Sometimes the Best Presents Can’t Be Wrapped Read online

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Ned Balding was dragged out of his home crying...

  BEFORE….

  DURING

  AFTER

  SPECIAL THANKS

  More from B.G. Thomas

  About the Author

  By B.G. Thomas

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  Sometimes the Best Presents Can’t Be Wrapped

  By B.G. Thomas

  Ned Balding used to be a decent man—until the stress of seemingly countless responsibilities changes him, and he becomes cold and driven—the kind of man who considers firing an employee days before Christmas. The kind of man who kicks a dog…. But Ned’s transgressions haven’t gone unseen. A Salvation Army Santa witnesses his misdeeds and decides Ned needs to be taught a lesson.

  When Ned wakes up the next morning, he’s stunned to discover he’s been transformed into a dog.

  In the past year, Jake Carrara has lost his mother, a lover… even his dog. His boss came close to firing him just before the holidays. He isn’t sure he’s ready for another pet when he’s asked to foster a dog, but Jake’s good heart won’t let him refuse. Little does he know, this isn’t just any dog.

  Through a twist of fate, two people with little reason to be friends might teach each other to rediscover the good—and the love—in life.

  To Caryl Hull, who has supported me from the beginning and before, and even been overjoyed.

  You planted a seed, my friend. This one had to be yours!

  NED BALDING was dragged out of his home crying and howling, toward a van. Terrified, he fought to get away—to run—with every ounce of energy he had. But there was a leather loop around his neck attached to a long pole, and a strong burly man was pushing and shoving him toward the van’s open doors.

  Ned snarled. Fought. Tried to bite, even.

  He was being taken away!

  Ned howled all the more and dug his bare feet into the grass of his front yard. He was naked, and anyone could see. Horrifying! Humiliating! The two of them reached the vinca-vine-covered greenway between the sidewalk and the curb, and he tried to dig his feet in there as well, driving his toes into the dirt and thick ground cover, thrashing to either side, but the man was too strong! Now he was on the hot blacktop, and it burned the soles of his feet. God, had it snowed only yesterday? And now his feet were burning?

  Got to get away! Run! Run run run! Get someplace where someone can help me.

  But the man next to him had grabbed hold of that choking leather band looped around his neck and, with muscles far stronger than Ned’s, was fighting, shoving, manhandling him up into the van—

  Stop! No! Don’t do this!

  —and he was absolutely terrified.

  “Don’t hurt him” came the voice of Lillian, one of his oldest friends, from behind. Why was she letting this happen?

  And no! What was inside the van was enough to make him redouble his efforts not to be shoved inside. Cages! He was going to be put in a cage. Oh, and the smells. God no. Shit and piss and something underneath it all. Something truly awful. He just wasn’t sure what.

  He was up and into the van now, and when that man tried to climb in after him, Ned turned and tried to bite him. Yes! To bite him!

  “Oh no!” the man cried and twisted Ned’s neck painfully. “Fuck you, you mongrel. In! Get in there.”

  Ned was forced back into a kennel—a plastic kennel!—and his terror intensified. He panicked, but the man was so incredibly strong, and before he could absorb that it had really happened, he was inside. His captor loosened the leather loop and slipped it right off his neck, and before Ned could react, the door slammed with a loud click! and he was locked in.

  Ned howled! He spun around inside the kennel and tried to bite the man’s hand, but the bastard was wearing heavy gloves that stopped Ned from doing any kind of damage.

  No! He thrust his head high so he could howl again but hit it hard on the top of the kennel, and he cried out and then just… threw himself down in defeat.

  He cried. He cried and cried and cried.

  And the man? Who had been so angry and cruel and vicious?

  His expression slowly changed from one of pure outrage—

  The man? Outraged? I’m the one in the kennel!

  —to one of… sympathy.

