“Darius,” I said. “I…this is very fast—”
“Fast is the point, isn’t it?” He looked me right in the eye. “Remember when I said it’s all about the hustle? This is us hustling. We need to strike while the iron’s hot.”
“I don’t know—”
“Think about it.” He waved his hand in the air as if picturing headlines with our names in them as he crossed the room to my kitchen. “You’re already on your way to becoming a bona fide Chicago celeb now, like it or not, and the two of us together could be the premier couple in town. Once I finally get my radio show, it could include a recurring segment with my illustrious wife, Dr. Annie Kyle.”
“That’s a lovely thought, but—”
“Imagine all the people you could reach and help with a segment like that. You told me that part of your frustration with being a concierge doctor was having to keep your client list small.” He opened my kitchen cabinets, looking for something. A glass.
He had a point, but no. I shook my head. “Darius, please listen to me. I can’t say yes…at least not right now.” I had too many things to consider, including two other guys who were in the picture.
“Okay.” He poured himself a glass of wine from the bottle I’d left on the counter.
Well, that was easy. “I’m sorry,” I said, “and I hope you don’t mind waiting—”
“I don’t mind because I know you’ll eventually say yes.” He sipped the wine and made a face.
This guy’s confidence was legendary. “Oh, do you?”
“Sure, I do.” He pressed his lips together and stepped toward me. “I’m the only answer that makes sense.”
“Really.”
“The Rob guy, I’m sure he’s nice, but he’ll end up boring you to tears. And Dax—”
“Dax isn’t in the picture.”
“Annie.” He raised his eyebrows. “You can keep telling yourself that, but believe me. I’ve been in your shoes.”
“Our situation is different.” I clamped my mouth shut.
Darius patted me on the shoulder. “Maybe your situation is different, and I hope for your sake you’re right. I wouldn’t wish the heartbreak I had to endure on anyone, especially not you.” He reached for my hand and opened my palm, into which he pressed the ring box.
“I told you—”
“Hold on to this,” he said. “Think about it. When you come to your decision, call me.” He shook his head. “No judgment, no ‘I told you so.’ I promise.” He closed my fingers over the box. “I believe we will do great, important, impressive things together, Annie.” He looked me dead in the eye. “No one is going to understand the demands of your career like I will. No one.”
He squeezed my hand and set his half-drunk wineglass on the counter. “We’ll be in touch.”
I wordlessly watched him walk out my front door as I heard Joanne’s chains jingling in the basement. A few moments later, Dax appeared at the top of the stairs.
“Well, that—” I started to say, but Dax cut me off.
A worried frown clouded his face. “Something scary happened with Joanne.”
I shoved the ring box, forgotten, into the bottom of my purse and ran downstairs to check on the dog.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
In Dog Beers, We’ve Only Had One!
Polly managed to fit Joanne in for an early morning appointment. Even though Yessi and Polly had been together for a while, I’d never been inside her vet’s office before. It was as expected—lots of dogs barking at one another in the waiting room and birds cowering in their cages. The place smelled like a kennel. Joanne, for her part, took the whole thing like a champ.
Polly only kept us waiting for a few minutes. When she came into the exam room, I gave her a hug, and then she got right down on the floor with Joanne and fed her a treat. “Okay, guys. What seems to be the problem?”
Dax had clammed up, worried about his dog, so I took the lead. “Last night, Dax took her for a walk, and when she stopped to do her business, her back legs kind of gave out.” I glanced at Dax to make sure I had that right. He nodded.
Polly examined Joanne’s hind legs. “Could she get up?”
“No. I had to physically lift her.” Dax mimed that action for her. “She couldn’t do it on her own.”
Polly nodded and beckoned to Dax and me. “Can one of you come down here and help?”
Taking charge, I jumped down to the floor, even though I was already dressed for work in nice pants and a button-down shirt. I’d dealt with patient families of all kinds. Some people sprang into action in the face of hard news, and others clammed up. Dax and I represented both ends of that spectrum. We made a good team, at least caretaker-wise.
Polly instructed me, “Just pet her head and try to keep her standing still for a moment.”
She lifted Joanne’s back leg and set it back down, pushing her toes underneath her paw. “Hmph.” She did the same thing with the other leg, and then she gave Joanne a treat.
“Okay,” Polly said. “See this?” I craned my neck to watch what she was doing. “Normally a dog’s paw will automatically flip back out, the way it’s supposed to be, but Joanne’s stays like this—tucked under.” She pulled herself off the floor and wiped off her pants. I stayed on the cold tile with Joanne.
Then Polly gave us the face I knew too well, the “it’s all going to be okay, but it’s really not, because I’m about to give you bad news” smile. “It appears Joanne is in the early stages of degenerative myelopathy, which is a disease that affects the spine.”
“Can we treat this?” I asked. The word “degenerative” didn’t instill me with confidence that this would get better with time.
