Shift Change Rules

The generator was already humming when I pushed through the back door of the clinic at eleven, my flashlight in one hand and my keys in my teeth. The whole city was dark. Every streetlight between my place and here had been out, and I'd driven twenty minutes white-knuckling it the whole way, half expecting some idiot in a lifted truck to come through an intersection and end my night early.

"Jo, that you?" Tom's voice came from the treatment area.

"Who else would be walking into a clinic at eleven at night during a blackout, the ghost of Christmas past?"

He laughed from somewhere near the surgery table. I found him by the glow of a single work lamp, already laying out surgery packs, checking instruments like it was just another Tuesday. Which, to be fair, it was just another Tuesday for him. The man had been a night-shift tech for eight years and I swear nothing rattled him.

"Power went out around nine," he said, not looking up from a pair of forceps. "Generator kicked on automatic. We've got lights in here, the kennels, and the break room. Everything else is dead."

"I passed three cop cars and a guy selling flashlights out of his trunk on the way in."

"Entrepreneurial."

"Extortionate, is what it was. Twenty bucks for a flashlight that's probably from a dollar store."

Tom set the pack down and finally looked at me. He's forty-four, two years older than me, and he's got this way of looking at you like he's already triaged you and decided you're stable. It used to irritate me when I started here a year ago. Now I kind of rely on it.

"Any calls?" he asked.

"Dispatch says two. Dog hit by car, owner is driving it in themselves. And a cat that hasn't peed in two days, which you know is a blockage until proven otherwise."

"Ugh. Blocked toms." He went back to his packs. "Might be a quiet night, might be hell. Generator's rated for the whole building if we need it, but I'd rather not run the X-ray on it if we can help it."

"I'd rather not either. Those things eat fuel."

I dropped my bag in the break room, grabbed my clipboard, and came back out. And that's when the night got weird. Not bad weird. Just weird.

Because when I reached past him to grab a leash off the hook, my arm brushed his, and we both went completely still. Like statue still. Like two people in a bad play who forgot their lines.

"Sorry," we both said at the same time.

And then we both laughed, but it was one of those laughs that has a nervous edge to it, the kind you can hear.

"Okay," Tom said, setting the forceps down with more care than they needed. "That was awkward."

"It was. It really was."

"Because we're the only two people in a dark building all night, and now that's going to be a thing."

"It's not going to be a thing."

"It's already a thing, Jo."

He had a point, and I hated it. Three months out of a six-year relationship, and apparently my body had decided that any accidental contact with a coworker was now a five-alarm event. Not that there was anything wrong with Tom. There wasn't. He was handsome in a quiet way, capable, funny in a dry, under-the-breath sort of way. I'd noticed. I'd been noticing for months and telling myself I wasn't.

"Right," I said. "New plan. We write rules down. Official rules. Like a prenup for an overnight shift."

Tom raised an eyebrow. "You're joking."

"Half joking. The other half is dead serious, because if we don't, we're going to spend the next nine hours orbiting each other like two awkward comets."

He considered that for a second, then walked over to the whiteboard on the treatment room wall and picked up a marker. "Fine. Rules. You first."

I took the marker from him. Our fingers touched, and we both pretended that didn't happen.

"Rule one," I said, writing it out in big letters. "No flirting!"

"Rule two. No touching."

"Rule three. No talking about personal lives. No exes, no dating history, none of it."

"Rule four," Tom added, taking the marker back. "Everything work-related gets said plainly. If there's a problem with a case, we say it. No reading tea leaves."

"Ooh, that's a good one. Rule five. Coffee in the thermos is communal."

"That's not a rule, that's just how the thermos works."

"It's a rule now. Everything on the board is sacred."

He wrote it anyway, and then stepped back, and we looked at our handiwork. Five rules, big block letters, on a whiteboard that usually said things like FEED KENNEL 4 AT SIX and WHOEVER LEFT THE FECAL SAMPLES OUT, WE SEE YOU.

"There," he said. "Now it's official."

"Permanently binding. Enforceable in any court."

"Especially the coffee one."

"Obviously the coffee one."

We shook on it, which was technically a violation of rule two, and we both pretended not to notice that either.

* * *

The car-hit dog came in around midnight. Golden retriever, young adult, owner a sobbing woman named Karen who drove like a maniac to get there, which, good on her. Broken hind leg, otherwise okay. Tom and I worked it like a well-oiled machine, him holding and prepping, me stabilizing and splinting until we could get surgical in the morning when the day vet with actual ortho skills came on. The dog, a sweetheart named Tank, spent the rest of the night stoned on pain meds in kennel three, dreaming little dog dreams.

And that's when the thermos came out.

Tom had made the coffee before I arrived, apparently, because he's the kind of person who makes coffee during a blackout on principle. He poured two cups in the break room and slid one across the table to me without a word.

"Is this a rule five event?" I asked.

"This is a rule five event. The thermos is communal. Drink."

I drank. It was good coffee, which surprised me, because night-shift coffee is usually the coffee of despair, brewed strong enough to strip paint.

