“I think Thompson would enjoy that.”
Caleb was saved from having to engage further when his afternoon dachshund patient showed up. He was pretty grateful for that dog, even though he’d have to now draw enough blood to do a full panel of tests. Drawing blood from a dog was among his least favorite things to do as a vet, and he still preferred it to continuing to let Diane subtly mock him.
“I’ll, uh, just go check on those kittens while I’m back there,” he said as a way to bow out of the conversation.
“Be nice to Lauren next time you see her. She works hard.”
Right. “I’ll try.”
Chapter 15
Lauren realized, as she lay with her limbs tangled with Caleb’s in her own bed, that though she was in one of those relationships—or not—in which she never went to her lover’s place, it was more because of expedience and convenience than anything nefarious on his part.
When she’d first moved to the city, she’d had a roommate who dated a guy who never allowed her at his place. Turned out it was because he had a live-in girlfriend, and Lauren’s roommate was his side piece. Thus Lauren had long been skeptical of guys who didn’t want to take their potential sex partners home. She didn’t even know what block Caleb lived on, but given that they both worked in the same building as Lauren’s apartment, that was likely due to laziness more than malevolence.
He was apparently equally contemplative, because he said, “Have you told your friends about me?”
“I may have said something the first time we slept together, but as far as they know, I hate you again now.”
Caleb murmured something Lauren couldn’t hear, then said, “Do you hate me?”
“Not right now.”
“Is it because of all the orgasms?”
She sighed dramatically. “They certainly help. Anytime you want to win me over, just go down on me like that again.”
“So if I said, ‘Dogs are better than cats’ and ‘One should have red wine with red meat’ and then went down on you, you’d be on board with my platform?”
“I’ll consider the wine thing, but you’re wrong, cats are clearly the superior animal.”
He put his hand on her hip. “Shall I try to persuade you?”
“I won’t stop you from trying.”
He laughed. Then he rested his head on her chest. “I’m not quite recovered from the last bout, but I’ll put it on my to-do list.”
Lauren ran her hand through Caleb’s hair. It was hard to deny this was…nice. More than nice. Being with Caleb made her feel powerful in a way, like she was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen, maybe the sexiest woman in Brooklyn. And now, tangled up with him in bed, she felt content. One could get used to such things.
And under normal circumstances, maybe she’d tell her friends about this, but her friends had few boundaries, and she wasn’t ready to let them in on this yet. Plus, she’d never be able to explain it. How she was sleeping with a man whom, in public, she despised. But the truth was she didn’t despise him so much anymore. Whether that was the endorphins from all the good sex talking or how she genuinely felt, she couldn’t say right then.
And then Molly hopped up on the bed. She gave Caleb a wide berth as she walked around the edge of the mattress and then curled up in a ball near Lauren’s shoulder.
“So you do have a cat. She’s not imaginary.”
“Nope. She doesn’t really like people, especially men, but I guess she’s either decided you are okay or her need to sleep near me has overwhelmed her desire to avoid you. Hard to say.”
Caleb chuckled, then reached across Lauren to hold his hand near Molly. Molly gave him a cursory sniff, then lifted her head to rub against his hand a little, then went back to her ball of sleep. Caleb retracted to his side of the bed.
“I see what you did there,” said Lauren.
“What did I do?”
“You tried to get her to like you. Tested the waters a little.”
“Sure.”
“You do like cats.”
“It’s not that I dislike cats, it’s that I prefer dogs.”
Lauren rolled onto her side, careful not to disturb Molly, and faced Caleb. “I wonder what Molly would do if you brought Hank here.”
Caleb recoiled. “I don’t see that ending well. Molly doesn’t look very big, but I’ve seen tiny cats do a lot of damage.”
“Or they will be fast friends. Molly’s never met a dog, so I don’t know what she would do.” Molly didn’t get along well with other cats, but she might like different animals. “Do you remember, when we were kids, there was a movie with a kitten and a pug who were friends who went on adventures together?”
Caleb narrowed his eyes. “I have no recollection of that.”
“I can’t remember what it was called, but it was really cute. And the whole point of the movie was to show that even a cat and a dog can be friends. Like you and I having a civil conversation right now.”
“When I was a kid, we had a golden retriever named Floyd, who was about the sweetest dog I’ve ever known. We also had a couple of cats who moved into an old barn on my parents’ property. Both cats clearly had it out for poor Floyd. I wanted to bring the cats into the house, but in my one attempt, they tried to claw Floyd’s eyes out. So dogs and cats can be friends, sure, and I’ve seen that in my practice. But not always.”
“Your childhood trauma explains a lot.”
Caleb laughed. “I did build a nice home for the cats in the barn. My family wasn’t really using it for anything except storage, so I cleaned it up and put some pet beds in there and I brought food to them every day. So, see? I’m not evil.”
Lauren shot him a sultry grin and reached over to twirl a lock of his hair. “No, not evil. I think you’re a big softy on the inside. You love all animals, even cats. You’d have to, in order to be a good vet, and the rumor around the café is your patients like you. But don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me.”
