a soft groan, knees aching at crouching in the frigid weather, and smiled for a moment at the other more timid animal.
“Took a job that moved me to the city, you know how that goes,” Danny explained, raising his gaze to address the woman. “Originally from Philly, so we’d still get hit with the cold and the snow every now and again.”
He paused, unsure suddenly of why he was taking the time to chat with the stranger. It certainly wasn’t his style - or it hadn’t been, at least, for some time. Perhaps it was the break in the weather, or the presence of the animals that thawed his often icy demeanor. Couldn’t hurt to be on friendly terms with at least one person in the city, he supposed.
He held out his hand. “Danny,” he offered.
“Jules.”
She shook his hand in a businesslike fashion, studied him a little more closely. He was a good five inches taller than she was, but at five-five looking up at men was her resting state. Not military, then. She downgraded the stare to five hundred yards rather than a thousand. The dogs had gone back to randomly sniffing at things.
“I was wonderin’ if you’d gotten turned around on your way somewhere else. You seem kinda spaced out.”
“No,” Danny replied, shaking his head even as the wind whipped up around them. “Just like to walk sometimes. Clears out the cobwebs, you know? Guess I get a little lost in my own head sometimes.”
It hadn’t been the first time he’d nearly mown someone over on his evening walks, but it was the first time he’d stopped to chat rather than blazing past with a muttered apology. He hadn’t had a job in a while, the money from his last exploit holding out long enough that he spent days without checking the obituaries or lingering around cemeteries. It was a toss-up, with older widows; some were glad to be rid of their spouses and would ignore his attempts to ransom the ‘spirit’ back to them, but if he found just the right one, it could be quite lucrative. This last one had held out.
“The pups drag you out for the night?” he asked amiably.
“Yeah,” the former officer answered. “This one’s not quite house-trained yet, and he likes to get out and smell four hundred or so hydrants and whatever else is in his path.”
Weasel, the mutt in question, looked up, then chuffed and went back to investigating a discarded Hardees’ bag. She was trying to avoid starting to give him people food, but an empty bag wasn’t a problem. The blonde smiled indulgently.
“What kind of job? I know the college kids are just back from holiday break, do you teach?”
“I work in IT,” Danny answered automatically, though it had been years since such a statement were true. “I’m between jobs at the moment, doing a lot of freelance work.”
Which was true, after all. To a point.
“How about you? You work with the critters or just get suckered in by these two?” he asked, shoving his hands in his pockets and regarding the animals with another rare smile.
“I was in the military, but I took early retirement,” she replied. And she had yet to get used to that, either. Army life had given her a routine; up early every morning, breakfast, exercise, drills, and - eventually - the mid-level intelligence work she’d been doing. Her dress uniform was still hanging in the front closet, wrapped in plastic.
Still, being a civilian again had its merits. If nothing else, doing her own investigating meant no red tape and no one looking over her shoulder, waiting for results. And she liked being back home. Despite the occasional bout of cold weather, it really was where the heart was.
“Having an easy time settling in?” He’d said ‘me’ rather than ‘we’, which likely meant he was single, but she’d never married, so it wasn’t as if she was pointing fingers. If he was freelancing, maybe she could get a card. Her computer skills were fine, but not stellar. It might be a good thing to have a professional she could call.
“Have a little too much free time, I think,” Danny told her with a shrug, chilled hands still shoved deep into his pockets; mild or not, the cold would eventually wear on anyone standing out in it for very long. His walk had found him wandering as much through his own mind as the city streets and he hadn’t taken notice of the cold until he stopped and drew himself back out to reality.
“Guess you might know about that now. Gotta find a way to fill the quiet,” he went on, and glanced around, eyes settling on car driving by before returning to face Jules. He offered her a half smile. “Like taking walks at night. Running into strangers on the street.”
Her mouth tucked in at the corners,and she said, “Well, pulling up stakes isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes a change of scenery is exactly what you need. Gives us time to do what we’re meant to be doing.”
Jules paused, glanced at the mutts. They tended to get impatient if she stood in one place for too long, but they were currently occupied with the fast food bag. “You mentioned doing IT work. I have a blog that I’m writing, and while the site looks fine, I think it could run a little more efficiently. If you’re looking for some extra cash, would you be interested in taking a look at it?”
She wondered briefly what he’d think of her subject matter, then decided not to worry about it. Blogging was common in the modern age, no matter what you were writing about, and her site wasn’t any stranger than some of the others she’d seen since she’d become active online.
