The Dog Park. Laura Caldwell

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       12

      “You really don’t have a great throw,” I heard.

      Baxter and I were at the dog park a few days after Victory’s photo shoot, and I was using a Chuckit! stick to throw his green ball. We hadn’t been out there enough lately, and in trying to fill all my orders, we kept missing our usual crew of dogs and owners.

      Today, as always, Baxter had tore into the park as soon as I’d unhooked his leash. But when he didn’t see his dog friends, he’d raced back to me, plunked the ball at my feet and had taken off again, looking over his shoulder as he’d run. I could almost hear him saying, Go long, go long.

      But now someone else’s voice. “You really don’t have a great throw.”

      I turned to see a guy laughing. He wore a pink button-down shirt, cuffed at the arms with shorts and brown loafers. “Former prepster gone casual”—the loafers weren’t fussy, the guy’s blond hair was a little shaggy.

      I looked at Baxter, who stood panting at the base of a tree, his eyes trained upward to the branches where the ball had traveled.

      “Yeah,” I said, pointing to the throwing stick, “and I can’t even blame it on anything.”

      The guy took a few steps, shook the branches of the tree, and the ball fell to the grass.

      “I take it you’re not into softball.” The guy threw the ball for Baxter, sending him streaking across the grass.

      “Nope,” I said. “I’m into other things. Like jiu-jitsu.”

      Sebastian had taken years of jiu-jitsu classes, mostly with former college wrestlers who wanted to continue hand-to-hand fighting with the martial art, a skill Sebastian very much wanted to learn.

      I had no idea why I had blurted that out, except that I thought it would be funny. I was becoming more and more bold. The latest social media wave about Superdog just made me more so. I was loving the attention and so was my business. I’d received calls and emails from over ten countries, and the orders for the collars and leashes increased, along with requests to style dogs (or people with their dogs).