Chapter 18
Dean’s never been to an emergency vet before.
Never been to a real vet either. Would have had to keep a pet at some point for that to happen and the closest he’d ever gotten were the fish in the stream behind his house when he was a kid. The ones he’d throw little pieces of bread to when they had enough slices to spare.
A dog or cat was out of the question. He never asked, no matter how badly he wanted to and did he ever want to. He had seen some of the other kids playing with their dogs in the yard from the window of his school bus and wondered what it might be like to have something that loved him unconditionally because that’s what pets were supposed to do. Be loyal, see past his faults, and love him no matter what.
He knew better than to tempt fate, though. It would only take one drunken rage for his father to hurt something he cared about, or for Boone to do the same with a prank or a joke. It was easier in the long run to have one less thing to worry about or get attached to.
Sitting in this waiting room, watching Ava hug her kitten close to her chest, only reminds him how simple it is to fall for these things. She’s tried to keep it at arm’s length. She won’t even name it, and that’s a sure sign that she expects it to disappear one day and break her heart.
If he believed in any sort of God he’d say a prayer. He doesn’t believe in a damn thing, though, so the last thing he does is pray on the off chance there is a deity up there and it hurts that cat just to spite him for daring to try. Thoughts and prayers are useless things.
He fills out the paperwork instead, writing down the answers she gives him so she won’t need to hand over her sneezing, coughing burden to hold a pen or a clipboard. He fills in the box for the animal’s name with Kat, making a joke at his lack of name when there’s nothing funny about this situation.
Ava is surprisingly calm for someone who fell apart back at the house. All frantic words and hectic movement, so unsure of what to do he had to take the cat from her and wrap it in a blanket because she stood there clutching it, unable to do much more than wait for him to take over and make a choice.
Now though, in this cold, sterile room, sitting in these hard, plastic chairs, Ava is quiet and calm with dry eyes and a thousand-yard stare.
“How long do you think it’ll be? Should we ask?” she whispers.
He glances around the room. There are three others ahead of them and he wonders how everyone here had such shit luck at the same time.
The receptionist, friendly but tired, told them to fill out the papers and wait their turn. That the cat wasn’t bad off enough to skip the line and that’s the best news he could have hoped for. He thought the damn thing was two breaths away from dying the way it lay limp in Ava’s arms in the car, but the longer they wait the more they both worry and one thing is for certain, this cat isn’t getting any better, only worse.
“Gonna go check. Hold on.” He heads to the front desk, hoping there’s some way to skip to the front of the pack.
He’s no vet but the other animals in here look less like an emergency than he’d have expected. A dog with a bandage on its paw, another in a chair wagging its tail, and a little cat in a carrier with a nice set of lungs. They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t need care, but the urgency is questionable.
When he reaches the receptionist, she eyes him with a wary stare, likely having taken the brunt of people’s outbursts every day of every shift. He tries hard as he can not to be a complete asshole when he speaks to her. “Any idea how long? Been over an hour.”
She shakes her head, sighing in defeat, the bun she wears toppling over in the process. “I’m sorry no, there’s three ahead of you.”
“Dunno if you go by first come first serve or by need, but I got a cat no bigger than a fat squirrel, and every few seconds it’s hacking up a lung and wheezing and getting more limp and pitiful. Worried it’s suffering. Getting worse.”
None of that is a lie, and it’s not like the woman in front of him doesn’t know the condition of their cat, she does, but maybe an hour’s wait and the possibility of it going even further downhill is enough because she squints at him, tilting her head with a frown.
“You say he’s more limp than before? Having worse trouble breathing?”
Dean nods, eager to see a vet and get help for a problem they weren’t prepared for tonight.
“Okay, lemme see him. I’ll get someone to take a quick look.”
A few seconds later, the kitten disappears into the back room and he and Ava are left alone to suffer harsh glares from others. He doesn’t give a shit though, only grabs two styrofoam cups of coffee from the machine and holds down the chair next to her like it’s his job.
Ava’s arm presses against his while she stares off into space, holding her coffee like a lifeline.
“He’ll be alright,” Dean says softly.