“I appreciate that. Although…” Caleb shifted his weight and propped himself up on his elbows. “I’m coming to realize the divorce left me more jaded than I thought. I didn’t used to be as much of a dick as I’ve been lately.”
“Are you…apologizing?” Lauren put some mocking in her voice.
“Shut up. No, not really. Just… If you’d met me a year ago, you might have actually liked me. You’re right, I do love animals. I like taking care of them. I like the puzzle of diagnosing problems. A vet’s knowledge of medicine has to be even broader than a human doctor’s because anatomy varies so much between animals. I also have to have knowledge of what each species or breed’s common issues are. Like, rabbits have sensitive stomachs, bulldogs tend to have respiratory issues, beagles get epilepsy, cats get UTIs. That kind of thing. And I love all that stuff, love studying the whys and hows of it.” Caleb sighed. “I have to remind myself of that sometimes.”
“Why is that?”
“I think I’ve just been going through the motions since the divorce. I have always put distance between myself and my patients to an extent because getting attached just leads to heartbreak. But it’s like there’s a wall between me and the rest of the world. It’s one of my own making, no doubt, but… I guess I didn’t realize how much I was cutting myself off.”
Lauren didn’t want to cheapen the moment by making a joke, because she appreciated that Caleb was sharing this much of himself. She could hear the frustration in his voice. She slid a hand across his chest and gave him a little hug. When he sighed, she kissed him softly.
“What was that for?” he asked.
“Be careful. You start talking about yourself in that way and I may start to like you.”
He lay back down on the back. “You’re a weirdo. I tell you I’ve become a jerk, and you’re like, ‘Mmm, give me more.’”
“No, what I heard you say is you’ve b
een a jerk, but you don’t want to be. You’re being smart and introspective. You went through something really difficult and you’re still dealing with the aftermath, but it sounds to me like you’re coming out the other side. I appreciate your honesty. It’s almost admirable.”
He cracked a smile. “Almost?”
“If I compliment you too much, it will just go to your head.”
He rolled his eyes. “Here I am, sharing with you, pouring my heart out, and you mock me?”
Lauren ran her hand across his strong chest. She kissed his chin. “I’m not mocking you. I’m…providing comic relief after a serious moment.”
“Right, of course,” he said, but he smiled.
Lauren couldn’t help but wonder what he must have been like before the divorce. Had he been happier? Less grouchy? Had he been idealistic, hopeful, nice?
Would she have liked him then?
Probably. A man as sexy as Caleb with a pleasant disposition to match? That sounded like Lauren’s dream man. Of course, he’d been married back then.
And, well, despite his grouchiness, Lauren kinda liked the man he was now. She smiled at him, probably looking silly, but Caleb reached up a hand and ran it through her hair, meeting her gaze and continuing to smile.
If her friends could see the way she and Caleb were grinning at each other now, they wouldn’t believe it. And that was fine; she didn’t need to tell them yet.
***
Hank nearly pulled Caleb’s arm out of the socket as he pulled him down the street. Caleb had decided to go for a long walk to clear his head. In the short time he’d lived in this neighborhood, he hadn’t explored it much, and having Hank lead him around was a decent excuse.
Hank was a huge dog. He was dumb and friendly but still kind of a beast. Labs were sometimes susceptible to obesity, but that wasn’t really the case here. Hank wasn’t fat, just large for a dog, close to a hundred pounds. So he could put some good force on the leash. Caleb worried he’d have little choice in where they went today.
But when they got up to Montague Street in the heart of Brooklyn Heights, Hank seemed more interested in sniffing everything. Montague was bustling at this time of day, people popping in and out of the various businesses and restaurants. It was charming, in a way, the nineteenth-century brownstones juxtaposed with the brightly lit signs of the modern stores that lined the street. The short, narrow streets of Brooklyn Heights almost reminded Caleb of a much smaller town, like a little village tucked into the wider city.
Caleb’s attitude toward New York City since he’d moved here had been “Why not?” It hadn’t been his first choice; he’d mostly just tagged along with Kara. He was still getting his bearings, not used to the tempo or size of the city. Boston had been just as expensive but felt more compact. Here, it could take an hour or more to get to some parts of the city, the subway ran all night, and he could get nearly anything his heart desired delivered almost instantly. He’d picked Brooklyn Heights on the recommendation of a vet school buddy, and it was a very nice neighborhood, but he didn’t know much about it besides that it was expensive and looked to be full of Old Money.
He let Hank lead him toward the end of Montague Street, which Caleb knew must have terminated near the river. He’d been in the neighborhood for such a short amount of time, though, that the sign pointing toward the promenade surprised him. He had a vague understanding of the neighborhood’s geography from looking at maps, but he hadn’t ever walked to this section of it.
This end of Montague was gorgeous. Old brownstones were largely left unchanged by a century of progress. Caleb could easily picture what this neighborhood must have looked like at the end of the nineteenth century, with women bustling about on their errands wearing voluminous skirts instead of jeans, with men in hats and suits instead of T-shirts. This pocket of Brooklyn was out of time, perhaps. And just ahead, Caleb could see a slice of the East River.
