Ask the Vet

I had both arms up to the shoulder inside a heifer when the clinic door banged open. The cow was named Daisy, she was on her second hour of labor, and I was four weeks into the busiest calving season Plains Rest had ever seen, so I did not even look up.

"Whoever you are, grab those gloves on the hook and don't touch anything."

"I'm not here about a cow."

I knew that voice. Tori Garza ran livestock distribution for the whole settlement, which meant she signed off on my feed requisitions and had once told Dustin Bingham, in front of forty people at a town meeting, that his water reclamation numbers were "adorable fiction." She was thirty-two, built like someone who had carried half the settlement's freight on her back, and she did not come to the vet clinic unless something was dying.

"Then what?" I asked, still working. The calf's leg had slipped back and I was trying to hook it forward without tearing anything.

"A friend with benefits arrangement. You ever considered one?"

My hands stopped. Daisy groaned. Somewhere in the kennels a dog started barking at nothing.

"Say again?"

"You heard me. I've been thinking about it for two months. You're competent, you're clean, you're not married, and you don't gossip. That's a short list around here. I'd rather ask you directly than waste a season hoping you notice me at the harvest dance."

I eased the rope around the calf's leg, pulled, and felt it come right. "Hold that thought," I said. "I've got a birth in progress."

So she did. She leaned against the counter, arms crossed, and watched me deliver a forty-pound bull calf while my brain tried to process that the scariest woman in the settlement had just propositioned me over the smell of afterbirth. The calf came out, I rubbed him down with a towel, Daisy licked him and started making that low hungry noise, and Tori said, "Good job," like she was grading me.

"Thanks. So." I peeled my gloves off and turned around. She was still there. "You're serious."

"I don't joke about logistics. It's a simple proposal. No strings, no drama, no one's business. We meet, we enjoy ourselves, we go home. If it stops working, we stop. And it's separate from work. Your feed requisitions get signed the same whatever you answer, and they keep getting signed if we stop. Do you want to think about it?"

"Yes," I said, and my voice cracked on the one syllable, which was humiliating.

"Take a week." She pushed off the counter. "The calf's fine, by the way. You did that part well."

Then she was gone and I was standing in a clinic that smelled like iodine and feed grain, holding a bloody glove, wondering what just happened.

* * *

Here is what you should know about me, so the rest makes sense. Sean Hawkins, twenty-eight, the only vet in a settlement of about four hundred people. I came here at twenty-four with a duffel bag and a license and a brief thing with a trader named Olathe who passed through twice a year. When she moved her route north she kissed me goodbye and told me I was sweet and it was finished. Since then, mostly animals and paperwork. I'm not bad looking, I don't think. I'm just quiet, and quiet gets mistaken for shy, and shy gets mistaken for harmless, and after a while you start believing it.

I spent that whole week being an idiot about it. I said hello to her at the well and managed about four words. I saw her at the mess hall and sat somewhere else. Janice Clements, who runs supply and misses nothing, asked me twice if I was sick. By Friday I had written the arrangement off as a joke, or a test, or something Tori did to amuse herself between supply runs.

Saturday morning I was in the distribution yard checking a shipment of goats, because I always do the health checks before they go out to the outlying farms. Tori was there with her chalkboard and her clipboard, and her hair was tied back and she was arguing with a farmer about feed allotments, and I stood there like a fool for ten minutes before I got in line and waited my turn.

"Goats are fine," she said when I came up. "Anything else?"

"Yes. About last week. I'll do it. The arrangement."

She looked up from her clipboard. "Okay."

"But I want terms," I said, and my voice held this time. "Ground rules. Nobody sleeps over. We go to your quarters or mine, whichever, and whoever's place it is gets it back to themselves afterward. No jealousy. If either of us wants out, we say so and that's it, no sulking. And nobody tells Janice."

That got a laugh out of her, short and real. "Janice would have it painted on the water tower by noon. Fine. All agreed." She wrote something on her board, I don't know what. "Come by the town hall Tuesday after the schedule's chalked. Around eight. Condoms are on you, I've got supplies but not those."

"Right. Sure. Tuesday."

"Sean." She paused, chalk in hand. "You can still back out. I'd rather you say no now than go weird on me halfway through."

"I won't go weird."

I meant that promise. Broke it, sort of, later. Anyway.

* * *

Tuesday I closed the clinic at six, went back to my room above it, and changed shirts three times, which I am not proud of. At seven fifty I was standing outside the old town hall with a paper bag of condoms and my heart doing something undignified. Her quarters were in the back, a converted records office with a cot, a stove, and distribution schedules chalked on salvaged whiteboards pushed against one wall.

