Page 17 of Open for Negotiation
“Can I have your jacket?” I ask. He agrees and drops it down into my hands. The lack of shelter sending the rain pelting my head once again.
I offer one more piece of jerky and when he takes it, I wrap the jacket around him and very carefully lift him from the ground. He doesn’t fight, he doesn’t pull away, but he’s trembling so hard that I’m worried he’s going to have a seizure or a heart attack.
“What do should we do?” Max asks as we shuffle back to the car, injured basset hound in tow.
Max
She comforted that dog and fed him small pieces of beef jerky all the way to the emergency animal hospital twenty minutes away from where we were. She was so gentle and so kind, and even now that he’s back with the vet, she doesn't want to leave until we know if he’s going to be okay or not.
Her heart is so much bigger than I could have ever imagined.
“Do you think he’s okay?” she asks from the chair in the waiting room of the emergency vet.
“I don’t know. I really hope so.”
She releases a breath then sweeps her eyes up to me. “I’m sorry this is what our date ended up being. I just have a soft spot and if we didn’t stop to help him, I would have felt horrible for weeks.”
“You don’t have to apologize. I just wanted to spend time with you. Be it having dinner, playing games in an arcade, or saving a hurt basset hound that ate all of my post workout snacks.”
That gives me the reaction I’ve wanted out of her since we let the vet techs take the dog back—a smile.
“You don’t have to hang out here though, you know? It’s shitty of me to expect that of you. I can catch a Lyft home or something.” She folds her hands together in her lap.
“I’m not leaving you here, Scarlett. We can wait until we hear something then we can go together. I’ll take you to get something to eat. It’s getting late and you haven’t eaten. That’s not something I’ll tolerate.”
She furrows her brow at the tone I didn’t mean to have, but it’s not something I’m very good at controlling. I don’t like when people I care about aren’t caring about themselves.
“Tolerate? We aren’t at work anymore, Mr. Duke. You can drop that little bossy thing you’ve got going on. I’ll only allow it this one time because my stomach is going to start eating itself soon. I just need to make sure he’s okay first.” She gives me another smile then looks behind me. Before I can even process it, she’s bolting to her to feet and pushing her way around me.
“Is he okay?” I hear her ask and I spin around to see the vet tech who took him from us standing with her hands in her scrubs. Without even thinking, I slide my arm around Scarlett’s back, pulling her in close to me. I want to give her some bit of comfort in case we are about to hear the news we’ve been dreading.
In this moment, all I can focus on are the tech’s scrubs. There are little kittens playing with a ball of yarn on them. It takes me back to when I was a kid and we had to have my cat, Lex Luthor, put to sleep. He was very sick and my mom told me that we were being kind by making that choice. I hated her for it then, but as an adult now, I understand the choice. I wonder if Scarlett has been through something like that and it’s what has caused this deep love of animals she clearly has.
“He’s stable, but he’s been through one heck of a battle. He’s severely malnourished and has a pretty horrific injury in his hind leg. There was an open wound there either from a fight with another animal or being hit by a car and the infection had progressed too far. The best course of action was to amputate that limb.”
Scarlett audibly gasps beside me and covers her mouth with her hand. “Oh my God.”
“He was in rough shape, but I have no doubt he will make a full recovery. You saved his life by bringing him in.”
“What will happen to him now?” I ask.
“Well,” she continues, “we will keep him a few days now post op, just to make sure everything is as it needs to be. We will give him antibiotics and the like, then he will move to be rehabilitated and to adjust to his new life as a tripod.” She giggles and it seems to help ease the tension pouring off of Scarlett in waves.
“So he will be rehabbed then adopted out? He won’t be euthanized?” Scarlett asks.
“Oh, no, not at all. The shelter we work with is a no-kill shelter. You don’t have to worry about that. I promise you.”
“Can we see him before we leave? I just want to say goodbye to him.” Scarlett looks up at me, confirming that I want to, then back to the tech. “Please. We’ll be quick.”
“Of course. He’s asleep, but you can still go back. Come on, I can take you.”
I follow behind them both when we step through the large metal door and into the cold, sterile hallway that is lined with doors, all closed at the moment. We are taken through a small hallway with glass windows on either side and beyond the windows… operating rooms.
The hallway must be used for students to observe operations or something, and at the end of that, there’s a swinging door labeled Recovery.
The room is large, bright, and cold. Everything you’d expect a recovery room to be, honestly. It’s sterile and white with cages lining the walls. Some are empty, some have occupants, and while the room has what you’d think, it’s also warm somehow, like those who work there genuinely care about what they are doing.
“He’s right back here,” the vet tech, that I now know is named Danielle because I glanced at her badge when she lifted it to buzz us through the secured door, says as she points to a larger cage that is low to the ground.