  “Jesus Patootie, doggie…,” he said. He shook his head slowly and sighed. Ned could smell the sweat that ran down the man’s face. That and something else he’d never smelled before. And then it hit him. He was smelling the man’s fear. How? How could he smell fear?

  “What happened to you, doggie?” the man asked.

  Ned cried. He couldn’t stop.

  Look what life had brought him.

  Only yesterday he’d sat at his desk and looked at the divorce papers that had been handed to him. He’d thought life had dealt him a really bad blow. But that? That was nothing.

  Because now, believe it or not, folks—and he was finally seeing that it was true—he, Ned Balding, was a dog.

  BEFORE….

  1

  NED BALDING stared at the divorce papers. Again. He’d been doing that more or less all morning. They’d been handed to him personally by some zit-faced kid who didn’t look old enough to have graduated high school, let alone be handing over such important legal documents. The little snot had been waiting in the parking lot, hadn’t even let Ned go into the office and take his coat off, and he’d used his tablet to take a picture of Ned holding those papers. Maybe as proof that he’d done his job and not thrown the papers away?

  Ned should have punched the son of a bitch and then taken the tablet and shoved it up the kid’s ass. He’d simply been too surprised.

  Stunned, really.

  He still was.

  Ned hadn’t really thought Cliff would go through with it. Thought that when Cliff had packed a little suitcase and gone to their lake house—if you could call such a small place a “lake house”—he was just sulking. That he was doing it for show. That like he normally did, he’d come back home in a few days, possibly as much as a week, and they’d pretend nothing had happened and move on.

  Apparently not this time.

  Ned became aware of how incredibly quiet it was. Ordinarily he had the door open to the outer office, but several weeks ago the piped-in music he paid for had begun the annual subversive holiday regime, and he couldn’t stand holiday songs. “Silent Night” and “Silver Bells” and “Do You Hear What I Fucking Hear?” and “The Little Drummer Boy” until you wanted to take the pa-rumping bastard’s drum and sticks away from him and beat him to death with them.

  It was one of the many things that Cliff had evidently come to dislike about Ned the last couple of years.

  “For goodness sake, Ned,” Cliff had said, hands on hips, two weeks ago. “How can you not like Christmas music? It’s so happy and inspirational, and a lot of it is incredibly beautiful. I mean, you don’t like ‘Ave Maria’?”

  “I don’t like ‘The Twelve Goddamned Days of Christmas’! I don’t want to hear about some little brat begging some innocent guy for some money to buy his mother some Christmas shoes because she just croaked and is going to be dancing with Jesus today!”

  Cliff shrugged and nodded. “Well, yeah, that one does suck a big one.” He shuddered. It was the only thing that kept things from getting nasty. “But how about ‘Carol of the Bells’?”

  “‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer’?” Ned countered.

  “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’?” was Cliff’s rejoinder.

  “Any Chipmunks song,” Ned lobbed right ba
ck.

  “Touché,” Cliff conceded. “But how about ‘O Holy Night’?” He grinned in triumph.

  “‘Please, Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas),’” replied Ned with a smile.

  “There is no such song!” Cliff cried.

  “Yes, there is.” Ned nodded. “It’s by John Denver,” he said and then proceeded to launch into the chorus, complete with a hillbilly twang.

  “Stop! Stop!” Cliff shook his head.

  “At least when Mame sings about how ‘We Need a Little Christmas,’ she waits until the week after Thanksgiving. That’s when everybody used to start playing Christmas songs. The week after Thanksgiving. Now it seems like they’re starting in July!”

  “Ned, it’s November third. That’s hardly July….”

  “It’s still not even Thanksgiving!”

  Speaking of which, he had an eighteen-pound turkey in the chest freezer on the back porch. What the hell am I supposed to do with it now? He and Cliff certainly wouldn’t be hosting the annual Thanksgiving meal this year, would they?

  “You’re Scrooge,” Cliff had told him that day. “You’re the Grinch! You’re that character Orson Welles plays in It’s a Wonderful Life.”