“You don’t know that.” Her voice is cold, like she could be talking to the wall instead of him. “I didn’t even name him. I should have.”
“You still can. He ain’t gone, that cat will be just fine.”
“And if he isn’t?”
“If he isn’t, then we still will be, but don’t get too far ahead yet.”
She looks away, fighting tears until they give up and recede.
They spend another fifteen minutes like anxious parents waiting on news of their sick child. Drinking bitter coffee and holding hands, watching some random cartoon on the TV before they’re finally called back.
* * *
An upper respiratory infection.
A cold.
Her cat has a cold and it could kill him.
Ava still doesn’t understand how something so common could sneak up so quickly and be such a threat, but the vet had been clear that kittens are fragile and these sorts of things can turn south quicker than anyone expects.
She feels guilty for not noticing sooner. She spent the whole day otherwise occupied, not thinking of anything except Dean. The cat seemed fine earlier in the kitchen, a little sleepy maybe, left some food in the dish that morning, but he was purring and happy like nothing was amiss. He certainly didn’t look a few steps away from death’s door.
When she finally walks through her front door with Dean trailing behind her there’s no cat in her arms. It’s only proof she needs to accept that she can’t be trusted to care for something so easily broken. There was a reason she fought so hard to avoid taking one in the first place.
“I should have checked on him more. I can’t believe I didn’t. What’s wrong with me?” she says into the darkness of the living room, not expecting an answer, voice cracking with the weight of her guilt.
“Snuck right up. The vet said it happens. I bet he calls later to go pick him up again. Just for observation, remember?”
The vet had seemed confident that IV fluids, antibiotics, and observation would be all he needed. She wishes she could trust that as easily as Dean does, but everything inside her screams that it’s a lie and this is the start of her worst fear coming true. She was a fool to let herself get attached, even a little bit because look what happens when she opens her heart up and lets anything or anyone in.
“You ah… you want me to go? I can, it’s no big deal. Give you some space if you want it?”
That’s when she realizes she’s been standing in the middle of her living room, lost in her head. He’s unsure of his place here now, as if he could be intruding, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
She doesn’t want to be alone, doesn’t think she could handle the silence and the absence of the warm little body next to her if she goes back to bed. “Stay. Please stay. I don’t think I’m dealing with this very well, but I don’t want you to leave.”
Her response prompts some of his uncertainty to seep away, allowing his expression to fall softer, the worry lines less pronounced. Then he’s on her sofa, kicking off his shoes and putting his feet up on the ottoman, holding out a hand that she hesitates to take. “Come over here.”
Curling up with him sounds like the best plan she could ask for, but all this resolve she’s built might evaporate on contact. She’s sure of it.
Dean wiggles his fingers and she can’t leave him hanging. Reluctantly, she reaches out with a frown, allowing him to pull her down next to him. Her chin wobbles, and her eyes water. It only gets worse when he wraps a loose arm around her shoulders and the safety of his embrace warms her heart.
“It’s just a cat,” she says, trying to convince herself more than him. “I knew this would happen. I knew it. It’s just a cat. It’s fine.”
“It’s not just a cat,” he whispers into her hair, all low, rumbling tones that reach into her soul and smooth out the rough places.
How did she get so lucky to have him with her, especially when she’s been doing a decent job of only opening half of her heart to him? She keeps the other half protected at all costs, fearful of the devastation she’s come to expect whenever she gets too close.
“I thought if I didn’t let him in all the way that it was safer, but look what happened. I got attached even though I tried not to and now he’s…” She trails off, unsure if she’s even talking about the cat anymore. If she were getting some much-needed therapy, her next session would be all about how the cat is a metaphor for Dean or some such nonsense that she has no desire to delve into.
He doesn’t respond, perhaps rethinking all the life choices that led him here, to this sofa with a woman precariously close to sobbing all over his clean shirt.
Then he takes a breath, one big enough that she knows he’s about to say something important and so she doesn’t let him. She’s too afraid to hear it, so she cuts him off, embracing the overwhelming need to share some part of herself, to let him know her.
