by Cameron Lowe
Although his back was turned, Nic said mildly, “He doesn’t smoke. And don’t you offer him any either.”
“He’s a big boy,” the woman said, eyeing Malcolm up and down appreciatively. She couldn’t have been much older than they were, if he had to guess, but the pancake makeup made it hard to judge. He had a very hard time not staring down the wide expanse of the vee of her shirt.
Nic turned around. “I said no,” he snapped, real anger in his voice.
“All right, jeez,” the woman said. The hand that wasn’t holding the pipe came up to shake Malcolm’s. “I’m Alicia.”
“Malcolm. Ignore the housewife.”
“It’s cute she’s so protective of you,” Alicia said, grinning.
“You two are funnier than a ruptured hemorrhoid on my butthole,” Nic said, finally coming up with the TV remote. When he fell back onto the loveseat, he squeezed her thigh. “Sorry. But he doesn’t smoke and I don’t want anyone pressuring him into it.”
“I’m a grown man, I can say no to some weed,” Malcolm said.
“Like at Penney Schultz’s party?”
“Oof,” Malcolm said, wincing. “Low blow.”
Nic turned on the TV and flipped it to a movie channel, uncaring what was on. “This asshole,” he said, jerking his thumb at Malcolm, “gets invited to play Truth or Dare. He winds up in a Jacuzzi bare-ass naked holding a teapot wearing only a woman’s dress hat. And no, it wasn’t covering his dong.”
“Had little flowers and everything,” Malcolm said. “Still got a copy of that picture somewhere at my house.”
Alicia burst out laughing. “Okay, okay, no weed for you, I promise. You don’t mind if we…?”
“No, no, go on ahead.”
Nic got up and grabbed his makeshift filter for when he smoked around Malcolm. It didn’t do diddly squat – twice, Malcolm got a contact high from the smoke being blown through the plastic tube and the dryer sheets within – but it made Nic feel like he was being more mindful, and Malcolm played along.
“Blow it out towards the window,” Nic said absently.
She took a long hit, held it, and released it slowly through the filter, aiming it towards the open window. “So Nic tells me you’re new to the city?”
“Yeah. Decided I’d come out here, make my fortune, run the whole place like Scarface.”
She snickered and passed the pipe to Nic. “I hear you, I hear you. What brought you out here?”
“He doesn’t want to talk about that shit,” Nic said.
“Nah, it’s all right.” Malcolm explained about Blair, how she’d cheated on him, but it was okay because it kind of set him free.
“That’s an… interesting way of looking at it. Still, I’m gonna say it for all of womankind out there. She was a skank, and you deserve better.”
“Thanks,” Malcolm said, feeling measuredly better. Probably another contact high. “So, you two are…?”
“What are we, dear?” Alicia asked Nic.
Watching Brendan Fraser throw a chair across a room at a fleeing man, Nic barely heard the question. “Huh?”
“Us. What are we?”
“Oh shit, not this again,” he groaned. “We have some fun, we hang out, and we like knocking our best parts together.”
“Every girl’s dream romance,” Alicia said, smacking his hip, but there was a look of fondness on her face. “So how’s the city treating you?”
That was a good question. If “apathetic” had been in Malcolm’s vocabulary, he would have seized on it. The first day he tried to make the eight forty-five bus, he arrived a half minute too late, sprinting for the stop before the driver took off. The guy had looked Malcolm square in the face, shut the door, and kicked the bus into motion, leaving him behind wheezing for air. Malcolm’s fault? Sure, he could have shown up sooner. But later that day, while he filled out an application in a downtown bookstore, a little kid, no more than seven or eight, darted by, a bottle of soda in hand. He upended it all over Malcolm’s tiny table and shouted, “Oops!” before sprinting off again, cackling wildly. The poster child for birth control left him sticky, angry, and when he tried to find the same manager who just gave him the application, a bored clerk told him the guy had gone home for the day. If ever there was a sign that this wasn’t going to work out, it was flashing now in bright neon pink letters.
“It’s… fine,” he said, his smile only a little forced.