"This is good," I said. "Where'd you learn to make coffee like this?"

"Working nights. You either learn to make good coffee or you die."

"Fair."

And then, because there was nothing else happening, and because the blackout had the whole city in its grip and the clock on the wall said the shift had nine more hours in it, we started talking. Not about personal lives, per rule three, but about clients. Which is the safe harbor of every vet clinic conversation.

"Okay," Tom said, leaning back in his chair. "Worst client. Go."

"Oh, that's easy. Mr. Delgado. The man with the African grey parrot."

"What's wrong with Mr. Delgado?"

"Nothing's wrong with him. That's the problem. He brings the parrot in monthly for a checkup the bird does not need, and he reads me articles from the internet about avian nutrition, and last time he asked if I, quote, knew about the mitochondria."

Tom snorted into his coffee. "The mitochondria."

"The mitochondria! I've been a veterinarian for fifteen years, Tom. I know where the mitochondria is."

"Is the powerhouse of the cell."

"Don't you dare."

He was grinning, and it was a good grin, and I made myself look at my coffee instead.

"Okay, my turn," he said. "Mrs. Koch. The chihuahua lady."

"Oh no. Oh, I know her. Princess?"

"Princess. Twenty-three years old if a day. Comes in every six weeks for something new. Last time it was, and I quote, she's making a clicking sound when she breathes."

"Was she?"

"She was not. There was no clicking. I listened to that dog's lungs for ten minutes. Not a click to be found."

"Did you tell her that?"

"I told her the clicking was, quote, intermittent. Because if I told her there was no clicking, she'd find a clicking somewhere else."

I laughed so hard I had to put my cup down. "That's the diplomatic diagnosis."

"Intermittent clicking. It's going on my headstone."

We went on like that for an hour. The horror stories, the sweet ones, the guy who brought in an iguana in a diaper, the woman who named all four of her cats the same name. Somewhere in there, the rules on the whiteboard got easier to forget, because talking about awful clients isn't a personal life, right? That's just shop talk. That's fine.

Around two, the lights flickered. The generator chugged but held. Tom got up to check the fuel gauge in the back, and I watched him go, and I caught myself doing it, and I looked at the whiteboard instead.

No flirting. No touching. No personal lives.

"Everything okay back there?" I called.

"Fuel's at seventy percent," he called back. "We're fine. The board is holding."

"The board is holding," I repeated, and poured us both another coffee.

Around two-thirty, the phone in my pocket buzzed, and I nearly knocked my chair over getting to it, because a phone buzz at two-thirty in a blackout feels like the world ending.

It was just my sister asking if I still had power. I typed back a one-word answer and set the phone face down on the table, and Tom glanced at it, and then glanced again.

"Golden retriever?" he asked.

"What?"

"Your lock screen. I wasn't snooping, it's just right there. Big dog?"

"That's Tank's sister, kind of. Long story. No, that's my friend's dog. I dogsit sometimes." I paused. "Why, what's yours?"

"Mine's not a dog."

"You have a phone photo you're defending already, so now I have to know."

He held up his phone, and there it was, a fat orange cat sitting inside an empty cardboard box, looking offended about being photographed.

"Oh," I said. "Oh, hello!"

"That's Barnaby. He's eleven. He does that when I'm packing. Sits in whatever box is out and glares at me like I'm abandoning him."

"Is he judging the photo or the photographer?"

"Both. He's an equal opportunity judge." Tom turned the phone so I could see the rest of the camera roll, a dozen pictures of the same cat in different boxes, on different blankets, in one shot sitting on a newspaper like he was being interviewed. "He's why I can't do long trips. Well, that and he's a nightmare with anyone else feeding him."

"Who feeds him when you're on shifts like this?"

"He feeds himself. Automatic feeder, water fountain, the whole setup. He hates it but he survives." Tom put the phone down, and then he said, sort of casually, "It's just him and me at home, actually. Since my divorce."

I looked at the whiteboard. Rule three, right there in his handwriting. No talking about personal lives.

"Are we breaking that right now?" I asked.

"Are we?"

"I think you just told me something personal. I think that counts."

"I think it does," he said, and he didn't take it back, and I didn't make him.

So I told him mine, because it felt like the honest trade. Three months since I ended six years with someone, no cats, no dogs, an apartment that was quiet in a way I was still getting used to.

"Six years is a long time," he said.

"It is."

"You okay?"

"I'm getting there. Some days I'm fine and some days I put two mugs out of habit and then stand there feeling stupid." I shrugged. "You?"

"Same, except the divorce was ten years back, so mostly I'm fine. The cat helps. The cat is terrible company and also the best company I've ever had."

"That's the most honest thing anyone's said to me all night."

"That's not a high bar. You've been talking to me all night."

I laughed, and I felt lighter than I had in weeks, and I looked at the whiteboard again and didn't get up to erase anything. Two rules gone now, if we were counting. I was starting to suspect we'd break