“You okay?” Peggy asked. “I thought it was a stray?”
“She was. But …”
“I get it. I’ll take care of the room. Mrs. Baronski is getting snippy about waiting.”
“Leave the room for now. He’s still in there with her, and I told him to take his time.”
Peggy frowned. “She was a straytoday, right?”
“Yes,” Kelsey answered and then pushed off the door and went to wash her hands, foreclosing any further discussion about Dex’s grief over a puppy he didn’t know. Or her own.
~oOo~
After Mrs. Baronski was mollified and Fifi examined and fully vaccinated, Kelsey went back to check on Dex and the pup. The room was empty and clean, ready for the next patient.
Peggy wasn’t in the back, but Roy was. Fixing himself a cup of coffee.
“Did you get the dog carcass from the truck?”
“No ma’am. Peggy told me not to go far, so I’ve been waitin’.”
“Okay. Come up front with me. I hope he stuck around.”
They went to the waiting room. Dex wasn’t there. Poop. She turned to look out the glass entry at the parking lot—and there he was, heading to the front door with a tarp-wrapped dead body. Did he mean to come into the waiting room with it?
“Roy, this way. Hurry.” Without waiting for him, Kelsey pushed her way through both doors, out into the frosty day. “Hey,” she said to Dex. “Let’s not take her in through the front. Roy will take her from here.”
His brow drawn low over red-rimmed eyes, Dex gave Roy a slow, assessing look. “Okay.”
Roy reached for the dog like he was taking a jar of honey from a grizzly. Dex eyed Roy like a grizzly protecting his honey. But the exchange got done, and Roy hightailed it around the building.
When they were alone at the entrance, Kelsey asked Dex, “Are you okay?”
He sighed. “Yeah.” His eyes met hers and locked. “Thank you. You’re … you’re amazing.”
Those words floated through the cold and caressed her cheek. All she could do was smile.
“I should go in and pay,” he said.
“No. I already coded it as pro bono.” This clinic did a lot of work with area shelters, and what couldn’t be paid with donations was written off. She didn’t think it was an ethical or legal stretch to code her work with the pup as shelter work.
An arctic wind gusted through the lot and slammed Kelsey with icy cold. She gasped and clutched her lab coat around her.
“It’s freezing. You need to go in. And I need to get to the station.”
“Okay.”
“Thanks again, Kelsey. It’s heroic work, what you do.” He looked away, down at the asphalt at their feet. “I guess you kinda balance me out.”
In this moment, she felt like she understood Dex in a real way, a deeper way than ever before. It would probably pass, when he again became the inscrutable glower across the clubhouse party room, but right now, they’d shared something raw.
So she couldn’t abide such a self-defeating statement. Without thinking much about it, she went right up to him, lifted onto her toes, and kissed his cheek. “You’re a good man, Seth. You don’t need anybody to balance you out.”
Before he could, with look or word, make her feel more self-conscious about that kiss than she already did, Kelsey turned and went back into the clinic.