Danny’s eyes arched in surprise for a split second before he normalized his features once again. He had been repeating the freelance IT line so often that the thought had never occurred to him that it might lead to some job offers. Jules didn’t look like a writer, he thought, but then reconsidered; after all, who really ever looked like a writer?
“Hey, yeah, that could work,” he said, patting down his pockets until he found a stray receipt - when did he go to Dunkin Donuts? - and a pen. Danny scribbled out his name and email address, adding his cell phone for good measure.
“Why don’t you jot down some ideas, send me an email? See where we go from there,” he offered, holding out the paper for her to take.
Jules had seen the look before, the one that said ‘Whuh?’, so it didn’t faze her. But with the great democratization of the internet, anyone and everyone with something to say could get out there and do it. She plucked the receipt from Danny’s fingers, and it crinkled in her hand before she tucked it into her pocket.
“If you’re still between jobs in a week or so, maybe we can get together and talk about it,” she said, and the dogs were getting restless. She got a better grip on the leashes, but she should probably get the mutts out of the cold. “For now, we can put it on a shelf and get out of this weather. I haven’t had my winter cold yet, and I’d like to skip it for once.”
Jules left the television in the store window behind, having caught the last of the weather forecast as she paused under the awning to get out of the sudden gust of wind. Cold, the girl with the too-big hair had said. More like frigid, above freezing or not. And McQueen refused to do his business, although Weasel had done his. The dog’s badly-chewed left ear twitched as he snuffled at yet another newspaper kiosk.
She’d quit smoking for the third time - or was it the fourth? - so maybe that wasn’t helping her mood. The money she’d save might make her feel better if she thought about that instead. A bus rumbled past on the street, the lighted interior revealing commuters on their way home from work. Jules watched it turn the corner and disappear, pulled a plastic bag from her coat pocket as the pit bull mercifully elected to do what she’d brought him out here to do. The city had elected to announce a fine for keeping the sidewalks tidy, so she’d brought along clean-up tools.
Danny had once hated the winter, cold grey skies and chill in the air enough to seep down to your bones, but it had started to grown on him. It was mild for this time of year, the night hovering just below freezing and the skies clear and bright; the dim yellow light of the streetlamps helped drown out most of the stars, but the moon was there, pale and staring and nearly full. Walking helped drown out the sort of thoughts that would keep him awake at night, so when the needling little whispers would begin in the back of his mind, Danny took to the stretching his legs over miles of sidewalk.
Mild or not, the cold would eventually wear on anyone out in it, and he shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his brown leather jacket, clenching and unclenching his fingers in an attempt to alleviate the stiffness the cold brought out in his hands. Danny watched his breath form into steam in the air, eyes following the rhythm of each exhale and not really seeing the world around him. He didn’t notice the woman and her dogs, sidestepping all three at the last moment and nearly landing himself in the gutter for his trouble.
“Whoa,” he muttered, more to himself than to the stranger, and stumbled a moment on broken pavement before righting his boots on the sidewalk.
Instinctively, the former officer tightened her grasp on both leashes, reining the mutts in before disaster struck. Rescue dogs could be skittish, and although she’d made sure to get their shots current, taking a chunk out of some stranger’s calf would end in tears, not to mention lawsuits. She sidled back towards the far edge of the walkway.
“Hope you weren’t trying to catch that bus,” she said, indicating the corner the vehicle had just rounded. A blue-gray puff of exhaust still lingered in the cold post-dusk air. She should have been re-accustomed to the cold by now, since she’d returned home over a year ago.
Jules realized she was still holding the befouled plastic bag, and she tossed it into the already-full trash can that was nailed to a telephone pole. In the suddenly windless evening, the smaller of the mutts butted his squarish head against her leg and whined.
“Bus?”
Danny’s head whipped back, catching a glimpse of dissipating exhaust in the air and twin red taillights burning like the eyes of some hulking beast from within the cloud of smoke. The world came back to him, pulled from the numbing solitude of his own mind: the whine and growl of traffic, obnoxious radio noise from passing cars, and the skittering of canine toenails on the sidewalk. He blinked once or twice to clear the last of the cobwebs, and turned back to the woman who spoke.
“Oh… no, I wasn’t,” he relented with a shrug. “Just walking. Sorry, guess I wasn’t paying attention. Didn’t see you or your friends there.”
Space cadet.
Then again, a thousand yard stare hadn’t been uncommon in the field, and the stranger was the right age to have served somewhere or other. Or not. Sometimes spacy was just spacy.
Keeping a good grip on the leashes, Jules said, “It’s good night for a walk if you like the cold and a view of the moon.” She’d tried earlier to pick out Orion, to find the Hunter where he stood night watch over Boston, but she’d only been able to see the dimmest outline of his left hand. Damned light pollution. She’d become re-accustomed to that more quickly than the weather.