“There are ways to slow the decline,” she said gravely. “We can give her vitamins and supplements that may help. Since we’re catching this early, I’ll tell you exercise is a good thing—keep her mobile, keep working her muscles.” Polly’s eyes softened. “I went through this with my lab a few years ago, and it’s hard. I wish I could give you more hope. It starts with what you witnessed today, but then she’ll have trouble going up and down stairs, she’ll become incontinent, and”—she shook her head—“eventually she won’t be able to get up on her own. It’s a tough road ahead.” She looked at Dax. “For all of you.”
I glanced back at Dax, who sat statue still, face muscles tight, hands clutched in his lap. I got up and took a seat next to him, resting my arm against his. I was here for him and Joanne—whatever they needed.
“Well,” I said brightly, doing my own version of the Dr. Good News Dance, “I’ve been walking Joanne a lot lately. She started out only wanting to go a block, but now we’re making it four or five. She seems really happy about it.”
“That’s great,” Polly said. “Keep that up.”
“How long?” Dax said, his voice low and grave. “How long does she have?”
Polly frowned. “Sad to say, by the time we diagnose this, it usually means the dog will be gone within the year.” She pressed her lips together.
Dax’s head dropped, and he pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes.
“I’ll be right back with the information about those prescriptions,” Polly said.
I jumped up and gave her a hug. “Thanks, Pol.”
She patted me on the back. “I’m happy to help, doc.”
I took the seat next to Dax and reached for his hand. He laced his fingers in mine. I held on, even if the action unnerved me. It felt like home. It felt like we were a real couple dealing with bad medical news together. My mind tried to flit to moments in the future when we might have to be there for each other as a couple—funerals, firings, food poisoning—but I wouldn’t let it. We sat there for a moment in silence.
“Thank you,” he said finally. “You’re better at handling this stuff than I am.”
“I’ve had a bit more e
xperience.”
He rested his head on my shoulder. Out in the hall, a cat meowed.
This was very real and very nice but also extremely fragile. Yes, we had this thing connecting us now—the care and feeding of Joanne—but beyond that…there was nothing keeping him here with me. He could find a new apartment and pick up and leave at any moment, and I’d be right back where I started.
I let go of his hand and jumped down to the floor to be with Joanne, which seemed like the safer option, my pants be damned. “It’s going to be okay,” I said, lifting her head into my lap and stroking the soft fur between her ears. “We’re going to take good care of Joanne. I’ll keep walking her. We’ll get her one of those little pill boxes to organize her medicine.” I made a box with my hands.
Dax stared hard at Joanne on the floor, who gave her tail a wag. Then he came down to the floor with us. He knelt next to her and scratched the spot just above her tail, which she loved. He laughed as she squirmed with glee.
“Seriously,” I said. “Polly said one year, but that’s just an average. You and I are overachievers, Mr. Yale.” I raised my eyebrows at him, and he laughed.
“A year from now, she’ll probably still be playing ball in the park.” He grinned at me.
My face slipped into a frown.
He came around to my side of the dog. “What?” Smiling, he tried to look me in the eye. “I’m supposed to be the weepy one in the vet’s office.”
I focused on Joanne’s ears. “A year is a long time.”
“Not that long.”
“A lot can happen… You’re talking about playing in the park with Joanne, and I’m wondering if I’m still in the picture.”
“Are you saying you want to be in the picture?”
“I don’t know, Dax.” I turned toward him, both of us kneeling next to his dog, who, based on the cacophony outside the room, appeared to be the most relaxed creature ever to set foot in this vet’s office. “Darius…proposed to me last night.”
His mouth opened wordlessly.
“I didn’t say yes,” I said, “or no.” I looked him right in the eye. “He senses that there’s something brewing between you and me, but he says he’s been in a similar situation, and what we have”—I pointed to Dax and me—“will flame out because we’re in such different places in our lives.”
“That’s…” He shook his head. “Anything can flame out. Let’s say you and Darius get married and your plus-one gambit works for a while. But then he—or you—meets someone new and falls in love. Boom. Flame out.” He reached for my hand, and I gave it to him. “Muriel and me? Totally same page. We were so in love and secure in our relationship that we didn’t even wait to graduate to get married. But time passed, and we changed, individually, apart from each other. Boom. Flame out.”
I let out a slow, shaky breath. Suddenly, with the vet out of the room, Dax had become the take-charge person. “Being left behind—being alone—scares me.”
He wiped a tear from my cheek. “Like I told you before, there are worse things than being alone. You don’t think you’re going to feel alone when Darius chooses one night to go out on the town without you or when Rob spends every Friday night with his buddies?”
“But—”
“This isn’t about them…or me, really. It’s about you, Annie. People change, they leave, and they die. You can’t control any of that. You can only control your reaction to it.”
I patted Joanne’s head. “Says the guy who was a blubbering mess worrying about his dog.”
“Yeah.” He tilted my chin toward him with a finger. “I will be devastated when Joanne is gone. It will rip me to shreds, but I know I’ll be okay, eventually.” He touched his lips lightly to mine. “Look, Annie, I’m not planning on going anywhere in the immediate future. I’ve been working for years to make Farouche a success, and it hasn’t happened yet.”
“Yet,” I said. “You still haven’t experienced the Man on Main Street effect.”
“No, but I’m used to disappointment. In all honesty, you’ll probably be begging to get me out of the house in a year.”
