Free Everyone Worth Knowing by Lauren Weisberger Page B

He looked smug and satisfied,
    and I mentally counted the days until the lease was up. One hundred
    seventy. I occasionally tried to recall what had attracted us in
    the first place, what had existed before the icy detente that had become
    the hallmark of our relationship, but nothing really specificemerged.
    He had always been a little dim, something that all the
    private schools had managed to mask but not repair. He was undeniably
    cute in that clean-cut, Abercrombie-catalog-boy way, and he
    did know how to pump out the charm when he needed something,
    but mostly I remember it just being easy: we had the same
    friends, the same fondness for chain-smoking and complaining,
    and a nearly identical pair of salmon-colored pants. Could a good
    romance have been modeled after my relationship with Cameron?
    Well, no, I don't suppose so. But his unspectacular, watered-down
    version of companionship in those weird, early postcollege years
    felt perfectly adequate.
    "I don't doubt it's a very special dog, Cameron," I said slowly,
    as though I were speaking to a third-grader. "The problem is that
    I'm. Allergic. To All. Dogs. You understand that sentence, don't
    you?" I smiled sweetly.
    He grinned, undeterred by the best bitchy, condescending tone
    I could muster. Impressive. He really was serious about this. "I've
    made some calls, done some research, and I've found us—drum
    roll, please!—a hypoallergenic dog. Can you say 'hypoallergenic'?
    C'mon, B, repeat after me, 'hypo—'"
    "You found us a hypoallergenic dog? What, do they breed them
    to be that way? The last thing I need in my life is some genetic mutation
    of an animal that will most likely send me straight to the
    hospital. No way."
    "Bette, don't you see? It's perfect. The breeder promised that
    since Yorkies have real hair, not fur, it's impossible to be allergic to
    them. Even for you. I made an appointment for us to pick one out
    on Saturday—they're in Darien, right near my office, and they
    promised to reserve at least one boy and one girl so we could
    have our pick."
    "I have to work," I said listlessly, already vaguely aware that
    adding responsibility to this particular relationship was only going
    to sabotage it faster. Perhaps we should have just ended it then,
    but December's such a tough time to find apartments, and the
    place really was a decent size, and well, dogs are cute and distracting
    . . . so I agreed. "All right, Saturday it is. I'll go to the office
    Sunday instead, and we can go pick out our hypoallergenic dog."
    He bear-hugged me and told me all about his plans to rent a
    car and maybe visit a few nearby antiques stores (this coming from
    the boy who'd argued tirelessly to retain his beanbag chair when
    we'd combined our stuff) and I wondered if maybe, just maybe,
    this little genetic mutation of a dog was the answer to all our problems.
    Wrong.
    So very, very wrong.
    Well, that's misleading. The dog certainly didn't fix anything
    (surprise, surprise), but Cameron was right about something:
    Millington turned out to be hypoallergenic after all. I could hold
    her, snuggle her, rub her furry little mustache right against my
    face without so much as a hint of an itch. The problem was that
    the dog herself was allergic to everything. Everything. Somehow,
    her tiny little puppy sneezes seemed endearing when she was
    tucked among her littermates in the breeder's kitchen. It was
    adorable . . . the only little-girl puppy had caught a little cold, and
    we were there to nurse her back to vibrant puppy health. Only the
    cold didn't go away, and little Millington didn't stop sneezing. After
    three weeks of round-the-clock care and nursing—Cameron
    chipped in, I'll give him credit there—our little ball of joy wasn't
    improving, even with the nearly $3,000 we'd spent on vet consultations,
    antibiotics, special food, and two late-night emergency-room
    visits when the wheezing and choking got particularly terrifying.
    We were missing work, screaming at each