“Don’t mind the pups,” she added, because Weasel had taken a very cautious step towards the guy, his mauled ears twitching. “Once they figure out they aren’t about to get kicked, they’re pretty chill.”
Danny crouched, his fondness for friends of the four-legged variety outweighing his recently acquired distaste for strangers he wasn’t conning. His family had always had pets growing up, anything furry, feathery, or scaly that didn’t present any danger was always welcome in their home. He and his wife had been toying with the idea of getting their daughter a puppy, just before the accident; he had been the one against it, citing the apartment life that would require regular walks, but Annie had persisted. Danny always found himself wishing he had relented, just to have the memories, and someone left behind to come home to.
He wanted to reach out but stopped himself, remembering what little he could from bring home strays as a child, not to approach without permission.
He glanced up to the woman holding the leash. “Are they friendly?” he asked.
“They’re learning to be, but they’re fast learners.”
McQueen was the bigger of the pair, and Jules watched as he edged towards the stranger. She’d had him for eight months, and technically she’d stolen him, having unclipped his lead from a chain link fence a dozen blocks from the house. She suspected abuse, and possibly even dog-fighting, because of the state of his ears and the scars on his flanks. The rehabilitation was a work in progress, but he’d learned to trust her.
“He’s a good one,” she said, looking down at the top of the man’s brown head. “Pit bulls get a bad rap because they get beaten into being mean, but it’s never really the dogs, it’s the owners. If you treat ‘em gentle, they’ll follow you anywhere.”
“Yeah, I know. My brother pulled a couple out of a shelter a few years back, great dogs,” Danny agreed with a nod. He extended a hesitant hand, palm up and not invading the animal’s space, for him to investigate.
“They don’t have a mean bone in their bodies, until people get their grimy hands on ’em,” he said with a sigh. “Never understood how people could do that, honestly. That kind of cruelty, on an innocent animal, that wants nothing but to be loved? People, I can understand. People are cruel, vindictive. Ruining lives… taking lives. All for selfish, stupid reasons. Can see how that’d bring it out, that kind of bone-deep evil, against other people. Some deserve it, really. But animals? A dog?”
He sighed and shook his head, and glanced up at the woman. “Worse when it’s a dog, a pet. Something we taught to look to us for care and safety. There’d be a special place in hell for someone like that. If there was a hell, anyway.”
Danny sighed again and turned his gaze back to the dog, its ragged ear drawing his attention. People seemed less and less worthy of the title of ‘human’, he seemed to believe more and more lately. The battered pooch was living proof.
The blonde nodded her approval, both of the stranger’s words and of the dog’s behavior, because McQueen had tentatively sniffed the man’s fingers, then his palm. Through patience and positive reinforcement, she’d broken through the animal’s wariness about being touched, and she made a mental note to reward him when they got back to the house. An extra piece of jerky with his kibble said he’d done well.
“You live around here?” she asked, waving behind her at the street where a few cars passed back and forth. Having established that they were both dog people, there was enough common ground to see if he was a regular around here. Anyone who was partial to canines couldn’t be all bad.
“From the way you’re bundled up, I’m guessing you’re familiar with Boston winters.”
“Moved out this way a few years back,” Danny responded, smiling just enough to cause his eyes to crinkle at the dog’s apparent approval. He slowly reached out and gave the pup a good long scratch behind the ears, smiling more fully at the way the animals eyes closed, enjoying the contact.
He stood with a soft groan, knees aching at crouching in the frigid weather, and smiled for a moment at the other more timid animal.
“Took a job that moved me to the city, you know how that goes,” Danny explained, raising his gaze to address the woman. “Originally from Philly, so we’d still get hit with the cold and the snow every now and again.”
He paused, unsure suddenly of why he was taking the time to chat with the stranger. It certainly wasn’t his style - or it hadn’t been, at least, for some time. Perhaps it was the break in the weather, or the presence of the animals that thawed his often icy demeanor. Couldn’t hurt to be on friendly terms with at least one person in the city, he supposed.
He held out his hand. “Danny,” he offered.
“Jules.”
She shook his hand in a businesslike fashion, studied him a little more closely. He was a good five inches taller than she was, but at five-five looking up at men was her resting state. Not military, then. She downgraded the stare to five hundred yards rather than a thousand. The dogs had gone back to randomly sniffing at things.
“I was wonderin’ if you’d gotten turned around on your way somewhere else. You seem kinda spaced out.”
