4. The Man Card
Screwing up a conversation that badly had to break some kind of karmic, cosmic law or something, Sky thought. She could never be considered socially graceful, but the very idea that anyone in the whole world could have acted more socially stupid was suddenly inconceivable.
In the presence of one of the best looking men she'd ever seen, who seemed to be an incredible gentleman—at least in his wolf form... a queer thought in and of itself—she had done what? Babbled about milking anal glands of dogs and how he needed to shit harder. Well, shit harder shit. Because somehow, the clarification made it better... No. No, it didn't.
She pushed a carrot around the plate. She couldn't end it there, either. She'd also sat there eating in front of him while he was starving for human food, and she couldn't image that the amount of meat he was getting in his wolf form sustained his far more massive human frame. Or did it?
Her thoughts were a muddle. She couldn't figure out how to feel about him. Should she be embarrassed about rubbing his wolf belly?
"Would you like me to take that," he interrupted her thoughts, "or have you grown fond of that particular carrot?" His eyes were twinkling at her.
"Oh, uh. You can take it, certainly," she answered.
They cleaned up, making minor small talk until silence stretched between them.
"Would you like me to stay outside tonight?" he finally asked her.
She put the towel over her shoulder to put it into the dirty pile for later. Then she turned to him. "You can sleep on the sofa tonight. I mean no offense, but I don't think I want your wolf in my room. A wolf with the mind of a man in my room is... not comfortable. But you don't have to leave, for now. I can't make a decision yet, but again... I don't feel right with throwing you out. I didn't save you to throw you to your death."
They went to bed, and she woke the next morning to find him in wolf form on the floor. She had to fight the urge to pet him. Then she felt awkward about having petted him. It just seemed somehow extremely personal all of a sudden.
She got ready for her day as quietly as she could, buckled her gun on, and headed out the door. She heard him get up, and looked over at him. "I assume you can make your own breakfast?"
He thumped his tail in agreement. Then he cocked his head and looked at her gun. He sat down and looked up at her face.
She sighed. "Listen, I don't know what you got me into, but Louisiana is an open carry state, and it brings me comfort. If someone figures out that you're here and decides to take it out on me, I'm not going down without a fight."
She slipped out the door into the garage. As she got into the car, he came out in his pants, his chest distractingly bare.
"Sky, let me come with you," he told her. "I can protect you. Some of what's out there-" He shook his head. "Let me help. I'm the reason you're in this."
"Alcide, I'm going to work. I can't drag a dog around with me everywhere I go! I need to live my life in a relatively normal way!"
"Sky..." He sighed. "I know you do a great job of taking care of yourself. But there are things that guns don't kill-"
"There's more?" She shook her head, waving a hand at him. "No. I don't want to know. We'll talk later. I'm going to work, and I promise I'll think on it all. Okay? That's the best I've got right now."
He looked sad, but nodded. "I'll be here. Please... just... be careful."
She opened the garage and he stepped back inside the house. He waved good-bye. Sky backed out and went to work.
Carlos greeted her with his usual uninterested over-the-head wave. A little later, he turned around.
"Whoa, you're packing heat today, huh? I mean, more than your deadly hot body and your to-die-for face..."
She turned on her stool. "Carlos, if you weren't gay, I'd marry you and disappoint the entire population of the Eastern United States except the hetero guys. And maybe them, too."
He grinned, "Compliments ain't going to get you out of explainin' the gun, girl, but you were close."
She ran her hand down her face, trying to clear the cobwebs and figure out a way to explain things. "There's this guy staying at my place. He's in some serious trouble and I worry it might rub off onto me."
He looked at her closely. "You like him."
She chuckled slightly. "He's a real gentleman, I think. From what I know of him so far. In fact, he's fairly near perfect. Aside from sort of lying to me to begin with and being kind of hovering. And he's got... a strange sort of... I dunno. Affliction, you might call it. But he's gorgeous. And he's kind."
"So aside from lying and smothering you and sort of having some kind of terrible disease, he's cute and he's sweet? Sounds perfect."
"Hey, that's not... entirely... right."
"Okay, sure. So you like him, and he's sweet and hot. So?"
"I sort of talked to him about..." she ducked her head and lowered her voice, "...milking anal glands."
"Oh, you didn't! Really? Tell me you're joking?"
