“So are stab wounds, but you don’t see me supporting their use.” He was grinning with me now, so I rambled on. “It’s your version of precise, and I’m willing to accept your version, even though it’s objectively incorrect, because that’s what compromise looks like.”
“That might be the single worst definition of compromise I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s the best definition of compromise you’veever heard and you know it.”
His mouth did a thing. It was slow and warm, and I watched it happen the way I’d been watching it happen for months.
I leaned in and kissed him. Gently and briefly. It was a kiss that said, “I’m here and I’m staying and we’ll figure it out and your blanket-folding technique is still wrong, but I’m falling for you because of—or perhaps, in spite of—it.”
Falling for. Not in love. I wasn’t saying the L-word yet. That word was in a drawer of its own, deeper and more carefully sealed. It definitely wasn’t time to open it—for either of our sakes.
Peter’s hand found mine on the counter. His fingers laced through mine and held on, steady and warm. The tremor from last night was gone. The surgeon’s hands, calm again, were anchored to something that felt less like a risk and more like a decision.
We stood in the kitchen and held hands and didn’t speak. The silence was the best kind, the kind that doesn’t need filling, the kind that two people can live inside without any furniture except the warmth between them and the light above the stove.
“Good night, Benji.”
“Good night, Peter.”
“Thank you for putting simple syrup in someone’s beer.”
I snorted. “You’re welcome. It was my finest moment.”
He squeezed my hand once, let go, leaned in for one last, lingering kiss, then went down the hall.
I sat on the counter for a while longer, alone in the stove light. I didn’t slide down any doors or make any sounds into my hands. I just sat there, quiet, in the room where everything important had happened between us, and I let that quiet hold me the way it held Peter, gently and without asking for anything in return.
Princess Consuelayowledfrom the foster room because her water dish was a quarter-inch below acceptable levels.
“Coming, Majesty,” I said. “Hold your complaints.”
I went to bed and slept well. In the morning, there was a Post-it on the fridge in Peter’s handwriting. Punctuated by a smiley face.
Simple syrup in a lager. I’m choosing to be flattered.
— P
Chapter 24
Peter
Icalled Dr. William Broadhurst on Thursday morning. Bill was the head of veterinary services at ZooTampa and one of the few people in the Tampa Bay veterinary community whose professional opinion I respected without reservation. We’d worked together on a handful of complex cases over the years, the kind that crossed the boundary between domestic and exotic and required someone willing to think outside the established protocols.
I’d consulted on a spinal injury of the zoo’s clouded leopard two years ago, assisted with a complicated dental extraction on one of the older lions last spring, and spent a memorable fourteen hours in the zoo’s surgical suite helping Bill repair a fractured tibia in a juvenile giraffe named Kito.
“Peter,” Bill said, picking up on the second ring. “Tell me this is a consult. I’ve got a geriatric elephant whose bloodwork is giving me fits.”
“Send me the panels and I’ll look at them, but that’s not why I’m calling.”
“What do you need?”
“A favor. Saturday morning. I’d like to bring someone through the back end.”
Bill was quiet for a beat.
“This is a date,” Bill said.
“This is a request for facility access during non-peak hours.”
