7. Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven
“And that,” Hope said, “is that!” She patted her client on his rump. “You’re the bestest boy. The bestest bestest boy. Yes, you’re such a good boy. The goodest goodest boy!”
Steve, the greyhound, licked his nose anxiously. Then, tentatively, he took the treat from her outstretched hand.
“Who’s the handsomest guy?” crooned Cara, the vet nurse, in her warm East London accent. She petted Steve’s nose, letting him lick her palm. “Who’s the best looking dude in the whole world? The handsomest guy ever?”
“Honestly,” came a slightly weak voice from the centre of the room. “I’m not sure I even know anymore. ”
Hope and Cara looked up from their cuddle puddle on the floor. Steve was curled in Cara’s arms and Hope had his face resting in both her hands. His owner was a well-built twenty-something guy in tradie fluoros, a look of disbelief in his eyes at his dog draped with cooing women. Hope coughed at him before he also started to drool. Cara was a bit of a knockout, with gleaming brown skin, huge dark eyes and her hair worn natural, all offset by her hot pink scrubs. The owner looked positively dizzy as he watched the two of them fussing. Down boy, Hope thought internally, trying not to laugh.
Reluctantly she got off the floor and Steve gave a tragic whimper as Cara tenderly fitted his bucket collar to stop him gnawing at his now bandaged sutures, quietly murmuring more sweet nothings into his wiry ears while Hope gave the man clear instructions for his dog’s wound care.
“No bunny chasing,” she warned Steve by way of farewell as he mournfully trailed out of the room behind his owner.
“Greyhounds are always so emo.” Cara smiled, as she watched the pair reluctantly disappear.
“I think his owner wanted the same treatment.” Hope couldn’t help her eye-roll as she put her suture materials in the tray for autoclaving.
“Can you imagine?” Cara cackled. She mimed reaching up to a man’s head height. “Who’s the bestest boy?” she cooed. “Who’s a good good boy? Do you think I should try it on my next date? ”
“Please do.” Hope caught the giggles.
It had been a long day - a typical Friday - everyone rushing to get their pets seen to last minute before the weekend came. Hope employed three other vets, and four other vet nurses. Between the whole gang they managed to cover after hours emergencies, but she was deeply mindful of keeping her staff rested and cared for. She’d finally employed a part-time office manager in the last six months, realising she was running herself ragged trying to keep on top of payroll, rostering and taxes and every other part of running a small business on top of caring for the full gamut of clients Gold Hill saw.
She was also just plain sleep-deprived because after getting home from her date/non-date with Alison the night before, she’d laid awake for far too long, staring up at the ceiling and imagining what could have been, before carefully putting to bed her desire for the beautiful but clearly unavailable woman.
Hope was a woman of her word. She could be friends with someone who was intensely fuckable without fucking it up by refusing to hear what Alison had clearly articulated. She’d eventually be able to switch it all off, and focus on Alison’s other intriguing qualities, like her hard-won resilience and her spiky comebacks. She’d direct her more… intimate energies elsewhere, and in no time at all, Alison would just be another friend.
“Oh please, like that ever goes well,” Prisha told her when Hope met her for a coffee after work. Prisha was one of the local GPs and they traded stories of their unruly clients and interesting presentations on an almost daily basis. Sometimes Prisha claimed she’d wished she’d done veterinary school instead of human medicine, but the second Hope told her she’d performed a euthanasia on someone’s pet dog or cat Prisha would well up with tears and beg her to tell her a happy story.
“What do you mean?” Hope was genuinely surprised at Prisha’s lack of support for her newly developing friendship with the most interesting woman on the planet. “I think you’re hot and we’re good friends.”
“Yes,” agreed Prisha, “but it’s not that straightforward for every situation, you sweet sweet thing,” she declared, reaching out to touch Hope’s nose with her fingertip. “It’s different when you’re attracted to someone you’re friends with and you start to catch feelings. Trying desperately just to be their friend is the worst feeling ever . Like you’re just pretending every second of every single day that you’re not dying inside. ” At Hope’s startled look she quickly added, “like Flynn and Magnus, I mean.”
“Right.” Hope winced. Flynn had been in love with Magnus basically since the day Magnus had started to transition, but he was still wracked with guilt for having never seen Magnus that way before. The two had been friends since primary school and Flynn flat out refused to even consider risking their friendship, despite the desperate hearts in his eyes. Sweet, dreamy Magnus remained utterly clueless and the rest of the friendship group could only watch Flynn listlessly date every guy under the sun except the one boy he truly loved.
“You see my point,” Prisha said heavily .
“I mean that’s different,” Hope pointed out. “Flynn and Magnus are beautiful star-crossed lovers; two cursed princes who’ve been destined for one another since before the universe existed.”
“Good point.” Prisha took a sip of her coffee.
