A long whistle jerked me back to the hospital corridor. Even though it was muffled, I knew who it belonged to. During the months since Caden entered my Hard-of-Hearing life I had become attuned to the sounds he made. I wanted to be grumpy about that. Tried to be grumpy about that. I wasn’t always successful, but I wasn’t ready to admit why that was the case.
Sometimes being a snarky, stubborn girl can really be a pain in the ass.
Frowning, I looked at Caden and realized he’d just gotten a taste of what California Highway Patrol fines were like.
“Ouch,” he said. I didn’t hear him, but I didn’t need to. The word was plain on his lips and face.
Gibson gave him an apologetic frown. “Sorry.”
Caden looked up from the citation and shrugged. “It is what it is.”
Gibson turned his attention to me, his smile knowing. “I’m going to leave this insane Australian in your capable hands now, Chase.”
In my hands.
An unnerving image flashed through my head at the words, one better left undescribed at this point in time. One that made my belly flutter and the bits between my legs … do things. I scowled at my body’s reaction, and crossed my arms over my chest.
Gibson had the nerve to laugh. Turning back to Caden he offered his hand. “You’ve got my number, Caden. Let me know how the dog is doing when you can.”
“I will,” he replied, taking Gibson’s hand and giving it a shake.
“Doofus.”
They both swung puzzled looks at me.
“I’ve decided his name is Doofus,” I said, tilting my chin at them.
Gibson lifted his eyebrows. Caden smiled. “We’ll let you know how Doofus is going.”
I didn’t miss the we in that statement. And like the wholly pornographic image that had filled my head at the notion of Caden being in my hands, my body reacted again. Maybe even more powerfully than the first time.
Great. Awesome.
Fuck.
*
Caden
We stayed at the animal hospital for the next hour, sitting in the waiting room out the front. I slumped in the hard plastic seats, exhaustion and jet lag doing their best to render me catatonic.
I’m afraid to say I was mentally, physically and emotionally drained. I’d been awake now for over twenty-four hours. I hadn’t slept on the flight over, instead binging on the latest season of Game of Thrones in an attempt to stop my mind stewing on Chase. For what it’s worth, it didn’t work. If you asked me what happened in the show, I couldn’t tell you. I think there was a dragon … maybe? And a guy with a sword? And some snow? I think …
While I slumped in my seat, Chase paced the small area, arms still crossed over her chest, her frown growing darker by the second.
She kept flinging glances at the door behind the reception counter. It didn’t matter how many times I told her the doctor working on Doofus was going to be a while, that the dog’s injuries were extensive and the procedures needed were time-consuming, she seemed to be affronted he hadn’t strode out yet to tell us Doofus was going to be okay.
The receptionist behind the counter watched Chase like she was some kind of curious caged animal. I noticed she often stared at Chase’s ears. I wanted to tell her to stop it. Had, in fact, stood up at one point and walked over to the counter to do just that, but had stopped myself before opening my mouth.
Chase had accused me of treating her like she was a little girl back on the freeway. She’d informed me I wasn’t her father or boyfriend and therefore had no right to protect her.
I wasn’t protecting her, not at this point in time at least, but I was thinking if she caught the receptionist constantly looking at her ears she might snap. I hated the idea of her feeling shitty about her hearing, but knew Chase would hate that kind of attention being brought to her hearing impairment more. So instead, I’d returned to my chair, slumped in its hard plastic seat and told her it was going to be okay – even as I prayed to God that Doofus would pull through.
Doofus. The fact she’d named the dog stirred something inside me, made me love her even more. It occurred to me right then I was a closet romantic. My mates at uni – the guys I played rugby with on the main lawn during lunch, who constantly told me I should hit on Dr. Briny Phillips – would be laughing their heads off at the notion I was all mushy over a girl naming a stray dog that may or may not die. But there you go, I was.
As I was fond of saying, it is what it is. And what it was with Chase was too profound for me to deny.
