Page 3 of I Will Always Love You (Maybe)

Kona probably thinks she’s going to play or maybe get a treat. Sure, she’s a little agitated being in this place with all the animal smells and new people, but an outsider would hardly be able to tell. I bring her with me almost everywhere, and she’s acclimated to most places.

Routine surgery.

So I wait. One hour turns into two. My butt gets sore on the hard wooden bench. I read the back of every single product label on their shelf, I pace, I sit. For ten, maybe twenty minutes, I stare out the window at the soft dusting of snow, and feel the minutes click by like someone is strangling a noose on me, notch by notch. Everything in me is screaming when I step outside to pull in some cold, fresh air before coming back to start my pacing and sitting routine again.

Two and a half hours in, the anxiety has set in to the deepest part of my bones, it’s in my core, and I’m going to puke. Something is very, very wrong. My heartbeat is pounding so hard that I can’t hear the animals or any voices over it.

When a clinic staff comes from the back room and whispers to Josie, taking a hard glance at me, the world stops moving. I leap from my seat and bolt to the counter. I know exactly what they are going to say, and God help me, I don’t think I can handle it.

TWO

JOSIE

I kind of hate myself for pretending that I didn’t remember Colby from the moment she walked into our vet clinic a few hours ago. Now it’s going to be weird, and I’ll feel all unsettled and jittery for the rest of the day. Which, honestly, is a state I’m pretty used to.

What I should have said was that I’d actually thought of Colby more than a few times this last year after we’d met, and idly wondered if I’d run into her again. However—as to not be that freaky sort of intense person that I’ve been accused of being in the past—I’d withhold that I walked down that same sidewalk several times a week for a month or so, just to see if I’d bump into her.

Besides not wanting to come off like a stalker, I know exactly why I didn’t say anything to Colby. And right now, I’m not trying to think about those reasons. I’ve spent the last year burying those thoughts and the last thing I want to do is dredge up the past and mess with my current inner harmony.

This town is not that big, and a woman like Colby is extremely hard to forget. She has this incredible chestnut brown hair, so thick that I wonder if it gives her headaches being tied into that ponytail. And she has these eyes… huge, beautiful, amber brown eyes, accented by the type of deep black eyelashes that companies would pay good money to replicate. The type of eyes that feel like she’s allowing you a glimpse into her soul, set perfectly on a heart-shaped face.

But way more than her obvious beauty, Colby carries a sort of introspectiveness, a stillness, that’s rare and hard to explain. I picked up on it immediately when I met her last year and I saw it again today. It’s like she’s observing everything first, and she thinks, thoughtfully, before she speaks. Maybe I noticed it because it’s so opposite of me—the one who laughs the loudest in the room, the one whose goal in life is to make people around me smile, the one as a child always scolded for being too loud, too obnoxious, too much. I’ve always been just a little too much for everyone, but I don’t know how to be less. Back then, I wanted to dance and sing and audition for Annie. Community theater, drama, debate team… I joined everything in the hopes of being seen. And I’ve been chasing this same urge my entire life.

Whereas Colby seems like the type who’s content to sit in a coffee shop, read a book, and observe quietly in the corner.

However, had I not remembered Colby, I certainly would’ve remembered that dog. I’ve always held a soft spot for goldens, and that Kona girl melted my heart the second I laid eyes on her last year on the sidewalk. Someday when I’m responsible enough, I’m going to adopt one.

At the desk, I check in a pet bunny for stitches, a cat for its wellness check, answer a call about a mobile vet for horse vaccines, and keep my eye on Colby. We’ve had patients sit here before, but never for this particular surgery. Five hours minimum. We’re close to three hours in, and Colby hasn’t even so much as pulled out her phone to doomscroll. I swear I want to introduce her to the magic of TMZ, or Reels. But she goes from pacing, to clasping her fingers behind her neck, to staring out the window, to asking me, yet again, if there are any updates. Every thirty minutes, like clockwork.

And just a few minutes ago, after a vet tech came and whispered about some breakroom drama—there’s a yogurt stealer among us—Colby bolted to the front desk like someone popped off a gunshot. It took a little convincing to assure her that the conversation had nothing to do with Kona.

“Hey, how did the Bikram yoga go today?” Leo, the head receptionist, who also doubles as my cousin and best friend, says next to me as he clicks against the keyboard, responding to emails.

“Ugh,” I say, scanning a vaccination record into the system. “Good until I sweated my damn thong off.”

His nose scrunches and he tosses his blond fringe out of his face. “Gross.”

The first ten minutes of hot yoga were great. My frozen limbs thawed in the studio. I breathed in the warm, humid air, stretched my limbs, attempted—and failed—to meditate. But shortly after, I was panting like a dog in heat. “Why did I think doing exercise in one-hundred-and-five-degree heat was a good thing?”

“Why do you think any of your ideas are a good thing?” he asks with a horrible, awful sparkle in his blue eyes.

Whatever. “Not all my ideas are bad.”

“Fair. I did like when you took that Moroccan cooking class and brought me that tagine stuff. That shit was delicious.” He reaches over me for the stapler. “But besides that, not sure your track record for ideas is batting you a thousand.”

“Don’t be a dick,” I say with a scowl. “Besides, I don’t get that reference because I don’t watch basketball.”

He rightfully groans at my terrible joke. Leo’s not trying to be a jerk. But he’s also not wrong. In fact, he’s probably trying to help me not spend money on frivolous stuff. Since moving back to town a year ago, I’ve tried everything to try and discover what fuels me. Cooking classes, online computer programming courses, yoga that made me melt, tennis, tai chi, swimming. I even tried gymnastics, which we will never, ever speak of again because for some reason I assumed my thirty-three-year-old body would still be as agile as when I was twelve, and let me tell you, it’s not.

As if the universe knew it was time to judge me, my phone vibrates with a notification pop-up for drum classes tonight at six. I sigh and swipe the reminder off the screen. One of these days, something will stick. I’m sure of it. The thing that I need, that will make me feel whole, is waiting for me. So far, though, trying to find whatever that may be has been like trying to capture steam in my palm.

But… maybe drumming will be the one.

After Leo rings up a customer for flea medication, he nudges me with his elbow. “There’s no shame in just going home and reading a book.”

“That sounds miserable,” I say. “Who reads?”

He lifts a brow. I chuckle, but I’m not totally kidding. Quiet, calm activities are not my thing. Maybe reading a book while skydiving or cross-country skiing, or anything where I don’t have to be alone in my thoughts, might be something I could give a try.