Some things were just a little bit difficult to explain to Laura. South Park wasn't normal. It was a strange amalgam of the mundane and the outrageous. Anything could happen in a town with an elementary school that had a cow for a mascot.
After meeting at the book signing, Kyle and Laura had arranged to meet at the coffeehouse where Kyle worked. Over a café au lait (Kyle) and a cappuccino (Laura) they had tried to make small talk. Kyle was surprised at himself; he wasn't as shy as he normally was when talking to a love interest. When he was in grad school, at Stoney Brook State University of New York, he had always found himself a bit awkward when it came to getting to know someone. Laura was different, however. It wasn't just the way her dark green eyes warmed up when she talked, or she kept her hands still and laced on her knee. There was something else in her demeanor that he was attracted to, on a profound level that instilled in him a certainty, an affirmation, of love.
Laura had told him of her life; her upbringing in New Jersey, how she had gone through a rocky time in high school and at last found her niche in New York. Kyle related to her of his time in South Park, describing how he had been surrounded by three close friends, only two of them very decent. He had said, growing a bit hot in the face, how he had been a top student and always had to contend with other peoples' imbecility. (Including his own, at times.)
He had felt compelled to disclose certain stories of his childhood to her, but had felt a hitch when it came to a certain few…what would she think, for instance, about his participation in a pre-pubescent, primal-instinct-fueled battle for the attention of Bebe Stevens, the pretty blonde who had developed breasts early? He had finally told her, amid much trepidation; she stopped laughing eventually. And even though she was a doctor, and not one faint of heart at that, it had taken her a little while to get over the story of Cartman's chili con carne. ("Dear God!" she had yelled. "Oh my God! I'm glad he went to Los Angeles and not New York! Oh God!")
They were not married yet, or even engaged, but Kyle was sure that they would be someday. He even planned the wedding in his mind. It would have to be a Reform wedding, not a Conservative Jewish wedding like he had hoped, since only Laura's father, and not her mother, was Jewish, rendering her technically non-Jewish. He imagined what their children's names would be: Zachary or Chaim for a boy, Rebecca or Hannah for a girl.
At present Laura was at the hospital where she worked, doing a short shift in the trauma ward. Kyle looked into his coffee and shuddered. Laura really has guts, he thought. She's got to have guts to work with...guts. He never really felt at ease with the painting of the mitral valve of the heart hanging on the wall at home. Or the kidney one. Or the picture of the pancreas waltzing with the spleen.
"Laur'? I'm going to go out for a bit, ok?" he had said on one particular occasion, when she had lugged home a swollen, excised appendix in a jar of formaldehyde to paint. He tore his eyes away from the revolting thing and tried not to vomit as he ran out of the apartment.
Because she loved him, Laura had ceased to bring her work home. Kyle no longer had to worry about coming face-to-face with a disembodied organ anymore, and Laura no longer had to worry about her boyfriend having a nervous breakdown.