I had three weeks to make her see that. Three weeks starting in a veterinary hospital, surrounded by the smell of sick animals, disinfectant, with the memory of Donald the Dude niggling away at me.
I closed my eyes, unable to keep them open.
“Doofus is going to be okay, gorgeous.” My fried brain told me I’d mumbled it, but I didn’t seem to have the strength or ability to repeat it louder. My fried brain also told me I’d called her gorgeous, but that was lost in a fog of heavy nothingness.
Suffice to say, I fell asleep.
I woke sometime later to a soft nudge on my arm. I did that slow, uneven, bleary-eyed blink/squint thing you do when being woken unexpectedly from a deep slumber in the middle of the day. Harsh white light stabbed at my dry eyes as I peered up at the receptionist bending over in front of me.
I mumbled “Yes?” at her.
Before she could respond I felt a warm weight on my lap. Dropping my still-fuzzy gaze, I found Chase curled on her side on the seat beside me, her head resting on my thighs. Her eyes were closed. My hand was lying on her shoulder, my fingers loosely cupping its finely curved shape. It moved gently with her breaths – breaths steady and slow enough to tell me she was asleep.
A hot, tight ball filled my throat. I’m ashamed to say, my cock twitched in my jeans, an eager rush of excited blood pumping into its flaccid length.
It wouldn’t be flaccid for long. Not with the enthusiastic way my body was reacting to Chase’s proximity to my groin. Seriously, anyone would think I was fifteen with the way my dick was behaving.
“Are you deaf too?”
At the question – asked with part curiosity, part frustration – I lifted my eyes from Chase and fixed them on the receptionist. “And if I was?”
She blinked.
I don’t do anger that often – I’m the guy who smiled and laughed all the way through his parents’ divorce, remember – because getting angry doesn’t help anything. But this girl was rubbing me the wrong way, and I don’t think it had anything to do with being tired or jet lagged.
Shifting a little in my seat, I dragged a hand through my hair – though not the one on Chase’s shoulder – let out a choppy sigh and offered her an apologetic smile. “How’s Doofus?”
Another one of those blinks answered me.
“The dog?” I said. “The reason we’re sitting here?”
“Oh, it survived.”
Relief rushed through me like a wave.
“Dr. Adams wants to talk to you about it, though.”
Unsettled tension polluted that wave. A cold lump replaced the hot one in my throat.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
She regarded me for a moment, as if unsure what to do, and then made her way back behind the counter.
It was my turn to blink. Was she seriously wearing stilettoes in a vet clinic?
Returning my gaze to Chase, I allowed myself a moment to take in the beauty of her face. There was no frown pulling at her eyebrows, no guarded tension. Just a relaxed peaceful expression I longed to see all the time. If only she’d let me …
Heart racing, I brushed a fingertip over her cheek in a gentle stroke, before tracing the line of her ear. She moaned, the sound low and thick with sleep, and then shifted about on the seat a little, her head doing the same on my lap. Her eyes didn’t open. Nor did she wake.
I did it again: cheek, then ear. Stupidly, I whispered her name. I’m chalking that one up to jet lag and exhaustion.
Her eyelids fluttered a few times and then, with a soft little hitching noise that sent purely male blood into that purely male organ between my thighs – that purely male organ currently right next to her face – she opened her eyes and smiled up at me.
For a split second I don’t think she was aware of what she was doing. A split second of raw, ungoverned emotion. And then realization of what she was doing, where she was laying, hit her and she scrambled up so fast she clocked my chin with the back of her head and rammed the heel of her palm into my groin.
Pain. Instant pain. Whoa. Trust me when I say getting a semi hard-on whacked with a floundering palm is not fun. I winced. Couldn’t help it. Tried. Failed. I winced, concertinaed into a groaning U shape and winced again, when the back of her head smashed into my chin once more.
My beard didn’t buffer the contact. I saw stars.
Chase let out a pain-laced “Fuck”.
I’ve never heard her swear. Not aloud, at least. Sure, she’d signed profanity at me a few times, but I’ve never heard her curse. For some reason, it made me laugh.