  “Lionel Barrymore played Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. Orson Welles played him in the Marlo Thomas remake.”

  They’d survived that night. No, the issue that brought the house of cards that was their marriage down was the subject of a dog. Or more than one. Cliff had decided he wanted to breed Labradors. And Ned put his foot down.

  “I don’t like animals,” he’d said. “You know that. Especially the kind that shit and piss and—”

  “All animals poop and pee,” Cliff said, using the kinder words for bodily excretions. “You do. You’re an animal.”

  “—shed. Especially shed! We’ve got good furniture, Cliff. I don’t want all that fucking hair all over everything. I don’t want it on my suits. And what about their claws? What would happen to our leather couch?”

  “I can keep them to a part of the house,” Cliff offered. “There’s a door to the downstairs. That way I can have a dog—”

  “Like you’re not going to try and weasel it upstairs once I get used to the idea of it being around! I know you. And then you’ll want her on the bed.” He shuddered.

  “—and I can breed her in the utility room and—”

  “Dogs drop their litter where they want to! We’ll come home and she will have made a huge bloody disgusting mess on the white carpet in the living room, and—”

  “Then we’ll get it cleaned.”

  “Which will ruin it. You know that kind of mess would never come out, and—”

  “Then we’ll get another carpet! We can afford it!”

  “We?” The comment had outraged Ned. “We? I’ll be the one that pays for it. I pay for everything.”

  Cliff’s eyes had flashed at those words. If only Ned had paid attention to Cliff’s expression. But he’d been too mad, and words said in anger can’t be taken back.

  “Watch what you say next, Ned baby,” Cliff had warned.

  Why didn’t I pay attention?

  Sadly, Cliff’s warning had only made him angrier. He’d felt so… backed into a corner. Like his husband was daring him.

  He took that dare.

  “You’re not breeding dogs in this house.” The words came so easily. After all, how many times had his father said the same kind of thing? “As long as you live under my roof, it isn’t happening, and—”

  Cliff walked out of the room.

  How dare he!

  Ned had followed him, expletives falling from his lips, but when Cliff pulled his little weekend bag out from under the bed, Ned had finally stopped his diatribe.

  “What are you doing?”

  Cliff didn’t answer. He packed. He did it quickly. A pair of jeans, some socks, a nice shirt or two, a few T-shirts, some of the sexy underwear he liked to wear (that Ned liked him wearing—Jack Adams, Garçon Model, and especially Andrew Christian), and a pair of deck shoes.

  Then he pulled the handle up out of the little suitcase and trailed it behind him as he strode out of their bedroom and down the hall.

  “Cliff! I asked you a question.”

  Cliff did not stop until he got to the front door. “And I am not one of your employees, Ned. I’m your husband.”

  Ned almost scowled at the word. He hated the term applied to two men. It seemed so… heteronormative. And while he liked blending in with the world, not standing out, he hated imitating traditions of a society that rejected gays. Why would he care for their institutions?

  But then why was it such a punch in the gut that Cliff wanted a divorce?

  “Geez, Ned. Who are you? What happened to the man I fell in love with?”

  “He grew up!” Ned shot back. “He started living in the real world.” What choice did he have when his father died and left him Balding Adhesives? A business he didn’t even want. But his sister, Patricia, wasn’t going to run it, and his younger brother, Perry, would run it into the ground. It had been in the family too long for something like that to happen.

  “I’m going to the lake house,” Cliff said—because he could, right? He worked from home. If you could call the articles he wrote working, no matter how decently they paid. “If you decide you want to live in fantasyland again, you let me know. But don’t take too long to make up your mind, baby, because I’ve been getting ready for some time now.”

  “Getting ready for what?” Ned said with a sneer.

  Cliff seemed to almost shrink from him, and that had been a splash of water in Ned’s face. One that startled him and allowed some inner (saner?) voice to warn, Be careful what you say next….

