Free Stay by Allie Larkin Page A

you,” I whispered, slowly, feeling the sting in my eyes as I said the words. I sat up, took a long sip of my drink, and wiped my teary eyes with the back of my hand. “Fuck him,” I said, getting up to make another drink. “Fuck.” I dropped a few more ice cubes into my cup, splashing myself. “Him.”
    I walked back into the living room, tripping a little when my sock caught on the carpet. I grabbed the remote and flipped through couples kissing, a sale on manufactured diamonds on the Home Shopping Network, and some design show where a couple celebrating their twenty- fifth wedding anniversary was getting a makeover for their big celebration. Everything reminded me of Peter.
    Finally, I settled on an old black-and-white episode of Rin Tin Tin . The dog dwarfed the child actor who played his sidekick, and a bunch of men in uniforms wearing toy guns on low-slung holsters delivered wooden lines like, “I’m the fastest shot in this town, sir!”
    I got comfortable on the couch with my laptop, and started deleting my junk e- mail with the TV on in the background, but the dog was incredible, and I couldn’t stop watching. He saved people and warned of certain danger. He was always there when needed. He never let anyone down.
    I typed Rin Tin Tin into my search engine, and got the official Rin Tin Tin website. Apparently, it wasn’t just one dog. There had been a long line of Rin Tin Tins. German Shepherds. I read the history of the first one, slurping through my fourth Kool-Aid. I got to the end, and was putting my laptop aside to get a refill, when I noticed a heading on the sidebar: PUPPIES. I poured another drink and raced back to the computer, only to learn that the next litter of puppies was all sold before they were even born.
    I looked for German Shepherd puppies in Rochester, but all I could find was a breeder in Canada who specialized in police and cadaver-recovery dogs. There was a detailed explanation of training the dogs with a coffee can punched with holes and filled with human remains. I snapped my computer shut, but then Rin Tin Tin jumped over a burning hay bale to save his master.
    That’s what was missing. That’s what I needed. Rin Tin Tin wouldn’t leave me for thin thighs and an aristocratic nose. Rin Tin Tin would be a loyal friend.
    I went back to looking for a puppy. The words on the screen were starting to blur, but I didn’t care. I needed a dog, and I wasn’t going to stop until I found one. I clicked from one site to another, and then, I saw him.
    He was a shaggy ball of fur. Jet-black, except for a small pink tongue hanging out of his mouth. His head was tipped to one side like he was listening to something intently. One of his ears flopped over. The breeder was in Bratislava, Slovakia, and the site wasn’t in English, with the exception of a few shaky translations. At the top of the picture of the puppy, it said something I couldn’t read, and then MALE 11/5. The puppy was only a few weeks old. He was just a baby. Under his picture, there was a link that said ORDER FORM. I moused over it, ready to click.
    I took another long slurp of my Kool-Aid. I couldn’t just decide I wanted a dog and order one off the Internet. It was crazy. Crazy! I tried to go back to watching Rin Tin Tin , but I couldn’t stop staring at the picture of the puppy. It was like one of those paintings where the eyes follow you everywhere. From every angle, I felt like that dog was looking at me. He was going to be taken away from his mother. He was going to be given to some random family and he was going to get lonely and miss his mom and they wouldn’t understand. Not like I would.
    “You need me, don’t you?” I asked him. I felt like his eyes looked more and more sad and lonely every time I looked at the picture.
    I clicked on the link. The order form said that the cost for the dog was one hundred and forty thousand koruny, which, seven drinks in, I figured was like pesos or lira or something like that,