"And I mentioned he should feed his wolf raw meat so his shit is harder."
Carlos stood there staring at her with his mouth hanging open. "Baby doll, you are a train wreck. You are!"
She buried her face in her hands. "God, I know, I know! I have no idea how to hold a conversation!"
"I know that's true. You couldn't hold a conversation if someone gave you a teleprompter."
"Well, it's not my fault! He was unconscious, so I just inspected him like I always do with all dogs!"
"Wait, you inspected Mr. Affliction? While he was unconscious?"
"The dog!"
"Oh! Oh..." he gave her a measuring, level look, "you found the owner of the wolf?"
"Sort of," she told him. "I can't talk about that."
He tilted his head at her and gave her a sly look. "Oh, right, right. Danger and whatnot. I read you, baby doll."
"I swear that if there's a more stupid conversational topic on the planet, I'd have found it. I'd think I broke some sort of cosmic law on how stupid a person can be in a talk with an attractive person; except that somehow, since he's kind of amazing, it seems impossible that I could do anything less grand than a fuckup so complete it boggles the minds of the very gods themselves."
"Zeus will probably smite you," he told her.
She giggled. "Or Aphrodite. Nothing says 'smite her for her stupidity in front of a hot guy' like the Goddess of Love, eh?"
The laser bell on the front door dinged and a woman came in with a small boy. They carried a cat carrier.
"Hi," the middle-aged woman said. "I'm Colleen, and this is Jack. We have an older cat, and he's been really acting up lately."
Sky asked her a few questions while she led them back into an examination room. She realized almost immediately that he had a urinary obstruction.
"I'm going to have to operate on him. Right now. Since he's already been like this for almost forty-eight hours, the chances of saving him are slim," she told the mom after asking the son to wait with Carlos for a few minutes.
"How much will that cost?" she asked tearfully.
"We'll talk about that afterward. I always work on a sliding scale. We'll find something you can afford."
"But you don't think it will work, do you?"
Sky looked at her, and then away. "It's unlikely. But if he dies, I won't charge you for the surgery at all."
She sniffled. "Okay. If you can help him, please do."
Sky nodded. "Go take your son over to get some ice cream. It will take several hours."
Three hours later, she finished the surgery. It had required opening the cat up to insert a catheter. He had been severely out of balance. She used everything she knew to do, but in the end, as she patched him back up and waited for him to come out of the anesthesia, she felt it was the end of him.
She'd tried a new use for her own invention. She wasn't sure how it would work, but these surgeries almost never lasted with male cats. Once they got an obstruction, it was almost inevitable that they died. And this cat was severely unbalanced due to the inability of his kidneys to function for two days.
She brought Colleen back into the room when the woman arrived back, asking Carlos to stay with Jack again. "Colleen, please listen. I think the only thing I've managed here is for him to die at home with you and Jack, where he's loved and it's not cold and clinical. It's extremely rare for a cat to survive with an obstruction of forty-eight hours. And it's almost certain that he will get another obstruction very soon. If he does live, you have to transition him onto a raw meat diet. If you fail to do that, he'll be back here for the same reason, or die before he can make it."
She took the other woman's hands in hers. "I'm sorry. I've done the best I know how. From here it's up to him."
Colleen nodded, tears running down her face.
"We'll bill you. When you get the bill, don't freak out, just come in and we'll find a way to make it affordable, okay?"
She said 'okay' on a sob and carried the cat carrier out to the foyer. Jack leaped up and came to see.
"Is he still alive?"
"He's still alive for now, Jack. That's all I can tell you."
"Thank you, thank you!" he cried, hugging her.
They left and Sky sat down heavily.
"He ain't gonna make it," Carlos said sadly.
Sky shook her head. "But he'll die with the people who love him."
She drove home in the enforced silence of the car, vowing to get her stereo fixed that week. She checked quickly around the house but didn't see Alcide anywhere. She went into her room and flopped face-first onto the bed and finally let herself cry.
"Sky?"
She sat up, embarrassed. "Oh, hi, I didn't see you in the house," she said. She searched for a tissue but the box was empty.
He disappeared from the doorway and then returned with the tissue box from the bathroom. He sat down on the bed beside her.
"Want to talk about it?" he asked.