“I had a cat before I married John. He was brown with stripes and sort of an asshole, grumpy all the time, but I loved him,” she pauses, her words cracking. “He didn’t make it past the first year. Not past the first real argument, when John thought I was cheating on him with someone who smiled at me at the grocery store. I should have known then, should have left him, I almost did. I cried for days over that cat, but I wasn’t strong enough to go. Felt so trapped already, isolated, even that early on. He’d hunt me down if I ever tried. Do to me what he did to my pet.”
Ava wipes at hot tears with the back of her hand, distant memories coming to life again, things she spent so long trying to shove as far back as they would go, hoping time would be kind enough to dull them.
“And then Charlotte came along and even from the start, I was so worried something would happen to her. That he’d get angry and hurt her, even by accident. Be too rough or make a drunken mistake. She was so little and helpless and I couldn’t even protect myself from him. How was I going to protect her? I did though. He never laid a hand on her, not once. But she’s still gone. Just gone.”
“What happened to her wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t.”
She nods half-heartedly against his chest, trying to focus on the feel of Dean running his hand over her arm from shoulder to elbow while telling her encouraging lies.
“Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. So many things could have gone differently that day. If I left with her sooner, she would still be here. If I was brave enough to run, she’d never have been in that car.” She sucks down a shiver of a sob, forcing herself to keep going. “I haven’t even gotten a plant since then. Everything I touch dies. Everything I love leaves. It’s so much easier to have nothing and no one. Safer. I even pushed Lori away as much as I could, but then this cat appeared, and you did. I said I wasn’t afraid of you but I lied. I am, just not in the way you think. You scare me and that’s all me…it’s not anything you’ve done….”
He freezes then, connecting the dots when this all comes back around to him. Understanding, she’s sure, that she’s so fucked up that she can’t have a real relationship without her fear of loss stunting the whole thing.
“Hey.” He’s got one finger under her chin, prompting her to look up and she almost doesn’t because she’s a red, crying mess, puffy and sniffling, but all she sees is understanding looking back at her. No hint of disgust or disinterest. No desire to escape.
He is afraid though. She can see it the way he fights to hold her gaze and not shift his attention away. As hard as this is for her, she has no doubt that his own fears rank just as high.
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m in this one hundred percent. Ain’t got a clue what I’m doing. I’m flying blind, but I’m tryin’ and I’ll keep tryin’ as long as you’ll have me.”
She backs away far enough to see his face and finds sincerity laced into his features. Such a familiar thing by now, something she’s gotten used to seeing in him from the very start when he was shoved into her infirmary and into her life all at once. “I know you are. I already know.”
He isn’t expecting her to say it back, she can already tell. He’ll let this go and spend the rest of the morning quite literally holding her together without ever getting the same reassurance in return. He deserves so much more than he’ll ever ask for and she isn’t about to let him doubt how she feels, not for a second.
She ghosts her fingers down the side of his face and places a soft, tear-stained kiss on his lips, whispering her words into his mouth and feeling the truth in them for the very first time. “Me too. I’m in this one hundred percent.”
Surprise registers on his face, quickly replaced with something that looks like confidence.
“Gotta work today, but I can stay till then,” he says with a hint of regret, like he wants to call in from the job he only recently got back to stay home with her and wait by the phone about their sick cat.
Their cat. It hits her then that she thinks an awful lot in terms of we and us lately. Maybe that’s not a bad thing.
She snuggles up to his chest, her ear over his heart and her hand bracing on his ribs, tears drying on her skin. “Have to name him when he comes home. Something cute, but not too cute.”
“How ‘bout popcorn. Or Oreo….chip….potato chip….tater tot….”
She can’t help but laugh at his monotone suggestions that sound like a grocery list. “Are you hungry?”
“Could go for some of them Oreos.”
“Sorry to disappoint. I did the last line before you came over.”
He sucks some air between his teeth in fake outrage. “Damn. Hey, that cat looks like a skunk. Should name him Pepe.”
“He’s not French, and he’s not a skunk, he looks more like a panda. Oh, Dean, let’s call him Panda. It fits right?”
He hums out a sound of approval, his thumb fluttering back and forth over her upper arm. “Yeah, it fits.”