Polly came in at that moment with the prescription information. She looked at the two of us kneeling together, holding hands, with pity, probably assuming all of this emotion was Joanne-related. “You can check out at the front desk,” she said solemnly. “Take all the time you need.”
After the door had closed behind her, Dax said, “Annie, I’m falling for you, and I think you feel the same way.”
There was no more denying it, even if the idea still scared the crud out of me. “But you’re so much younger than I am, and you’re not looking for anything permanent.”
He shook his head. “But also not about to deny myself happiness when I think I’ve found it.”
My eyes stung with tears. I couldn’t fathom going to either of the other guys and vowing to marry one of them while Dax still existed in my world. He’d always be in the back of my mind. And the front. And the sides. “I’m scared of what might happen—”
He cupped my cheek. “Don’t think too far ahead. Focus on you, me, and Joanne: our little dysfunctional family. We’ll take it one day at a time, no sweeping proclamations, no premature engagements. Yeah, it’s scary, and maybe it will flame out spectacularly…”
I hesitated, trying to ignore the feeling of doom settling inside me and Darius’s words echoing in my ears. This was what I wanted, and I couldn’t deny that anymore, no matter the outcome. I reached for Dax, pulling him toward my lips. “Or maybe we’ll live happily ever after by accident.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
E=MC Hammer
After the vet, I had to get to work, so Dax and I said goodbye in the car outside the house. “I have to bartend tonight,” he said after kissing me for a good minute plus, “but that’s probably a good thing. If we’re going to do this, you need to let the other guys off the hook before we go any further.”
“You’re right,” I told him. “And I need to do it in person.” I had to give Darius his ring back, for one thing. “I’m going out to my mom’s for lunch on Saturday. I’ll talk to Rob then.”
I showed up at my mom’s house at one o’clock sharp that weekend, ready to rip off the Rob bandage. It wasn’t fair to him to string him along. He deserved to move on, as I was doing with Dax. I’d get him alone and break the news, neat and clean. He’d be fine. We’d both gone into this potential relationship with eyes wide open, and he’d understand why I needed to move on.
But when I got to Rob’s house, he wasn’t there. I’d knocked softly, so as not to disturb his mother. Instead of ringing the doorbell, I sent him a text. Hey, are you home?
He sent back, I’m at your mom’s house :)
Great. Super. A new kind of dread settling in my chest and shoulders, I tramped across his front lawn and into my mom’s backyard. There I found Mom, Rob, and Mrs. Casey all seated around the patio table.
I smiled, pretending everything was fine and normal and wonderful. “Hi, everyone.”
“Annie,” my mom said brightly, glancing at her watch. “You made it.”
“It’s one-oh-two,” I grumbled. “I’m two minutes late.” I glanced at Rob, who was smiling hard, his teeth bared in determination.
Rob jumped from his seat and took my hand. He kissed my cheek and led me over to the table, pulling out a chair for me next to him. I moved as if in a dream, taking in the spread of food my mom had laid out—bread and lemonade and lasagna and salad. I’d gone through the looking glass. I was at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
I glanced at Rob’s mom. “Mrs. Casey—”
“Regina,” she said.
“—you look great.” I wasn’t just blowing smoke. She did look great. She wore a fashionable sunhat and big glasses and had wrapped herself in a colorful muumuu, but I could still tell that her color had improved since the last time I’
d seen her. And she’d filled out a bit. Her plate was crammed with food, and she was eating it.
“Thank you, dear.” She reached for Rob’s hand. “I feel so much better these days. Thanks to Robbie…and you.” She winked.
My stomach churned as my eyes swung to Rob, who was staring hard at the table, focused on the large pepper grinder in front of him.
I straightened up, starting to get a sense of what might be going on here. “What do you mean?” I said through clenched teeth.
Regina chuckled. “Why, your engagement, silly.”
“Your what?” My mother squealed, her hand flying to her lips.
“Did she not tell you yet?” Regina said. “She and Robbie are getting married.”
Shrieking, my mom jumped up and wrapped her arms around my back, bouncing up and down, squeezing me tight. “Annie, why didn’t you say anything?”
Seething, I glanced at Rob and spoke through a plastered-on smile. “I thought we agreed we weren’t going to tell anybody until things were official.”
“What do you mean?” Regina’s nervous eyes swung between Rob and me. “I thought this was official? You said, Robbie…”
Rob glanced over at me, pleading, concern draining his face of color. He nodded slightly toward his mother, and I got it. He’d told her about us, and now she was sitting here looking healthy and happy. He was asking me not to ruin it.
I cleared my throat. “I meant—I thought we were going to wait until I actually had the ring.” I looked my mom straight in the eye. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it sooner. We’re having it resized.”
“Understandable.” My mom scooted her chair right next to Regina now, and the two of them started squawking about showers and timelines and guest lists.
This had gotten out of hand. I stood and motioned for Rob to follow me out to the front.
“Look at the two lovebirds stealing some time alone!” my mom cooed.
My heart in my throat, I opened the gate and headed silently to the front of the house. When we were out of earshot, I hissed at him, “What the hell, Rob?”
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