I came through the loading doors while somebody was wheeling in a fox the size of a man, and it had no smell of fox at all, only glue and hot fabric and the sweat of the human folded up inside it. I lifted the tail as I passed. It was not attached to anything that could feel me lift it, which delighted me, a tail that flew for no reason but that I asked.
They are so warm in there. That is the thing I keep setting down and picking back up. Under every muzzle and every paw a face is pouring off heat, and when a head comes off, quick, in a corner, I get the whole of it at once: the wet hair pasted flat, the relief, the small private gasp of a creature remembering it has skin.
I carried that gasp out under the door and let it go in the parking lot next to some perfume and a hot dog cart. Nobody there knew it was a gift.
They hug like they have been apart for years and will be apart for years again. Fur into fur, nothing touching, all that softness between them, and still they hold longer than the bare ones do outside. I got in where I could, along a collarbone, into the gap where a paw does not quite meet a wrist.
Somebody propped the ballroom door to cool the room and I took the chance and took the whole warm noise of them with me, the laughing, the buckles, the ten thousand degrees of hidden human.
I am three streets over now, laying it down on a stranger who will only feel the breeze.