"Door's unlocked," she called when I knocked. She was sitting on the cot in a flannel shirt and jeans, boots off, hair down. "You changed shirts. Good. The vet coat was a bit much even for me."

"I don't wear the coat after hours."

"You wore it Saturday. I saw you at the goat pen."

I put the paper bag on her desk like it was evidence. She laughed again. Then she stood up and crossed the small room, and I forgot every word I own.

"So," she said, close enough that I could feel the warmth off her. "How do you want to start? You can kiss me, if you want. That's an invitation, in case the directness of my life has not made it obvious."

"I want to." My voice was steady enough. I kissed her, and she kissed back like she did everything else, firm and sure and no wasted motion, and after a while her hands were on my belt and I said, "Wait."

She stopped instantly. Stepped back a half step. "Limits?"

"No, no limits. Just. Give me a second, my hands aren't cooperating."

And that is when she saw it. I was fumbling with the top button of her shirt, and my hands were shaking. Not a little. A lot. She caught my wrists, not rough, just stopping me, and looked at my face.

"Sean. Sit down."

"I'm fine, it's just..."

"You're twenty-eight, you've done this before, I know that much about you. So why are your hands going like that?"

"It's you," I said, which came out wrong, and then I made it worse. "I mean, everyone knows you. Everyone respects you. And I'm the guy people bring their sick chickens to. And I keep waiting for you to say something like you said to Dustin about his numbers."

She sat down next to me on the cot. She did not let go of my wrist.

"First, what I said to Dustin was about his numbers and he knows it. Second, I asked you here because I watched you work a case at the Hendersons' place in March. Their kid's goat had gotten into the antifreeze. You stayed four hours on a work night and never once made them feel stupid. That is the man I want in my bed, not the coat." She tipped her head. "Also I don't grade people. I grade shipments."

I laughed, and the shaking mostly stopped.

"Better?" she asked.

"Better."

"So here's what we'll do. You undress me. Slow, doesn't matter, we've got all night. If your hands shake again, I'll hold them until they don't. Deal?"

"Deal."

She stood and let me take the shirt off her, and this time my hands only shook a little, and she was right, it didn't matter. She had an old scar across her ribs from a fence wire and I ran my thumb over it and asked about it and she told me a story about a mule named Otis that I did not fully believe. Then it was my turn, and I got my own shirt off over my head, and she looked me over with the same unhurried attention she gave a shipment manifest, which sounds unflattering and was not, not even slightly.

"Good," she said, simple as that, and pulled me back down onto the cot.

She reached past me to the wall, where a hand crank fed the little battery pack that ran her lamp. The arrays up on the hill stored what they stored, and after the failure two winters back nobody trusted the grid line from the dam, so light was rationed like everything else. She gave the crank three hard turns, and the bulb came up dim and amber. "That's all we get," she said. "Storage drops after ten whether you're finished or not."

"Then we'd better not waste any," I said, and surprised myself by sounding like someone who meant it.

I got her jeans off, and then her underwear, and she was bare in the amber light with the scar on her ribs and her chest rising faster than her face let on. Her nipples were dark and already hard, and when I put my mouth on one she made a short sound and pushed into it, her hand coming up to hold the back of my head. I used my tongue and then my teeth, barely, and she said "harder," so I did, and her hips came off the cot. I worked my way down her stomach, over the fence-wire scar, and she spread her legs for me without any ceremony at all, which was the most honest thing I had ever seen a person do.

Her pussy was wet before I even got there. I ran my fingers through her and she was slick and hot, and when I found her clit she said, "There. Stay there. Circles, not flicks." I did what she told me, slow circles with two fingers pressing under it, and she talked me through it the way she talked everybody through everything, exact and unembarrassed. "Faster. Good. Now inside me, keep the thumb working." I slid two fingers into her and she was tight and gripping and so wet I could hear it, and she braced her heels on the cot and moved against my hand like she was running a drill she had designed herself. When she came it was quiet, a long low sound in her throat and her hand clamped on my wrist, and then she laughed once, breathless. "All right. All right. Condom, now, before I get greedy."

I put it on while she watched, and she reached out and stroked my cock once, twice, base to head, checking me like she checked everything, and I nearly came from that alone. "In," she said, and I got between her legs and pushed in slow, and she was so hot around me that my whole mind went white for a second. She hooked her ankles behind my back and set the pace herself, hips rising to meet me, and I fucked her the way she wanted, hard and steady, her nipples brushing my chest with every stroke. The lamp flickered once, the storage dipping, and neither of us stopped. She got a hand between us and worked her own clit while I moved, and watching her do that, watching her take what she needed while I was inside her, finished every