I reached for her, my groin aching, my dick rapidly shrinking in agony-induced retreat, my balls throbbing in both pain and desire, and my chin just throbbing in pain. Before she could fully right herself on the seat beside me, I took her in my arms, grinning, and kissed her.
I wasn’t really thinking. I just did it. The second my lips touched hers I realized what I was doing. We both snapped frozen. And then Chase moved. She let out another sound, infinitely more sexy than that slumberous one she’d made earlier, and she was cupping my face in her hands and kissing me back. A crazy hot kiss that involved tongues touching and teeth clinking. It lasted a lifetime and sent me insane. It was incredible. My cock decided it was over its pain and flooded with eager, happy blood. My heart thumped hard and fast and wild in my chest, my throat, my ears.
And then the kiss was finished. As surprisingly abrupt as it had begun, it was over.
Chase jerked away from me, her eyes wide. Her mouth was open, her lips shiny. My chest tightened. That was my saliva on her lips. Mine. Not anyone else’s. Not Donald the Dude’s. Mine.
Time ceased for a moment, and then I rose to my feet.
We were in the waiting room of an animal hospital. We were sharing the space with pets and their owners, and a receptionist who seemed to look upon Chase as an oddity. As much as I wanted to kiss her again, as much as I wanted to talk to her about the truthfulness of our unexpected kiss, we weren’t alone. This was not the place to continue what was the best moment of my life.
This was the moment to find out about the dog we’d saved.
She watched me stand. Confusion swam in her eyes.
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
With a shake of her head, she jolted to her feet beside me. “I want to know what’s going on too.”
I couldn’t miss the scratchy quality to her voice. Nor the wavery quality to it either. As wrong as it sounds, a part of me was happy she was as affected by the kiss as I was.
Deciding to ignore the contemptuous look on the receptionist’s face, I took Chase’s hand and we walked together around the counter to the door. She didn’t try to squirm her fingers free of mine. Another thing I was happy about.
Actually, ecstatic is probably a better word.
I’d just pushed the door open, the biting smell of animal feces and disinfectant attacking my sinuses instantly, when I heard the receptionist mutter “Deaf freaks”.
Without letting Chase’s hand go, or slowing my pace, I flicked her a smile. “And proud of it.”
The door swung shut behind us before the shock finished forming on her face.
“Proud of what?” Chase asked as we made our way along the corridor toward the surgery.
“How freakishly good-looking I am,” I answered.
She rolled her eyes … and adjusted her fingers so they threaded through mine.
I’m not sure I can adequately describe how amazing the feel of her palm against mine was. It sure as hell affected me as much as her palm against my crotch had earlier. In a whole different way, true, but with the same impact.
I couldn’t have been happier, holding her hand there in one of the least romantic places to hold a girl’s hand.
I grinned.
She smiled back at me. And then wrinkled her nose and sniffed. “Nice smell,” she said with a grimace.
I squeezed her hand a little more. “You get used to it.”
The smell of vet clinics is very distinct. It’s not the same as a hospital smell. At least, not to me. A vet clinic is undercut with the musky odor of animals and all the smells they produce. It’s not essentially a pleasant smell, but one I found great comfort in. I guess it takes a particular kind of person to be a veterinarian, and I was one of them.
What kind of person is that?
My animal ethics lecturer at Melbourne Uni will tell you one of great compassion, patience, empathy and intelligence. She’s adamant a vet is more talented and intelligent than a human doctor because, as she puts it, “a vet can’t just ask their patient were it hurts. They need to figure it out themselves”.
My opinion? A vet is someone who can see the humor in having your arm buried up to the shoulder in a cow’s butt.
Dr. Dean Adams, the vet surgeon, was checking Doofus’s temperature when we entered the recovery ward. Doofus was stretched on his side, the length of his body shaved, wounds stitched in bright yellow medical string, his tongue lolling like a fat pink ribbon from his muzzle.
