Vet's Revenge Gone Wrong

I'm Sydney, thirty-two, and I've been a veterinarian for six years, which is long enough to know when somebody's stealing your work and long enough to know there's usually nothing you can do about it. That's where I was Tuesday night, sitting in the break room of All Creatures Emergency Hospital at eleven forty PM, eating cold pad thai out of the box and stewing about it all over again.

Here's how the last two days went. Yesterday a golden retriever came in at two in the afternoon with a torsion, stomach flipped, dying on the table, and I was the one who did the surgery. Three hours on my feet, hands shaking by the end, dog alive at the finish. And then at this morning's rounds, in front of the whole staff, Scott stood there in his pressed shirt and told everybody what a great save it was, how he'd guided the case, how the hospital's protocols made the difference. My name never came up. Not once. Monique was there, Monique who'd handed me instruments for three hours, and she didn't say anything either, because Monique is twenty-seven and studying for her tech certification and has figured out correctly that keeping your head down is how you survive in that building.

I said nothing too. But I stayed late. That was my form of protest, staying late, and it's a stupid form of protest because nobody pays you for it and nobody notices, and the only person it punishes is me, sitting in the break room under fluorescent light that hums like it's mocking me, eating noodles that went cold an hour ago.

The thing about Scott, our owner and senior vet, forty-seven years old, never married, polished as a showroom car, is that he's not even a bad surgeon. That's what makes it worse. If he were incompetent I could at least tell myself he needed to inflate himself to cover the gap. He's competent and lazy in exactly the right proportion, the proportion that lets him stand in front of a room and hand out credit like he's tossing treats to dogs who did the actual trick. Fifteen years he's built that reputation. Fifteen years of my kind of work sliding underneath it like a foundation nobody sees.

At midnight Monique came in, pulled her jacket off the hook, and gave me that look she gives me, the one that says are we doing drama tonight or are we being sane.

"Go home," I told her. "You finished your charting."

"You sure? Dr. Harlan's still in the back."

"Dr. Harlan can alphabetize his own dentals. Go. You've got an exam to study for."

She hesitated, then went, because Monique always does the sensible thing and I've stopped holding that against her. The front door chimed behind her and then the building was mine, or nearly mine. Just the hum of the monitors, the soft constant bark of a beagle in kennel three who barks at nothing all night like a metronome, and me.

I should have gone home. I knew I should have gone home, and I stayed anyway, and I don't fully understand my own reasoning even now. Part of it was that going home meant the day had won. Part of it was that Scott was still in the back with his paperwork and some animal part of me wanted to walk past him on the way out, wanted him to see me leaving at midnight for no reason except spite, wanted my tired face to be the last thing he processed before he locked up.

So I killed another forty minutes. I cleaned instruments that were already clean. I read the same paragraph of a journal article four times. I checked on the beagle, who looked at me with the dumb devotion of his breed and kept barking. And at about a quarter to one I heard the printer in Scott's office stop, and I heard him stand up, and I decided that was my cue.

He came out through the treatment area and found me standing at the central counter pretending to study a chart, and he did the thing he does, the small pause, the little downward glance, the way he checks whether the room is worthy of him before he enters it. Even empty rooms get the treatment.

"Still here?" he said. "Long day."

"Long day," I agreed.

"You know," he said, and I could hear the paternal tone assembling itself in his throat like a hairball, "you've got a bit of an attitude problem lately, Sydney. The staff notices. I notice. Might be worth thinking about."

There it was. Seventeen hours after taking credit for my surgery, he was telling me I had an attitude. I felt something in my chest go very still and very clear, the way it does sometimes, and I said, "Whose attitude got that dog home to his family?"

He smiled the professional smile. "We all did our part."

"Right," I said. "We all did our part."

And then I did something I had not planned, or maybe I had planned it somewhere below the level of planning, because I came around the counter and stepped into his space. Not touching him. Just inside it, close enough that I could smell his cologne and see that his collar was slightly crooked, close enough that he had to look down at me or step back, and he didn't step back, which told me something.

He was single. Everyone knew he was single, had been single forever, some theory that he was married to the practice. Forty-seven years old and alone in a strip-mall animal hospital at one in the morning with a woman he'd spent all day condescending to.

"So tell me, Scott," I said, looking up at him. "When you go home tonight, to your nice empty house, who tells you what a great job you did? Is that what the mirror's for?"

His eyebrows went up. Actual surprise, the first honest expression I'd seen on him all day.

"That's a little hostile," he said.

"A little. Yeah. I'm a little hostile. I've been doing your best work for six years and you've been signing your name to it, and tonight you stood up in front of everybody and called my surgery your protocol." I didn't move back. Neither did he. "So I'm curious. When you're not being Dr. Harlan, brand ambassador, who are you even with? Does anybody know? Anybody at all?"

"Why?" he said, and something new appeared in his voice, something that wasn't the professional smile anymore. "Why do you care who I'm with?"

Good question. I didn't have an honest answer, or I had one I didn't like, which amounts to the same thing. The plan, if you could call the fizzing thing in my head a plan, was revenge, was making this man feel something uncomfortable, was taking something back. It had started as a fantasy about ruining him and had somehow drifted, over the last year, into a different kind of fantasy, and I'd been telling myself the second one didn't exist.

