The shrewd response hit his ears before he saw her face, and he tried to shake off the surprise that the reaction had brought. "I had him on a leash!" he retorted, shouting only because he was at a distance. He caught up to his rambunctious dog—he really didn't act like he was his age most of the time—and watched as he sniffed at the puppy for a minute. "He usually isn't on a leash; he wanders around here free, so he doesn't respond well to being on one."
In a low, direct tone, he said, "Cin," and watched as the dog walked over to Brandon's side and sat down. He used a few of the police dog methods to train him, and they'd worked well enough.
"He's good. He wouldn't hurt a flea, you know that." All the animals around here loved him, even. Friendlier than any other dog his size, and relatively easygoing. "Stay," he said to the dog, then hooked the leash to his collar and scratched him on the head, pulling a piece of jerky from his pocket and handing it to him. That would keep him busy for a little while.
Normally, the offer of casual sex would've been made more than once by now. But... things with Lexi had fucked his head up pretty hard. At first they'd been all about the casual sex. But then he'd gotten close to Allie once and lost her, and then gotten close to her again, and she left. And then she came back, and he got close to her again, started to fall for her again, and... she left again. He didn't know how that had turned to an aversion to casual sex, but it had, and he wished it hadn't. Maybe if it hadn't, it'd be easier to figure shit with Bea out. Maybe he wouldn't be so fucking weirded out by the idea of whatever was happening here.
She asked him why he was here, and he glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the infirmary. "Oh. Leah's in there," he explained. "And Cin needed a walk, but I didn't want to be far away from here, you know? Just in case."
Did she not know that Leah was in the infirmary? It'd been Vienna who'd been there with her, hadn't it? But then again, Vienna hadn't exactly left, either, so maybe it wasn't crazy to think that she didn't know. "She had some kind of false labor or something," Brandon explained, just in case Bea didn't know. "I think she's okay, but I haven't seen her for a little while. Marchand and your sister are in there and I don't want to crowd the room, you know?"
That, and Brandon was pretty shitty in the infirmary.