Chapter 24
Peter
Icalled Dr. William Broadhurst on Thursday morning.
Bill was the head of veterinary services at ZooTampa and one of the few people in the Tampa Bay veterinary community whose professional opinion I respected without reservation.
We’d worked together on a handful of complex cases over the years, the kind that crossed the boundary between domestic and exotic and required someone willing to think outside the established protocols.
I’d consulted on a spinal injury of the zoo’s clouded leopard two years ago, assisted with a complicated dental extraction on one of the older lions last spring, and spent a memorable fourteen hours in the zoo’s surgical suite helping Bill repair a fractured tibia in a juvenile giraffe named Kito.
“Peter,” Bill said, picking up on the second ring. “Tell me this is a consult. I’ve got a geriatric elephant whose bloodwork is giving me fits.”
“Send me the panels and I’ll look at them, but that’s not why I’m calling.”
“What do you need?”
“A favor. Saturday morning. I’d like to bring someone through the back end.”
Bill was quiet for a beat.
“This is a date,” Bill said.
“This is a request for facility access during non-peak hours.”
“Peter, in four years, you’ve called me about animals—exclusively about animals. Now you’re asking for private time on a Saturday morning. That’s a date.”
“Will you help me or not?”
His warm chuckle drifted through the phone line.
“Are you kidding? I’ll do you one better.
I’ll give you the full backstage pass to the hospital wing and the nutrition kitchen.
I’ll even have Sarah open the giraffe platform early.
Makena’s been hand-feeding well this week, and the manatee rehab team does their morning check at 10:30.
I can get you in for that instead of the public feeding demo.
You’ll be in the water room with the animals, not behind glass. ”
“That would be excellent.”
“I have one condition.”
“What?”
“You bring this person by my office so I can meet him, because whoever convinced Peter Loupier to call me for something other than a leopard’s spine has to be worth meeting.”
“That’s unnecessary.”
“It’s my condition. Take it or leave it.”
“Fine.”
“What time do you want to start?”
“9:30. I need us out by 1:15. He works at four.”
“9:30,” Marcus repeated. I could hear the smile in his voice, not teasing but warm, the smile of a man who had watched me operate for fourteen hours on a giraffe’s leg while my partner was dying, and who was, I suspected, genuinely glad to hear that something in my life had changed.
“9:30, right,” I said. “Thank you, Marcus.”
“Send me those elephant panels before Saturday and we’ll call it even.”
I hung up and sat in the break room and made a list on a Post-it note:
9:30 — Meet Marcus, backstage access
9:45 — Hospital wing and nutrition prep
10:30 — Manatee rehab (in the water room, not public)
11:15 — Giraffe platform (private, before public hours)
11:45 — Africa section, general grounds
12:15 — Lunch (check menu, he doesn’t eat beef on Saturdays—unclear why, possibly superstition, don’t ask)
12:45 — Gift shop (budget: reasonable)
1:15 — Depart (buffer for traffic, needs to be at bar by 4)
I reviewed the list.
I considered, briefly, that this was insane, that a normal person would make dinner reservations and buy flowers and conduct the early stages of a romance through the established channels of candlelight and wine and effortless spontaneity.
Then I considered that Benji had fallen for a man who communicated through refrigerator stationery and owned Milk Duds tongs.
The effortless spontaneity ship had sailed approximately two months ago when I’d handed him a laminated kitten-feeding binder.
I knew, deep in my bones, that the most honest thing I could offer another person was not a performance of normalcy, but the actual shape of who I was: organized, precise, and deeply invested in the veterinary infrastructure of regional zoological facilities.
I folded the list and put it in my wallet.
I told Benji Friday night around 2:45 a.m. A new foster had arrived, a nervous orange tabby named Clementine, and Princess Consuela had identified Benji’s closed door as a personal affront requiring immediate investigation.
“Tomorrow morning,” I said. “I’m taking you somewhere.”
Benji looked up. “Where?”
“You’ll find out when we get there.”
He bolted upright. “Peter Loupier is surprising me?”
“I’m informing you of a scheduled event with an undisclosed location. That’s not a surprise. It’s operational security.”
“That’s a surprise, Peter. You’re surprising me. With a date.” Benji’s grin was possibly the brightest light in the universe. For a brief moment, I worried I might have to look away.
“I’m taking you to a location at a predetermined time for the purpose of a shared experience. If that constitutes a date, then yes.”