“Aw, that bad?” Alicia asked.
“It’s pretty bad,” Malcolm confirmed. “But it’ll be better when I find a job.”
“Why not just work with Nic?”
Malcolm’s roommate snapped a glare at her. “No.”
“It was a joke.”
“It’s not funny.”
As though Malcolm wasn’t there, Alicia asked, “Does he even know…?”
“Some of it, probably,” Nic said. Malcolm knew he dealt weed. That much was pretty obvious. He was beginning to suspect there was more to it, though he didn’t want to ask questions and Nic wouldn’t tell him anyways.
Alicia favored Malcolm with a bland, bleary smile. “Well, I’ll keep my eyes peeled for jobs for you, hon. Stop hogging it,” she said, elbowing Nic.
“Yeah, sorry.”
After she took another deep hit, Alicia studied Malcolm, still holding the smoke in. “Well,” she said, breathing the word out along with a plume of smoke before hastily bringing the filter back to her lips, “it’s not permanent, but I got a way you can make thirty bucks. Both of you.”
“If it means selling our bodies, I gotta warn you, I want a lot more than thirty bucks,” Malcolm said, “and I’m not doing another pony show. The last time left me feeling sore for months.”
Nic groaned, but Alicia laughed. “Oh, I like this one, Nic.”
“What’s the work?” Malcolm asked. “Not anything illegal, right?”
“If you count hauling boxes as illegal, then yeah.” She shrugged. “I got a friend, she’s moving in with her boyfriend, and they’re looking for some extra hands. They pay in cash and pizza.”
“Thirty bucks to move boxes?” Nic asked.
At the same time, Malcolm, who was definitely getting another contact high, said, “Pizza?” They glanced at each other, and Malcolm added, “We’re in.”
Alicia’s eyes crinkled. “I’ll make sure she still needs the help.”
* * *
“Aw, he’s a cutie,” Gwen said, unconsciously echoing her friend across town. She knelt down next to the Pomeranian. All hair and smiles, it panted as it stared up at her. “Is it okay to pet it?”
“Oh yes, Mauler’s the sweetest little boy,” the dog mom said, kneeling too.
“Poor guy.” Gwen reached out, her palm outstretched first so the pup could sniff it before she twisted her hand slowly sideways and stroked his coat. That was a trick Dr. Robertson taught her the first week. It allowed a dog to get used to her, to show it she was no threat. The furry little guy rolled his head back as she found a sweet spot and scratched it.
“Are you new here?” the woman asked. “Haven’t seen you before.”
“Been here about a month or so. Working over the summer,”
“Oh, that’s nice. Are you thinking about becoming a vet after high school?”
Gwen might have laughed if she didn’t get variations on the question a lot. She had one of those young faces, slim and a little pixie-ish. “Oh, when I’m done with college, actually.”
“Oh!” the woman exclaimed. “You can’t be a day over fifteen.”
“Thanks, but about five years north of that.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. But thank you, and yes, I’m hoping to become a vet. I just got my associate’s degree in vet technology, and I’m hoping to go back and start towards my bachelor’s.”
“Well, good for you!” the woman said, still sounding as though she were praising a child, emphasizing the you.
Gwen escorted her to a chair, where the woman picked up her p
up and held him on her lap like a child, stroking his chest with one manicured finger. It was kind of cute, actually, and Gwen fought back the urge as she did with every dog that came through there to call up Calvin and tell him they were getting a puppy. Instead, she settled behind the desk and logged in Mauler’s information, double checking to make sure he wasn’t on any special medications. It wasn’t too long before Dr. Robertson opened up the door to one of the clinic’s exam rooms and stepped out, talking and smiling to an older woman with a monstrously huge tabby in a pet carrier.
“Genie will get you set up with a bag of our healthier cat food. Remember, just half of what she’s been eating, and let’s see how she does.”
Gwen gritted her teeth at the wrong name. She’d already corrected Dr. Robertson three times since starting there, but still he called her Genie. Only sixty, he looked two decades older. Two packs a day and an ex-wife who hung around constantly to needle him did that to a person. Robertson wasn’t so much walking towards old age as diving headfirst into it, a gleeful grin on his face.