  But it was too late for that.

  “For moving on,” Cliff said quietly. “I’m not happy, Ned.”

  “Do you think I am?” Ned shouted, despite his saner side’s counsel.

  Cliff trembled then, and his eyes got big and… wet? And it was a bigger splash of water but still not a big enough one to get his saner self to prevail. This was his pride after all!

  “God, Ned.” Cliff shook his head.

  “Go on! Get out!”

  And then he did. Cliff turned without a word, opened the door quietly, and shut it even more so.

  Ned kicked the door. Hard. More than once. His foot hurt for several days, and he was lucky he hadn’t broken anything. He didn’t hear a word from Cliff in all that time. And Ned hadn’t called him because he was sure Cliff would be back. Sure of it.

  But the papers said something different, didn’t they?

  2

  THERE WAS a slight rap on the door, and in the quiet of the room, it startled Ned. He jerked his head to look through the window that made up the top half of the door and see who it was.

  Jake Carrara.

  He clenched his jaw and had to will the anger away or at least tame it, or who knew what he might say to the man?

  Ned gestured for him to come in and smiled inwardly. Jake did not look comfortable. Good.

  The door opened, and Jake stepped in.

  “Good morning, Mr. Carrara. Why don’t you sit down?” He said the latter to cut his employee off from wishing him a good morning. Not that it was. Morning. Or a good one. It was a half hour shy of noon, and the day was the worst Ned could remember in years.

  Time to take it out on someone. And it might as well be this slacker.

  Jake pulled the chair away from Ned’s desk enough to sit down. “G-good morning.”

  Damn, he’d said it anyway. Well, at least he’d stuttered. Ned’s inner smile broadened.

  “C-can I help you with something?” Jake asked. The young man—he might have been thirty or so—ran his fingers through his thick dark hair, and his eyes, nearly black, revealed worry. Good. He should be worried.

  “Well,” Ned said to Jake’s question, “you can start by telling me if you know that last Thursday and Friday account for the fourth time this year you’ve mi
ssed days of work.”

  Jake closed his dark eyes, sighed deeply, and reopened them. Despite himself and his mood, their intensity almost startled Ned. They were the kind of eyes you could fall into. But Ned wasn’t doing any falling today.

  “Yes, sir. I am. And I’m truly sorry. I was afraid that’s what this was about.”

  You’re sorry? You knew what this was about? Ned opened his mouth to say something—

  “My relationship ended in January,” Jake said. “That’s why I missed time then. I c-couldn’t face the world there for a few days. We were together a long time, sir. We never got married—he didn’t want that.”

  He?

  “But I don’t think that made it less of a relationship, just because it wasn’t legal.”

  —and Ned closed his mouth with a snap.

  Being legal certainly didn’t keep Cliff from leaving me.

  A heaviness seemed to settle over Ned’s shoulders. He didn’t like the feeling.

  “We met in high school.” Jake shook his head. “I thought we were together forever. I mean… we were high school sweethearts. We went to the prom.”

  God! Is he really doing this? And his eyes! Is the fucker going to cry?

  “Geez!” Jake said and wiped at his face. “I’m still not over him.”

  Ned turned to his computer. The subject of a relationship ending wasn’t one he wanted to talk about right now. “And February?” he asked, not even trying to understand why a breakup would mean Jake had been unable to work.

  I’m here, aren’t I? Did I stay home and cry?

  “My mother died,” Jake said quietly.

  Ned stiffened. Shit. He saw that now. Typed right there under Reason for Absence. Death of mother. And under that: 3 Day Grievance approved by N. Balding.

  How did I forget that?

  Ned closed his eyes. Fuck. Opened them and said, “Ah yes. I’m sorry about that.” He didn’t look at Jake. Pride again. He could almost see Cliff shaking his head. Fuck you. He scrolled down the screen. “And this time off in July?”