My heart seized in my chest as I read the words, not realizing just how badly I had needed to hear them. It was a bit crazy, maybe, to have become so attached to a dog so quickly. Especially one as poorly behaved as he was. But, what can I say, I had never had a dog growing up and had always wanted one, but just never got around to it. Finding him had been fucking fate.
The worst part of getting arrested was sitting in a cell that night wondering what happened to Coop.
All for naught, it would seem, since he had been with this Autumn woman all along.
I remembered her too.
Kind of hard not to.
She was a knockout with her tall, lean but womanly body, long blonde hair, blue eyes, and a certain kind of laid-back confidence she wore around her like a perfume.
Hell, she had been shamelessly watching the whole scene with my ex, not even trying to hide how much she was enjoying the show.
She was gorgeous.
Then when shit went down and got a little uglier than it needed to, she had been quick to try to get it on tape, to make sure there would be evidence to back-up a claim if something ever happened to me.
So beautiful, with her head on straight, and a dog lover?
Sounded a lot like the perfect woman.
Sounded a lot like somewhere I wanted Coop to be raised.
I reached into the envelope to find a picture of the dog that had still been a bit of a puppy in my mind - small-bodied but big-footed. He still had big feet, sure, but the rest of him had caught up with them. She was right too; he hadn't gotten even the smallest bit better looking with age. He was now just a giant ugly dog.
He seemed happy too with his big bright blue collar that matched his eyes, sitting on a sidewalk with a cookie half-hanging out of his mouth. You'd swear he was smiling.
Curious, I looked past him at the store he was situated in front of, squinting at the picture that was taken from a distance.
But then my lips curled up when I made out the sign.
Phallus-opy.
She took a picture of my dog outside a sex store? What's more, she sent me a picture of my dog taken out front of a sex store?
Either it was a mistake, or this Autumn woman was one interesting character.
I'd say time would tell, but, well, let's face it, it wouldn't.
I had five more years behind bars.
I would never meet this woman.
It shouldn't have, but that knowledge gave me a small pang to the left side of my chest, deep in the black hole I didn't even recognize as a heart anymore.
I figured time inside would do that to a man.
It was harder for those who had a wife or girl on the outside, knowing they were away for a while and unable to fill her needs, worrying that she might step out on him, or get rid of him completely while he spends every night with his dick in his hand thinking about her.
I was in the lucky minority in that I didn't have that worry. I didn't have a girl, and I sure as fuck would never have demanded she wait for me even if I did.
So I wasn't plagued with that insecurity. And, well, I had a sex drive like anyone else, but suppressing it wasn't exactly hard in a place full of men, that smelled constantly of a bathroom and sweat and shitty food.
"Jesus, the fuck happened to his hair?" my cellmate, Tank, though his actual name was Bobby, asked as he came in, leaning up into my bunk because the idea of 'personal boundaries' was wholly lost on the man.
"Dunno. I found him like that when he was a puppy."
"Thought you said you have no close family," Bobby observed. "You know, aside from the kids."
"I don't," I agreed. Knife, meet gut. I still hadn't gotten used to the sensation. I wondered if I ever would.
"Who has the dog then?"
"Some chick at the coffeeshop where I got arrested. Took him home with her."
Bobby's lips tipped up, giving his already good-looking face a little charm. "She hot?"
"Incredibly," I agreed.
"Well," he went on with a shrug. "I guess when you get out, you're gonna have to go take him back from her," he said with a twinkle in his eyes before he dropped down into his own bunk to read the half a dozen letters he got each week from various family members who never gave up on him, even though this was his fourth trip to prison since he was sixteen.
Honestly, the idea never even occurred to me.
Six years was probably more than half of Coop's lifetime. He wouldn't even fucking remember me. He had a good life with the Autumn chick.