“Want to check it out, Hank?”
Hank barked and happily let his tongue loll out of his mouth.
Caleb laughed and said, “All right. Come on, buddy.”
There was a short walkway, and then, suddenly, the scenery stole Caleb’s breath.
The promenade was a long esplanade that overlooked the East River and lower Manhattan. Caleb brought Hank up to the railing and found himself gazing at the skyscrapers of the financial district, One World Trade Center surrounded by dozens of tall buildings Caleb didn’t know the names of. The Brooklyn Bridge spanned the river just ahead, and it was a remarkable sight, that old bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan just as it had for nearly 140 years. To the left, a fair distance away, was the Statue of Liberty, holding her torch up in welcome.
This was the city in all its glory. Caleb had never seen it from an angle like this before. He’d flown into New York a couple of times since moving here, and he always spent the descent gazing out the window and trying to identify the landmarks. There was a lot about this city he still didn’t know yet or hadn’t explored. He’d done a lot of the obvious tourist stuff with Kara when they’d first moved here, but since she’d left, he’d mostly kept to himself, just traveling between his home and his work.
Caleb walked with Hank up the promenade a little. Attached to the railing was a framed photograph of this same view, but before 2001, the Twin Towers still standing. The picture was jarring, upsetting in its way. Caleb didn’t have roots here, had never even been to New York until a few years ago, but he’d met enough New Yorkers through his job to know people did have deep histories and memories. Brooklyn in particular was an odd mix of people who had lived here for years, whose families had been here for generations, and people who had moved here five minutes ago because it was trendy or it was what they could afford. Lauren had told him that she’d originally moved to Brooklyn because she couldn’t afford Manhattan, but parts of Brooklyn were even more expensive than Manhattan now.
Caleb brought Hank over to a bench and they sat so Caleb could people watch for a few minutes. There were joggers, probably passing by for the view. There were people out casually walking. A few office workers eating lunch. A woman he recognized as a barista from the coffee shop near his apartment leaned on the railing and looked at Manhattan.
Caleb couldn’t complain much about gentrification since it got him a nice apartment in an affluent neighborhood, but he’d been reading a lot about how Brooklyn was changing. Whitman Street ran through a part of Brooklyn that was quite gentrified, cute little mom-and-pop shops lining the long boulevard that ran from the East River all the way to Queens. The street changed after it intersected with Flatbush Avenue; the eastern part of it was old warehouses and self-storage places and train yards and housing projects. Of course, in order for this whole swath of Brooklyn to be cute and charming, a lot of people had either been priced out or pushed out of their homes.
He sighed. The promenade overlooked the highway, which added some noise to this otherwise peaceful place, and what Caleb thought must have been Brooklyn Bridge Park nearby. He didn’t much mind the noise; he was willing to overlook that for this view.
So maybe this neighborhood did have some magic to it.
Caleb had thought he’d take a job at a clinic and work there until he figured out what to do next, and part of his plan had been to probably start his own practice, likely in a less expensive city. But working for someone else had its perks. Being able to focus on his patients without fretting about finances was the major advantage. Being part of an established practice and not having to worry about finding new patients was another. He still felt a bit like an outsider in this community, but the longer he worked at the clinic, the more they tried to include him. There was a routine, a rhythm, and he enjoyed having that in his life.
And then there was Lauren. It… It wasn’t a real thing and probably never would be, but having her in his life challenged him in a way, and being with her at night reminded him that he
was still capable of feeling. What would he do when they inevitably ended whatever was happening between them? How would he feel when she began dating someone else?
Best not to think of that right now.
Caleb leaned back on the bench and let the sun bathe him. He felt more like his old self than he had in a while, content instead of tense and angry. Was that this place? Was it because Kara was gone, because he was here, because the pieces of his life were falling into place? He didn’t know and he didn’t want to question it too much.
He looked down at Hank, who was lying on the paving stones, his tongue out, his eyes taking it all in. He looked happy, too. “What do you think, Hank? Should we stay awhile?”
Hank barked, probably at a bird that had landed on the railing, but Caleb took that as a yes.
Chapter 16
Spring felt like it lasted about a day and a half. When Caleb had lived in Boston, the joke was if you didn’t like the weather in Massachusetts, wait five minutes. And that applied here, because after several disgustingly warm days, New York was finally blessed with gorgeous weather.
Caleb left work in the early evening, looking forward to walking home in this weather, maybe grabbing takeout from the Tex-Mex place near his apartment, and just watching TV with Hank.
As he walked outside, so did Lauren.
“You guys closed for the day?” Caleb asked.
“No. Paige is closing today. Diane actually told me I work too much, so she’s forbidden me from staying until close on days when I come in to open.”
Caleb smiled. “Forbidden you, eh? Don’t you close at six? Which is in about ten minutes?”
“Yes, but we’re staying open tonight to host a writers’ group after hours. Paige can handle it. If this goes well, we may start a book club or something next. Diane’s letting me hire a couple of extra people, so if we start staying open later, it’s not an undue burden on the current staff.”
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