“Let’s set you up,” she said to the cat lady, as Dr. Robertson ushered the Pomeranian and its owner back towards the same clinic room. They ran through payment options, and after Gwen added in the bag of cat food, she helped the woman out, lugging the heavy bag with awkward sidesteps until they reached the woman’s Cadillac. Between muscling down playful Labradors and carting animal food around, Gwen figured she’d soon be able to pop a bottle of beer open with her biceps, so that was a plus.
While loading up the bag into the trunk, a familiar Maxima pulled into the lot and parked nearby. Perfect timing. She needed something cheerful in her life. “Hey baby!” she called over to Calvin. “Give me just one second.”
The cat lady shut her trunk, and after shaking her hand, Gwen headed for Calvin. Raced for him, actually, throwing her arms around his neck and laying a kiss on him hard enough to nearly knock him over.
“Not that I’m complaining, but what’s that about?” he asked.
“Ah, nothing. Just been so moody lately. You came at just the right time. Been needing you.”
“Oh?” Calvin asked, his eyebrows rising. “We could sneak out of here, maybe run around the corner. It’s mostly out of sight.”
“Har har,” Gwen said, and kissed him again. “Come on inside and talk to me. Dr. Robertson won’t mind.”
“Ah, good, because I brought lunch.”
“Ooh ooh ooh, what’d you bring, what’d you bring?” she asked, grabbing his arm.
He laughed and opened the back door. “Shrimp po’ boys from Coleman’s.”
Gwen’s heart sank. Calvin didn’t remember she didn’t like shrimp. A bad batch at a restaurant as a teenager left her unable to stomach them. She’d told him that story at least three times. It was okay, she told herself. This was a nice gesture. When he turned back around, bag in hand, her smile was back in place.
“Awesome, we can eat in the waiting room.”
The whole building had once been a small motel, retrofitted to suit the clinic’s needs. The reception area hadn’t changed much in that time, and Robertson and the other vet he partnered with even kept some of the plush, bland furniture from the previous owners. They took up residence in a pair of armchairs, and once Gwen cleared the table, they settled in to eat, leaning over their sandwiches so as to not spill anything.
Thankfully, the po’ boys were stuffed with a spicy sausage too, and Gwen could pick through the meat, nudging aside the shrimp and hoping Calvin didn’t notice. He was oblivious, and they kept up a staccato conversation about a half dozen things the way couples do.
“Juliet called, she wants to do a girls’ night, go watch a movie…”
“Oh, we meant to go see Boat Trip, remember? Crap, I bet it’s out of theaters by now.”
“Yeah, I bet so. Think we should invite her and Peter over sometime? Should we have a dinner party? Are we the couple that does dinner parties now?”
“We’re twenty, not sixty, Gwen. I think we still call them just parties.”
“Good point. Oooh, we should have-”
“I forgot,” Calvin said flatly, cutting her off. He was staring at her sandwich. “How did I forget? And why didn’t you remind me?”
“Remind you about what?” Gwen asked, the floor beneath her mental feet dropping open. No, no, no, she didn’t want to do this now. Not at work. She’d been having such a good day.
“You know what I’m…” He shoved off the chair and grabbed her sandwich. “The shrimp.”
“Calvin, it’s not a big deal,” she protested.
“Isn’t it? You didn’t say a word. Not a single word.”
“It’s a great sandwich-”
“Oh come on,” he snapped. “If you don’t like something I bring you or cook for you or whatever, say something. For God’s sakes, Gwen, as long as we’ve been going out, you’d think you could at least be honest with me.”
“I mean it,” she said, trying on a placating smile. “The sausage and everything else was really good. And hey, more shrimp for you, right? That’s a win-win.”
He studied her, that glow still in his eyes, and finally Calvin nodded. “All right. But if there’s something wrong, speak up. I don’t do passive-aggressive.”
