Page 43 of Spiced!

I was smiling back. And then I was laughing, too.

Something about his smile and his laugh and his eyes, in this light, at this hour, landed differently than it had across a dark bar from forty feet away. They had more power, more pull. They had more, I don’t know, everything.

I looked at my Fanta, desperate for salvation from his gravitational pull.

“Tell me about the tapir,” I said, swallowing my sudden . . . whatever.

His grin smoothed as he slipped into vet mode. “You want to hear about the tapir?”

“You mentioned a complicated zoo consult. I want to hear about it. Besides, I don’t even know what a tapir is. It sounds like a gut problem Mofongo might get.”

And there was that laugh again, unguarded and full and bouncing off the bar’s exposed brick walls like happy little gremlins who’d avoided the microwave.

“That’s a tape worm. Not the same thing.”

I shrugged and tried not to melt at the sound of his mirth.

He considered for a moment, then he told me. It wasn’t a full clinical rundown or anything, just the shape of the thing. Marisol was eleven years old and offered a presentation that didn’t fit any obvious answers. Imaging told a layered story Brendan was still working through. He talked about it the way he talked about things when he wasn’t explaining them to anyone, just thinking aloud. His hands moved more than they usually did, and he stopped twice to reconsider details, then came back to them from different angles. He was, I realized, genuinely inside the problem. Watching him work through an unsolved mystery was fascinating in ways I hadn’t expected.

He finished talking, and I was quiet for a long moment.

I took a sip of Fanta. He took a sip of whiskey.

“Is she scared?” I asked suddenly, startling us both.

His eyes narrowed, brows knitted, then everything smoothed. “The tapir?”

“Yeah. I mean, when something’s wrong and a patient doesn’t understand why, isn’t that scary? It would be for a person. Don’t you think animals know when something’s off even if they can’t voice what it is?” I spun my Fanta can so the label faced me. Then, for no reason, spun it back toward Brendan. In a smaller voice, I asked again, “Do you think she’s scared?”

He thought a moment, actually thought about it. He didn’t toss me some reflexive reassurance or bullshit answer he might use to placate someone else. Finally, he said, “Probably. She’s been quieter than usual, less interested in the things she normally likes.”

“How do vets comfort patients like that? Is there something special you feed them? Some kind of treats? Do nurses—or whatever you call them with animals—sit with them and talk to them? I heard there’s a spray to calm dogs when they’re afraid of storms. Would something like that help a tapir? Is there some technique that’s unique or special for patients like this?”

I didn’t know why I was asking all this. It just came out in a jumbled flurry of words. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t even know what a tapir looked like, and yet, in my mind’s eye, I could see a poor animal in a metal cage, utterly confused and feeling unwell, and seriously, sadly, terrified.

The thing about a cage is that nobody explains it to you.

You just wake up in one.

I did not say this out loud, because it was a first date, technically, and “let me tell you about the nature of confinement” is not in anyone’s top ten opening moves, but I thought it. Spinning a Fanta can I wasn’t drinking, some back room of my brain that I kept locked for a reason quietly begged to be opened.

Because that was the part that really got me.

Not the being-sick part.

The nobody-explains-it part.

The waking up somewhere new, with people talking just outside the bars in a language you don’t understand, deciding things about you that you can’t argue because no one asked.

Animals don’t get a heads-up.

No “This is temporary,” no “This is for the best,” no “You’ll understand when you’re older”—which, for the record, is the single most useless sentence adults have ever invented, right behind “We’ll see.”

I knew, distantly, that I was no longer entirely discussing the tapir.

I also knew this was a wildly inappropriate amount of feeling to have in a Speedo while seated in a gay sports bar.

So I did what I do.