“What brought you to the symposium?”
“Oh. Diane encourages me to do professional development, so she’s got me on every mailing list for every organization in the city relating to pets or animal rescues or veterinary anything. When I got the invitation to this thing in the mail, Diane encouraged me to go. She thought maybe learning more about feline behavior would help me better manage the cats at the café.”
“Did you learn anything useful?”
“Yeah, the discussion of observed behaviors in feral colonies was especially interesting. I didn’t know that cat tails could tell you anything, but I’ve seen the cats at the café greet each other with their tails up all the time. If that really means they are approaching in a friendly way, that seems like good news.”
“Also that purring could be a way to lure prey into a false sense of security.”
Lauren laughed. “That I knew. And I totally believe it. I’ve been attacked by enough cats at the café to know that purring is not always a sign of contentment.”
“Attacked?”
“Nothing major. Scratches, mostly.” She held out her arm. There were a few red slashes across it, all minor.
“You ever get bitten?”
“Every now and then. Not often. We’ve got a procedure in place for when that happens, at Olivia’s suggestion. There are several full first aid kits and antibacterial ointment in the staff restroom.”
“Okay. Just curious. I get bitten every now and then, too. Usually when I’m giving cats shots.”
“Yeah, I learned that lesson the hard way. I brought one of the first café cats to the clinic to get her shots, and as soon as the needle hit her skin, she turned her head and sank her teeth into my hand. My whole hand was red and puffy for week. I had to get prescription-strength antibiotic ointment.”
“Fun.”
“Yeah, not so much.”
They both laughed.
“I guess it was good you were there tonight,” Lauren said.
“You guess?”
“Something about that guy Mike rubbed me the wrong way. And I’m not sad to see you.”
“I’m not sad to see you, either.” In fact, he’d had a whole cycle of emotions once he’d spotted her. He’d been surprised to see her, but happy about it. He’d considered maybe just ducking out of the auditorium until he saw Mike, at which point his feet carried him right to her. Because he wanted her to himself. Which was not at all a fair way to view the situation.
As they ate and chatted about some of the finer points of the symposium, it occurred to Caleb that they’d crossed some other threshold, and now they were the sort of people who had casual dates to eat frozen yogurt like they were in some fantasy of the fifties. He also much preferred this to trying to hear each other in a noisy bar if they’d gone for that drink, because he quite liked listening to her.
But was that enough? He didn’t want a long-term relationship. He wasn’t sure he could trust love to last longer than a dog’s attention span. And he wasn’t sure that he and Lauren even had enough in common to sustain anything worthwhile.
He just liked her.
So they ate yogurt. And when they were finished, they sat in the booth with their empty cups and kept laughing and talking. And when the staff kicked them out because the store was closing, they walked back outside, and Caleb wanted to take Lauren’s hand. Except, no, they weren’t in that kind of relationship.
“What train do you take home?” Lauren asked.
“I can take almost anything. The 4/5 or the 2/3 or anything that goes to Jay Street.”
“Let’s get the F, then. That’s the train that stops nearest my building.”
“All right. Lead the way.”
Lauren’s knowledge of the city streets was clearly much better than Caleb’s. She confidently led him south toward Bryant Park. On the way, they chatted about new building developments—Lauren pointed at a skyscraper a few blocks away that hadn’t existed a couple of years before—and how the city changed. Caleb found the amount of construction in Manhattan and Brooklyn to be puzzling at times, wondering where there was even room for new developments, but New York was a forward-facing city, constantly sloughing off the old to replace it with the new.
Then he said, “Oh, that Randolph guy you mentioned stopped by the clinic the other day. He seems like a scumbag.”
Lauren laughed. “Yeah, he’s pretty slick. Diane told him she wasn’t selling in no uncertain terms, but I guess he’s not taking no for an answer.”
