Thom Baron has been struggling with social anxiety his entire life. He's taken the medications, gone to the therapists, followed the programs, and concluded his best life is a solitary one. When he comes across a dog in obvious need at his local market, it rekindles the desire to have some company around. It may come with a dishevelled coat, a notched ear, and a refusal to respond to anything but its given name "Ugly," but it could still be a friend.<br><br>However, Thom's new fur buddy has no such need to keep to itself and immediately befriends the man Thom has secretly coveted since he moved in -- Justin, Thom's gorgeous, bright-eyed neighbour. No matter how Thom tries to evade the man, the dog keeps drawing them back into each other's lives, and it doesn't take Thom long to recognize it's simply pursuing the demands of Thom's own heart. With the dog giving him the courage to try, Thom reaches out to return the love being offered.<br><br>Until a stranger shows up insisting the dog is his and demanding its immediate return ... a loss Thom knows will take all of his efforts and newfound confidence with it.

But by the Grace of Dog

There weren’t a lot of folks in the world about whom Thom would use that word, but with Justin, he felt more and more comfortable. Justin managed to get his own way more than Thom liked, and somehow Justin had a knack for getting him to go along with those ways. But maybe Justin had been right when he’d suggested that Thom might get used to him if they took things nice and slow. At the very least, they were proving to be a nice complement to each other with him as the quiet one and Justin being the chatty one, he of the nods and the mumbles and Justin of the laughter and the winding conversations. They were like the nursery rhyme about the man who ate no fat and his wife who ate no lean and how, together, they worked perfectly to clean the bone. When that was coupled with Dog running between them, inadvertently keeping people from getting too close, Thom barely felt like he was out and among people at all—not on the street, or through the market, or even standing in front of vendors.


Chapter 18