“102.5,” Dr. Adams noted, tossing the rectal thermometer into a kidney dish. He gave the veterinary nurse a smile. “I’m happy with that.”
He turned to us, his smile widening. “He’s not out of the woods yet, Caden, but he’s heading in the right direction.”
I crossed to the open cage in which Doofus lay, still and sedated. I couldn’t help but give him the once-over. Hey, I’m one year away from being a vet myself, with more intern hours clocked in a clinic than anyone else in my class. Of course I was going to put my soon-to-be doctor’s hat on.
“When can we take him home?”
Chase’s question stroked my tightly wound nerves. Until that point I would have said it was impossible to be a nervous wreck and happy beyond belief all at once.
“Not for a few days, I’m afraid,” Dr. Adams said.
I turned, aware Chase would have difficultly deciphering what seemed to be his natural mumbly intonation. I stopped myself repeating Adams when I found her chewing her lips, watching him. She was agitated, but doing her best to exude an air of calm. I needed to do the same. Giving Doofus’s limp leg one last gentle pat, I moved to Chase’s side and tapped Dr. Adams on his shoulder.
He lifted his head, eyebrows raised.
“Can we take him home soon?” Chase asked. I wondered if the slight change in wording was a subconscious defense mechanism: not repeating herself per se?
Those raised eyebrows dipped a bit and then realization dawned on his face. “Not for at least a week,” he answered a little louder this time.
I wanted to let him know that as long as Chase could see his face, and his voice wasn’t muffled by a hand or pen, or any number of things people seemed to stick near their mouth when talking, he didn’t need to raise his volume. Not in this small area.
Instead, I stood by her side. One thing I’d learned about Chase Sinclair very early in our relationship, she didn’t like people going all “knight in shining armor” on her when someone discovered she had a hearing impairment. I did it once very early on and wouldn’t do it again. Not when there was chance of her catching me, at least.
I suspected I’d very much gone all “knight in shining armor” back on the freeway, with an added bonus of “incredulous anger” and a side-order of “misplaced panic” thrown in for good measure. I really owed her an apology.
“But you can come and visit him daily during his recovery, if you want?” Dr. Adams offered.
> “We’re from San Diego,” I answered, gut clenching at the thought of Doofus not getting any affection during his recovery. “But I can check into a—”
“We’ll be here,” Chase said at the exact same time.
I stopped and gave her a frown. “How are we going to do that?”
Her answering smile was inscrutable. “We will work it out.”
I continued to frown at her. She continued to smile at me. How’s that for a role reversal?
When I turned back to Dr. Adams, he was studying us both over the rim of his glasses. “That’s good. It tears me apart when we’ve got an animal in our care with no one to show it some love during its recovery.”
The feeling was entirely mutual. I’d spent many an hour in Briny Phillips’ clinic back home making sure all the animals received comforting pats and words, but the ones that didn’t have owners, who never saw a familiar face, I paid extra attention to.
“Thank you for saving the big guy today, Caden.” Dr. Adams held out his hand.
I took it and gave it a firm shake. I liked this man. He was down to earth, and clearly as dedicated to animals as I was.
He chuckled. “I’m still not convinced putting your lives at risk was wise, but I am in awe of your compassion and commitment. You’re going to make an amazing veterinarian when you finish your studies. In fact, you already are one now.”
“Thanks,” I said. I’ll admit it, a goofy grin was all over my face.
“And if you ever feel like moving to the States for work,” he continued, “come see me.”
That goofy grin I mentioned? Even goofier now.
“Thanks,” I repeated, a tad lost for words. Sure, I’d already been offered a full-time place at Briny’s clinic, but whoa, talk about an ego rush. If I wasn’t careful, my head would be too big to get through the door.
“You’re welcome.” Dr. Adams turned to Chase. “Get the temp – I’ve forgotten her name – to give you my card on the way out. And make sure she writes your contact numbers down, so I can call you and let you know how … what did you call him?”
“Doofus,” said Chase.
“How Doofus is doing.” With that, he excused himself and left us alone with Doofus.
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