Leash of a Lifetime

I turned forty-three in March and I didn't do anything about it. Olwen brought a cake to the clinic and the staff sang and I said thank you and went back to draining an abscess on a bulldog. That's been my whole life lately. Animals in, animals out, and me in the middle with a coffee that goes cold before I finish it.

I live alone in a rental house with a fenced yard I never sit in. I have a stack of romance novels on the nightstand that I keep buying and not reading. Eleven of them now. I know because I counted one night when I couldn't sleep. The spines all face the same way. I straighten them more often than I open them.

The thing is, I'm good at my job. I can hold a screaming tomcat with one hand and give instructions with the other. I can talk a panicked owner down from the ceiling. What I can't do is sit across from a man at a restaurant and have it go anywhere. I tried the dating apps for four months two years ago. Every conversation felt like filling out intake forms. Breed, age, temperament, any history of biting. I deleted them and told Olwen I was done and she said okay and then she kept trying anyway, in her way.

Olwen has been my friend since we both started at the clinic ten years ago. She was thirty-one then, recently divorced, and I was thirty-three and already set in my ways. She runs the front desk like a general and she has never once let me eat lunch alone unless I lied about it first.

So that's where I was this past Tuesday. Forty-three, single, never married, surrounded by animals and unread books. It was almost closing time and the waiting room was empty and I was cleaning up after a nail trim on a dog that hated me.

The bell over the door rang.

"I know, we're technically closed in ten minutes, but I've got a situation here."

I came around the corner with the towel still in my hand and stopped.

Finn Raymond. Standing in my waiting room with a cardboard box and a gray cat in it. He was forty-three now, and he looked older in the face but the same in the shoulders. Same way of standing like he was waiting to be told what to do next.

We'd been in the same master's program years ago. I was twenty-three when I first noticed him, in the pathology seminar where we sat two rows apart. He was twenty-three too, or near enough. I never said a word about it to anyone. He finished his degree and moved away and I finished mine and stayed, and that concluded matters for about twenty years.

"Naomi," he said. "You probably don't remember me."

"Finn Raymond," I said, before he even finished. "You sat on the aisle. You borrowed my notes when you had the flu."

He laughed. He still had the same laugh. "Okay, so you remember. That's either good or embarrassing."

"It's good," I said, maybe too fast. I set the towel down and came over and looked in the box. The cat was gray, medium, dirty, one ear crusted. "Where'd you get this?"

"He followed me out of the parking lot at the warehouse. I fed him a tunafish sandwich and he got in my truck. I figured that's a commitment."

I checked the ear, the eyes, felt along the ribs while the cat complained. Ear infection, underweight, otherwise fine. Finn watched my hands the whole time, and I was aware of my hands in a way I hadn't been in years.

"I'll take him back," he said. "Whatever it costs."

"There's not much to take back. Ear drops for two weeks. He needs to gain weight. You could board him here while you're at work, or just come back in and learn to dose him yourself."

"I'll learn. I'm not smart but I can follow instructions."

I heard myself say, "I remember that about you."

He looked at me. I looked at the cat.

Olwen had gone home at five, so I did the treatment myself. I flushed the ear while Finn held the carrier and talked to the cat in a low voice. Then I rang up his bill and gave him the drops and the demo and he paid without arguing, which put the money part to bed early and clean. No favors owed either direction. I noticed I was glad of that, and I didn't look too hard at why.

We were standing by the front desk and he had the receipt in his hand and the carrier on the counter and there was no reason for either of us to still be there.

"Wait," I said. "Stay here. I have to lock up."

He stayed. I turned off the waiting room lights and locked the front door and flipped the sign. Then I stood there in the dark half of the clinic with my heart working harder than it should and made a decision that was not like me at all.

There's a hook by the back door where we hang leashes that owners leave behind. I took one down. It was red, nylon, nothing special. I walked back to him and held it out.

He took it and looked at it and looked at me. "Is this for the cat?"

"No," I said. "It's for you, if you want it."