"I...did surgery... on a cat today... he... probably... won't make it..." she said between sobs. "Little boy's... pet..." She couldn't explain further.
He hugged her against him. She tried to stop crying, tried to stop thinking about Jack and Colleen losing their pet. Tried to stop thinking about how much poor 'Jet' must have hurt before he was brought into her office.
Eventually, she quit crying. Her sorrow spent, she sat up, clutching the tissues.
Alcide got up and walked into the other room. She heard him in the bathroom, but was still surprised when Marrok appeared in the doorway. She supposed she should stop calling him that, or thinking of him that way.
She stood up and reached for the brush. "Can I brush you?" she asked him, uncertain as to how to proceed. Did one ask such a thing of a werewolf?
He thumped his tail once, and she chuckled. "I guess that's a 'yes' still?" He thumped it again and she headed for the couch. When she got there, she invited him into her lap and he laid across her while she watched TV and brushed 'his wolf'.
She found she was still confused as to how to speak of him, or even to him, now that she knew the difference. But stroking the brush along his fur was comforting. Finally, when her show was over, she explained the situation a little better. She had a cat come in, who was probably going to die despite her best efforts. It made her feel hopeless and lost.
On days like this, she wanted to go work at McDonald's. Or Arby's. Or a clothing store.
He licked her face and she laughed. "We're going to have to talk about this licking thing, sir."
He jumped down from the sofa and padded back into the bathroom. A few minutes later, Alcide appeared, sitting on the sofa beside her. She could feel the heat radiating from his body, and it distracted her for a few seconds.
"I'm sorry you had a tough day," he told her.
She smiled. "Thanks. And thank you. Brushing... uh..." What should she say? You? Marrok? Your wolf? She floundered, uncertain.
"Marrok?"
She took a deep breath. "Yeah. It was comforting." She handed him the remote. "I'll start some dinner. Thank you for not trying to fix things and not saying I was silly for crying over something I couldn't change."
"Why would I do that?" he asked.
She looked at him in surprise, and then laughed. "I think it's one of the rules on the 'man card', isn't it?"
"Lest I lose my standing with men everywhere," he answered, "let me inform you that I didn't say anything because I don't know how to help, and not because I was trying to be sensitive. Do you think that will suitably reinstate my man card?"
"I can't answer that, or I'll be issued a 'bitch' card, and probably never recover my self esteem." She grinned at the look on his face. "Let's just leave it at this; I don't think you could do the 'insensitive prick' thing well if you tried. Personally, I'm good with that."
He shook his head. "Amazing how different women can be from each other. I think Debbie would be shocked to hear anyone say that about me."
"Debbie must be dumber than she was acting when she was here. And that's pretty dumb." She turned to look at him, "Sorry. I guess you had a relationship with her, or you wouldn't have said that. I guess I was applying for the 'insensitive prick' position, myself."
"It's okay. We were engaged. I was really in love with her, but she ran off with the leader of another pack. She got tangled up in drugs and violence. She cheated on me a couple times before that, but I forgave her." He leaned back against her counter.
She tried not to stare. He looked almost out of place, like a bit of the untamed wilderness had strolled in and parked itself in her kitchen. His unruly hair and the growth of beard on his face lent him an aura of looming danger that was at odds with all she'd seen of his personality so far.
"And she thought you were insensitive?"
"Yeah. She always thought I was looking at other women. I couldn't even have female friends, or she'd think I was banging them."
Sky raised her eyebrows. "You know why, right?"
"I guess I didn't make her feel very secure," he answered. "I did try, though."
She shook her head. "No, Alcide. It wasn't that. There are two reasons," she said. She raised her hands and ticked them off as she spoke, "Number one, because cheaters know how easy it is to get away with cheating, so they always expect it. Number two, because you were too good for her, and she knew it. So she expected you to wise up and realize it any second."
"You think I was too good for her?" he asked.
She put her hands on her hips. "Now you're just fishing for compliments, girlie-man," she told him with a grin.
"I wasn't," he said, "but if you're giving them out, I won't refuse."
"I'll try to think of one before dinner's ready."
"Ah, if it's going to take you that long, I hope it's a good one."
"Probably not. When I get hungry all the blood leaves my brain and goes to helping my stomach scream bloody murder. Any idea what you might like for dinner?"
They made spaghetti.