“By every objective definition and measure, that constitutes a date. Now, more importantly, what should I wear?”
“Comfortable shoes, something you can walk in.”
Benji waited, blinking his saucer-sized eyes.
I didn’t say more.
“Clothes, Peter. I can’t go wearing only shoes.”
“Oh, right. Wear clothes you don’t mind getting wet. Oh, and you might want to bring some trunks. For swimming. Swim trunks.”
“Swim trunks?”
“There’s a wet component, possibly a getting-into-water one, too.”
“There’s a wet component to our first date?”
I nodded once. “There’s a component that involves proximity to water. The degree of wetness is variable and impossible to predict with any accuracy.”
“You’re a fucking meteorologist.”
“I’m a detailed date planner.”
Benji’s blinking turned rapid and intense. “I have so many follow-up questions.”
“Save them for tomorrow. Be ready to leave at 9 a.m. We’re on a tight schedule.”
“I’m always ready.”
“You have never, in two and a half months of cohabitation, been ready for anything on time. You have a consistent eleven-minute lag between stated readiness and actual departure. I’ve built the eleven minutes into the plan.”
“You’ve timed my lateness? And incorporated that assumption into your first date calculus?”
“I’ve observed a pattern. The observation is now a planning input.”
“This might be the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. Or the least. The jury’s still deliberating.” He hopped up, darted across the room, and planted a peck on my cheek. “I’m going to be ready at 8:59 tomorrow just to destroy your model.”
I grinned. His saucer-eyes were inches from mine. “I welcome the disruption.”
I went to my room and checked the list one more time. I set my alarm for 7:30, which was unnecessary because I always woke at 6:45, but which I set anyway because tomorrow mattered in a way that I wanted to honor with redundant preparation.
Benji was ready at 9:08, which was three minutes ahead of the predicted lag, and which I chose to interpret as effort.
“I’m early,” he said, appearing in the kitchen in jeans and a green T-shirt (right side out, which I noted) and sneakers that had seen better days but qualified as walkable.
“You’re early relative to your historical average. You’re eight minutes late relative to the stated time.”
“You grade on a curve. I’ll take it.”
When we climbed into my truck, Benji examined the cab with the open curiosity of a person cataloguing details.
The dashboard was immaculate, and the emergency veterinary kit behind the seat sat packed and prepared.
There was a small photo clipped to the visor that he leaned forward to look at and then leaned back from without comment, because Benji understood which things to ask about and which things to let exist.
“Can I at least get a hint?” he asked as I pulled onto Bayshore.
“You’ll know when we get there.”
“A cardinal direction. Give me a cardinal direction.”
“North.”
“North. That eliminates the beach, the Keys, and Cuba. We’re in the northern hemisphere of possibilities. Are we going to Canada? That’s a long drive. I should’ve packed at least one change of clothes if we’re going to Canada. Maybe a jacket, too.”
“That’s not how cardinal directions work, and no, we’re not leaving Florida.”
“It’s how my cardinal directions work. North means adventure.”
“We’re here.”
I turned into the parking lot, but instead of pulling into the public entrance, I drove past it to a service road on the east side of the property.
I badged through a gate with an access card Bill had messengered to the clinic the previous afternoon and parked in the staff lot beside the veterinary building.
Benji looked at the staff lot.
He looked at the unmarked building.
Then he looked at the service road.
Finally, he looked at me.
“Peter. Where are we?”
“The back end of ZooTampa.”
“The back end . . . as in, not the front end . . . as in, not where the public goes.”
“I know the head of veterinary services. We’ve worked together on complex cases for the past four years. He’s giving us backstage access this morning so we can have some private time with the animals before public hours start.”
“You have a guy at the zoo.”
“I have a professional colleague at the zoo, yes.”
“You have a guy. You called your zoo guy and arranged a private backstage pass. Peter, my dear Peter—”
“I’ve assisted on surgeries here, mostly on giraffes or big cats. Bill and I have a professional relationship. It made sense to leverage it.”
“You leveraged a professional relationship to take me on a private zoo date.”
“Is that a problem?”
He undid his seat belt, leaned across the center console, and kissed me.
It was quick, firm, and tasted like the caramel creamer he’d used in his coffee that morning.
When he pulled back, his face was doing the thing where every emotion was visible at once, layered on top of each other.
It was a very Benji emotional statement.
“That is the opposite of a problem,” he said. “Let’s go see some animals.”