“No,” Danny replied, shaking his head even as the wind whipped up around them. “Just like to walk sometimes. Clears out the cobwebs, you know? Guess I get a little lost in my own head sometimes.”
It hadn’t been the first time he’d nearly mown someone over on his evening walks, but it was the first time he’d stopped to chat rather than blazing past with a muttered apology. He hadn’t had a job in a while, the money from his last exploit holding out long enough that he spent days without checking the obituaries or lingering around cemeteries. It was a toss-up, with older widows; some were glad to be rid of their spouses and would ignore his attempts to ransom the ‘spirit’ back to them, but if he found just the right one, it could be quite lucrative. This last one had held out.
“The pups drag you out for the night?” he asked amiably.
“Yeah,” the former officer answered. “This one’s not quite house-trained yet, and he likes to get out and smell four hundred or so hydrants and whatever else is in his path.”
Weasel, the mutt in question, looked up, then chuffed and went back to investigating a discarded Hardees’ bag. She was trying to avoid starting to give him people food, but an empty bag wasn’t a problem. The blonde smiled indulgently.
“What kind of job? I know the college kids are just back from holiday break, do you teach?”
“I work in IT,” Danny answered automatically, though it had been years since such a statement were true. “I’m between jobs at the moment, doing a lot of freelance work.”
Which was true, after all. To a point.
“How about you? You work with the critters or just get suckered in by these two?” he asked, shoving his hands in his pockets and regarding the animals with another rare smile.
“I was in the military, but I took early retirement,” she replied. And she had yet to get used to that, either. Army life had given her a routine; up early every morning, breakfast, exercise, drills, and - eventually - the mid-level intelligence work she’d been doing. Her dress uniform was still hanging in the front closet, wrapped in plastic.
Still, being a civilian again had its merits. If nothing else, doing her own investigating meant no red tape and no one looking over her shoulder, waiting for results. And she liked being back home. Despite the occasional bout of cold weather, it really was where the heart was.
“Having an easy time settling in?” He’d said ‘me’ rather than ‘we’, which likely meant he was single, but she’d never married, so it wasn’t as if she was pointing fingers. If he was freelancing, maybe she could get a card. Her computer skills were fine, but not stellar. It might be a good thing to have a professional she could call.
“Have a little too much free time, I think,” Danny told her with a shrug, chilled hands still shoved deep into his pockets; mild or not, the cold would eventually wear on anyone standing out in it for very long. His walk had found him wandering as much through his own mind as the city streets and he hadn’t taken notice of the cold until he stopped and drew himself back out to reality.
“Guess you might know about that now. Gotta find a way to fill the quiet,” he went on, and glanced around, eyes settling on car driving by before returning to face Jules. He offered her a half smile. “Like taking walks at night. Running into strangers on the street.”
Her mouth tucked in at the corners,and she said, “Well, pulling up stakes isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes a change of scenery is exactly what you need. Gives us time to do what we’re meant to be doing.”
Jules paused, glanced at the mutts. They tended to get impatient if she stood in one place for too long, but they were currently occupied with the fast food bag. “You mentioned doing IT work. I have a blog that I’m writing, and while the site looks fine, I think it could run a little more efficiently. If you’re looking for some extra cash, would you be interested in taking a look at it?”
She wondered briefly what he’d think of her subject matter, then decided not to worry about it. Blogging was common in the modern age, no matter what you were writing about, and her site wasn’t any stranger than some of the others she’d seen since she’d become active online.
Danny’s eyes arched in surprise for a split second before he normalized his features once again. He had been repeating the freelance IT line so often that the thought had never occurred to him that it might lead to some job offers. Jules didn’t look like a writer, he thought, but then reconsidered; after all, who really ever looked like a writer?
“Hey, yeah, that could work,” he said, patting down his pockets until he found a stray receipt - when did he go to Dunkin Donuts? - and a pen. Danny scribbled out his name and email address, adding his cell phone for good measure.
“Why don’t you jot down some ideas, send me an email? See where we go from there,” he offered, holding out the paper for her to take.
Jules had seen the look before, the one that said ‘Whuh?’, so it didn’t faze her. But with the great democratization of the internet, anyone and everyone with something to say could get out there and do it. She plucked the receipt from Danny’s fingers, and it crinkled in her hand before she tucked it into her pocket.
“If you’re still between jobs in a week or so, maybe we can get together and talk about it,” she said, and the dogs were getting restless. She got a better grip on the leashes, but she should probably get the mutts out of the cold. “For now, we can put it on a shelf and get out of this weather. I haven’t had my winter cold yet, and I’d like to skip it for once.”
