24 hours later
Red-cheeked and merry, the man in the red suit retrieved a cookie from the plate on the mantel and took a big bite. “Delicious! Tell that roommate of yours he has excellent taste.”
I was suffocating. The weight of a thousand stones pressed down on my chest. I couldn’t breathe. Someone was burying me alive.
A distinctly canine groan reached my ears.
I cracked an eye open to find Boone next to me on the bed, his front paws and head resting on my chest. Unsure whether this was better or worse than the slobber bath I’d gotten last night, I decided now wasn’t really the time to judge.
What time was it?
With a quick glance at the clock, I saw it was three minutes past midnight. Just like last night. “That’s downright creepy.”
A canine sigh had me turning to Boone. “Not you, buddy.”
If bloodhounds could roll their eyes, Boone did. And given his particular background, I was gonna say it was possible.
“What? Okay, it’s not creepy, it’s a coincidence.”
Boone groaned.
“It’s not a coincidence?”
A solid thwack of his tail against my bedding confirmed that no, it was not a coincidence.
That was how Boone and I rolled. I tried to guess what he meant, and he kept sending what he probably thought were pretty clear communications my way. We’d have to agree to disagree on that one.
I massaged the base of his ears, and he groaned in canine delight. Mastering the basics of human speech aside, Boone was just a big old hound dog who liked to have his belly rubbed and his ears massaged.
I continued to rub his ears. “I don’t see how that’s not creepy.”
He shook his head, just enough to get his point across but not so hard that I’d be scraping dried bloodhound slobber off my ceiling tomorrow. Then he hopped off my bed to return to his own.
“Seriously? I have some freaky recurring dream about Santa at the same time every night, and you’re telling me that’s not creepy?” But I was talking to the waddling hind end of my hound.
And now that I’d said it aloud, perhaps dreams about jolly old Saint Nick shouldn’t be labeled as creepy. First, it was Boone and his strange sense of humor with the smothering and the slobbering that had made the dreams nightmarish. Wasn’t it?
And second, when was Santa creepy?
Santa was a happy guy who brought joy to world and generally did good things. Minus the breaking and entering. Oh, and if that stuff about the lump of coal was true, that wasn’t really okay. Everybody had a bad day. You know, maybe stabbed the occasional non-human person who was trying to kill her. Possibly chopped off the head of a very bad, even murderous, bad guy.
It happened.
To me.
“Nuts.” I grabbed my pillow and pulled it over my head. I would not worry about whether I was on Santa’s naughty or nice list.
Except I was lying to myself, and sleep was not going to be my friend tonight.