“Alison is just… hot,” Hope said simply. “And beautiful, of course. God, older women just do something to me,” she sighed, tipping her head back to the ceiling. “She’s just… intriguing and incredibly annoying and prickly and perfect. She also smells way too good.” The sentence ended in a held-back half-moan as she recalled Alison’s proximity as they’d said goodbye. “ But, ” she blinked and raised her finger to make her point, “I’m really good at being a good friend. So I’ll find someone else who wants to fuck me and I’ll be the good friend she clearly needs.”
“Sounds great,” Prisha said, with a clear lack of confidence. “Hey, quick question: do you think we’re all doomed to die alone and unloved? Like literally every single one of us?”
“Preesh.” Hope slung her arm around her friend’s shoulders. “God, you’re the best. I fucking love you.”
“Yeah. I know.”
That evening Hope stayed in, cooking a meal for one and enjoying the solitude. She’d never expected that moving from the big smoke to a mere dot on the map would be the thing that brought her so much community or the kinds of friendships she’d only dreamed about.
So much had changed in two years. When her life in Sydney had slowly dissolved, she’d been gripped with panic. She’d been on the cusp of turning thirty with nothing to show for it; none of her life looked the way she’d wanted it to. Even veterinary medicine - her hard-won dream of a career - felt more like a nightmare. She’d been another cog in the wheel at a large urban practice, slowly ground down by the relentless and casual cruelty of humans towards helpless creatures, or their intense expectations that she could fix everything , preferably without charging them much, or risk their wrath.
When the rest of her life had truly imploded, she’d taken a leave of absence and gone to visit her parents in Ballarat. It had been an odd place for her parents to wind up, but Sydney’s ferocious housing market had proven too much for two modest humans who simply wanted the quiet life. Ballarat was a regional Victorian town where her parents could afford to think about retirement one day, where despite the terrible weather they were already able to spend more time pottering in the garden, rather than working themselves to the bone and barely covering their mortgage.
It had been an interesting reset. Being a vet wasn’t terribly paid, but it wasn’t remotely a buy-a-house-in-Sydney kind of income, particularly not with her student loan or the fact that she’d suddenly found herself solidly single. Hope had looked around at her parents’ quiet life - while she enjoyed the simple pleasures of being loved well by two kind humans - and made an abrupt decision .
She started putting out feelers, hoping for a job to pop up that would make executing that decision clearer. When she discovered that the veterinary practice in a tiny town less than an hour from Ballarat was up for lease, she fell into a tailspin. It was the kind of highly functional tailspin that Hope excelled at, including an intense amount of admin, strategic planning, hard work, quick talking and a wild leap of faith head-first off a cliff. She’d executed an impressive mid-air somersault and landed on both feet. Here she now stood, out the other side, with both her own thriving business and an entire lifestyle shift she adored.
Flynn had come first. A lanky, handsome ginger who was extremely easy on the eye. He’d been casually dating Bevan, one of the other vets in the practice, and he and Hope had gotten chatting a couple of months after her arrival in town, just as she was finally lifting her head and taking a deep breath in. He’d whisked her out one evening, when Bevan was being sulky, and taken her to the pub to meet his friends. On laying eyes on him with Magnus, Prisha and Camille, Hope still swore she’d experienced love at first sight.
They’d all clicked into place and now Hope couldn’t imagine being without a single one of them. It was all just so… easy when they were together. Even the melancholy that floated between Flynn and Magnus only seemed to enhance the pleasant buzz of warmth that was their tight-knit friendship group. It was love, all of it, and honestly Hope wanted to write songs about it. The fact that friendship love was supposed to be the poor cousin of romantic love made her aggravated. As far as she believed in soulmates, Hope was certain she was lucky enough to have four of them. The security she felt when they were all in one room - especially after all she’d been through in Sydney - made her feel like the luckiest girl on earth .
Jesus christ, they could get in each other’s pockets though. Between evenings at the pub together, her and Prisha’s almost daily coffee catch-ups, Flynn’s bi-weekly need to all but sob out his romantic longing against her shoulder, and what she and Camille affectionately referred to as their date night every week, Hope did not get a lot of downtime. She was what she thought of as an extroverted introvert. She loved her friends, got high on their energy, but if she didn’t get time to decompress she could crumble from exhaustion.
Tonight, then, was delicious. Hope cooked a risotto while listening to a pop culture podcast, then put her feet up as she ate it on the couch with a romance novel. She took a long luxurious bath and gazed up at her rented ceiling, imagining when the practice got to the point that one day, maybe her landlord would let her buy this little slice of heaven perched halfway up the hill above Gold Hill.
Dressed in her pyjamas, she wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and went to sit out on her tiny front porch, hot chocolate in hand and gazed out at the small scattering of lights glowing from the town. She knew, with absolute certainty, that life couldn’t be happier.