"You don't care," I said. "You're asking to regain control of the conversation."

"Maybe," he said. "Is it working?"

I laughed. I couldn't help it, a short ugly laugh, and his mouth twitched in response, and I realized with genuine irritation that the man was quick. All this time I'd filed him under pompous and he was standing there holding his own in a fight I'd picked, not retreating, not lecturing, just looking at me with an expression I hadn't seen him use on anyone.

"You're not what you pretend to be at rounds," I said.

"Neither are you," he said. "You pretend to be a team player."

"Fair."

We stood there a second longer than was professional, in the dim half of the hospital, monitors beeping somewhere, the beagle barking his idiot heartbeat into the dark, and I could feel the whole evening tipping toward something, and I let it tip, because spite is a powerful fuel and I'd been running on fumes.

"I should lock up," he said, but he didn't move.

"You should," I said, and I didn't move either.

He went for the supply closet first, I think, because it was the nearest door, and I followed because I had stopped pretending I wasn't going to. That's the honest version. Somewhere between the counter and the closet I had made the decision and told no one, least of all myself. The closet is a narrow little room off the hallway, shelves of gauze and surgical drapes and bottles of chlorhexidine, a motion light that buzzes on after a delay and gives everything a flat fluorescent ugliness that no amount of mood could survive. Good. I didn't want mood. Mood would have made it mean something else.

He stepped in and turned around and there wasn't much room left, so we were close again, closer than the counter, and the door swung shut behind me on its hydraulic arm with that soft pneumatic sigh the doors make at one in the morning when nobody official is around to hear it. He said my name. Just my name, Sydney, in a voice that had none of the rounds voice in it, none of the brand ambassador, and it occurred to me that he probably hadn't said it that way in six years, maybe ever, that to him I had been Dr. Reyes this and the junior associate that, a line item with excellent surgical hands.

"If you're about to fire me," I said, "the timing is actually perfect, I've been rehearsing the door slam for months."

"I'm not firing you." He looked down at me in the buzzing light. "I don't know what I'm doing."

"Welcome to my whole year."

And then he asked. That part matters to me, I've decided it matters, because whatever this was going to be I wanted it chosen, both of us choosing, not dragged out of anybody by exhaustion or spite alone, and spite was only going to get us to the door. He said, quietly, not quite looking at me, "Can I kiss you?" and the asking itself did something to my chest that I'm still not ready to name, because I had spent a year imagining him as a thing to be taken from, and here he was giving something before I'd even started taking.

"Yes," I said. "Obviously yes!"

He kissed me and it was not the kiss I expected from a man who irons his shirts to that level of crispness. It was careful and then it wasn't, and he had a hand at my jaw and one at the small of my back, and I stood there against a shelf of sterile drapes letting it happen and feeling, underneath the actual physical enjoyment of it, a hot bright current of something else, which was power. Pure, ugly, wonderful power. I had walked into this closet to ruin him a little and instead he was kissing me like he'd been waiting years for permission, and I understood with a kind of lurch that I could end him whenever I wanted, that the whole thing was mine now, every minute of it, and that I was going to keep going anyway.

Revenge had been the engine. It was not the fuel anymore, or not only the fuel. I let him kiss me for a while, long enough that the buzz of the light became the whole world, and then I put a hand flat on his chest and pushed, not hard, just enough, and he stopped immediately and stepped back and looked at me with a question on his face.

"Exam room four," I said. "It's clean. Monique restocked it before she left."

He didn't ask what for. He nodded once and followed me down the hallway past the dark reception window and the kennels, where the beagle was still going, with no concept of night shift in his little dog soul, and I opened room four and turned on only the exam light, the low one over the table that we use for dental work, so the room was half gold and half shadow.

I want to be accurate about this because the details are the whole point of telling it. I had imagined this, or versions of this, for months, and in the imaginings I was always the one directing. The reality was not different, which surprised me. He stood there and let me run the show from the first second. I told him to take off his coat and he took off the coat and folded it over a chair, of course he folded it, and then I backed him against the exam table and kissed him again because I wanted to, not because the plan needed it. My hands were shaking a little and I hated that, hated that my body hadn't gotten the memo about who was in charge here, and then I stopped caring about the memo because his mouth was doing something at my throat that had knocked every memo off the wall.

"Say yes if you want this, and say stop and we stop," I said, against his ear. And then, because I am practical, "Condom. You have one or I go find the human health drawer in the break room, and I promise you that drawer is tragic."

"Yes," he said, hoarse. "Yes. Wallet. Left side."

Fine. Unromantic and practical and exactly right. I got it out of his wallet myself, because that was part of the power too, and while he was working on his own buttons I pulled my scrub top over my head and felt the cool air of the room on my skin and watched him look at me, actually look, the way nobody had looked at me in longer than I would admit, and that look cost him something, I could see it cost him something, and I banked it like fuel.

We ended up on the floor, because the exam table was stainless steel and neither of us was that committed to a bit. His jacket went down first, then his shirt, and I pushed him back onto them and climbed over him and took him in hand and stroked him until he wasn't composed anymore, until the man who speaks in complete careful sentences was making short broken sounds and saying my name again, the real way. I rolled the condom on him and held his eyes the