She thought about telling him about the house. About her feelings about him and his parents taking care of her, swaddling her in money and possessions and a place far beyond what they actually needed. A dozen different ways to phrase it ran through her mind and she rejected them one by one. There was just no way to tell him politely she didn’t want somewhere she wasn’t paying for, or at least splitting with him. Still, if ever there had been a time to say something, it was then.
The phone rang. Her thoughts popped like a balloon and the instinctual need to do her job took over. She bounced to her feet and leaned over to kiss Calvin’s cheek. “Be right back. I promise you, I love the sandwich.”
“Well, some of it, anyways,” he said, trying to smile back at her.
“But what I do love is uhhhhhhhhhh-mazing, baby.”
On the phone, a man needed Dr. Robertson to take a look at his dog’s eye after he’d gone after a couple barnyard cats. She watched Calvin as she took down the pertinent information and entered it into the computer, setting up an appointment for the following day. By the time she hung up, Calvin had relaxed again and was picking the shrimp off her sandwich.
“Want to split a Sprite?” she asked, just before the phone rang again. “Ugh, jinxed it.”
It was Alicia, a friend from college and sorta-kinda colleague from a nearby animal shelter. Dr. Robertson often did a lot of pro bono work for the shelter, and jointly ran a spaying and neutering clinic together. Just as Gwen started to chat up her friend, the vet came out of the waiting room with the Pomeranian lady, and stared unamused at the food on the coffee table and his assistant talking away on the phone. She caught his glare and switched course in midsentence.
“So if you want,” Gwen said, “I’ll get you the information for another vet who treats snakes and lizards.”
Some of Dr. Robertson’s displeasure dissolved as he thought she was on with a client, and he nodded firmly. House-pets only, he’d told her the first week, and only things with fur on them.
“The grumpy stegosaurus stomping around?” Alicia asked.
Gwen gave Dr. Robertson what she hoped was a winning smile. “Uh huh. Yes, they’d be able to do it.”
“Great. Well, call me later. I got a couple guys to help out tomorrow with your stuff. I told them you were paying thirty instead of fifty, so don’t say a damn word to them.”
“Okay, great, that sounds like a plan. Thanks, Alicia.” Gwen had no idea why she’d be thanking her friend in the conversation if it was real and hoped Dr. Robertson wouldn’t inquire about it, but he’d already turned to talk to the woman with the dog again, his hand resting high on her arm, squeezing. He was a very touchy-feely sort of dirtbag, and Gwen knew in the pit of her stomach he’d hir
ed her more for her looks than her grades or the interview.
Once she’d hung up, Robertson told her to get the woman a bottle of their small-dog sized antibiotics and to put something on the books for another checkup in two weeks. As she set about that, he walked over to Calvin.
“You her gentleman friend?”
“I’m her boyfriend, yes,” Calvin said, rising up to shake hands.
“Uh huh,” the doctor said, looking down at his hand disdainfully. “Son, if you’re going to come in here for lunch, at least have the good sense to treat her to the Timberwolf, and not this garbage.”
Calvin laughed, but when he saw the doctor was serious, he clammed up. Robertson walked the woman and her dog out, then poked his head back in to tell Gwen he’d be out for lunch for forty-five minutes. She could’ve punched him. The whole reason she was sticking around for lunch was because he told her they had to do pill checks for outdates.
“Oh, I’m gonna strangle him with that stethoscope,” she muttered to Calvin as she rejoined him. “And thank you for saving me from the evil shrimp.”
“My pleasure,” he said, patting his belly.
“That was Alicia, by the way. She said she suckered a couple guys into helping us out. She told them thirty, not fifty.”
“And she’ll pocket the rest. Clever.”
Gwen took a bite and nodded while she chewed. “I just hope…” It came out unintelligible, so she swallowed so she was more understandable. “I just hope it’s not that stoner guy she brought to the barbeque.”
“Oh, what was his name? Rick? No, Nic.”
“That’s it.”
“He wasn’t so bad.”
“Honey, in just five minutes, he was trying to sell you a dime bag.”
Calvin shrugged, grinning. “Gotta respect an entrepreneur.”
Chapter 5