The clinic has a back room. It's where we keep the laundry and the oxygen cage and, this week, a litter of kittens that were still recovering from being fixed. They were drowsy in their cage, barely moving. Finn followed me in there with the carrier and set it down and stood there holding the leash like it might go off.

"If you want it," I said again. "Or we forget this and you go home with your cat and the drops."

"No," he said. "I don't want to forget it." He wiped his palms on his jeans. "I've been waiting most of my life for somebody to hand me one of those and mean it."

"Then put the carrier down and kneel."

He put the carrier down and knelt. On the tile floor, in his work boots, holding a red leash in both hands like it was the most important thing anyone had ever given him. I took the other end and looked down at him and my hands were steadier than I expected.

"Ground rules," I said. "We stop whenever either of us says stop. You tell me your limits and I believe you. And you pick a word, a real one, that means everything stops even if it's just the talk."

"Okay," he said. "Yes. Okay!"

"Say the word."

He grinned, nervous, and his ears went red. "Catnip."

I laughed before I could stop myself. Not a polite laugh, a real one, and he laughed too, still on his knees, still holding the leash, and something in my chest unclenched for the first time in about a decade.

"Catnip," I said. "Fine. That works."

"It was the first thing I thought of."

"I can tell."

One of the kittens stirred in the cage and made a small noise and we both looked over at it and then back at each other and the moment held anyway, which surprised me. Usually when something interrupts me I lose the thread completely. Usually I'm relieved to lose it.

"Stand up," I said. He stood. I hooked a finger in the leash short of pulling, because I hadn't asked yet and I wasn't going to grab. "I'm not taking you home tonight. I want to be plain about that. This is new and I don't do new."

"That's fine," he said. "I'm not in a hurry. I've waited twenty years, apparently."

"You didn't know you were waiting."

"I didn't know, no. But here we are."

I rolled the leash up around my hand. "Thursday. The diner on Route 9, the one with the jukebox. Seven o'clock. You buy your own dinner, we split nothing, and if it goes badly we both say so and go home."

"And if it goes well?"

"Then you'll find out Thursday."

He picked up the carrier and the bag of drops and I let him out the back door and watched him walk to his truck. The cat was yelling at him the whole way. He got in and sat there a second and then rolled the window down and looked back at me.

"Thursday," he called.

"Thursday," I said.

I locked up and drove home and put the leash on the nightstand next to the unread novels. It didn't match anything on that table and I liked it that way.

Thursday came slow that week. I worked two dentals and a rabies booster and thought about the leash on my nightstand more than I thought about any of it. Olwen noticed something on Wednesday.

"You're humming," she said at the front desk. "You never hum."

"I'm not humming."

"You're absolutely humming. Is it the cat guy?"

"His name is Finn."

"Oh my God, it's the cat guy!" She rang up a client's heartworm test without looking at the screen. "I knew it. I knew the minute you took the carrier from him."

"You were home by then."

"I have my sources." She waved me off. "Go. Do whatever it is you're doing. But if he hurts you I still have Jeff's old baseball bat in my trunk."

Jeff was her ex-husband and the bat was a long story and I didn't ask. I went home and fed my own cat and picked out a shirt like it mattered. It was a diner on Route 9. It didn't matter. I picked one out anyway.

* * *

Finn was already there when I pulled in, sitting in a booth by the window with his forearms on the table. He stood up when he saw me, then sat back down, then stood up again, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi. Sit down."

We ordered coffee and burgers from a waitress who'd worked there since before I left town and back again. The jukebox was playing some old Jonah Strait song and a quarter of the speakers were dead. Finn talked about the warehouse and I talked about the dental I'd done that morning on a pug with an underbite and it was easy, which I hadn't counted on. Easy was not what I did.

Then he set down his burger and said, "Can I ask you something?"

"Ask."

"Tonight. Or is tonight just dinner?"

I put my coffee cup down. "What do you want it to be?"

"I want it to be more. If you do." His ears