Like Cats and Dogs, Kate McMurray [miss read books .TXT] 📗

was nice but dull. I get that. So, he called, just to be nice. He’s dating a young man named Elvis now, if you can believe that.”

“Elvis? Really?” asked Paige.

“Yes. And apparently he’s a hunka hunka burning love. But my point is Robert invited me to this housewarming, which, if what I recall of Robert’s social circle remains the same, promises to be a smorgasbord of single gay men.”

“What about Pablo?” asked Lauren.

“I’m keeping my options open.”

Paige lifted her glass. “To keeping options open!”

They all clinked glasses again. Lauren laughed. Thank god for her friends.

***

Caleb checked on the kittens just after he got to work the next morning. All five were still thriving. Rachel had set up a little pen for them to play in and given them some little balls and things, and the kittens were having a great time pouncing on each other. Although Caleb did not want any kittens in his home, it was hard to deny that these little guys were pretty cute.

Rachel wandered into the back room. “They have names yet?”

“No. I figured whoever adopted them could name them.”

“I’ve been calling them each by their coloring. Gray, Mittens, Stripy, White Nose, and Giant.”

“Giant?”

“It’s like the reverse of calling a big guy Tiny. I’m calling the little one Giant. I think he’s got some spunk. Don’t you, Giant?” She reached down and scratched the little kitten’s chin.

“What’s on the agenda for today?”

“You’ve got a goldendoodle who needs booster shots at ten and a Great Dane with a cough at eleven. Mrs. Liao is bringing in one of her cats this afternoon, although I don’t recall which one.”

“How many cats does Mrs. Liao have?”

“Eight.”

“Eight? In a Brooklyn apartment?”

Rachel grinned. “I’m betting that place is…pungent.”

“And I thought Lauren was a crazy cat lady.”

Rachel gave the cats one last head rub each and then turned to walk back toward the waiting room. Caleb followed. Rachel said, “Lauren is a crazy cat lady, but she keeps it to the café.”

“She has a cat at home, too.”

Rachel raised an eyebrow. “And how do you know that?”

“It came up in conversation when she brought the kittens here.” That was plausible enough. He’d enjoyed his morning with Lauren immensely, but he didn’t want to discuss it. It was his business.

And it didn’t really mean anything; it had been just some fun after a tough night. She didn’t want a relationship, and neither did he.

He’d been in love once and it had been terrible. After vet school, after they finished internships in different cities and somehow made a relationship work, he and Kara had set up a practice together in Boston, looking after the cats and dogs and hamsters of the wealthy brownstone class who lived in Back Bay. They’d put their pooled money into a storefront on Newbury Street sandwiched between an ice cream parlor and a novelty gift shop. They’d operated in the red for the first few months, which had been tremendously stressful, but they got enough business to start turning a profit just before Caleb had maxed out their credit. And Caleb had always figured if he and Kara could get through all that together, their relationship was indestructible.

Caleb would have been happy to stay in Boston. Sure, he preferred big dogs to the little ones a lot of his clients carried around in fancy bags, but most of the patients were good dogs (and cats and bunnies and gerbils and hamsters and guinea pigs), and he and Kara had been happy working together.

He’d been a different person back then. Hardworking and content. He didn’t constantly feel the edginess that had been trailing him since the divorce. Perhaps that was why the move to New York had made sense when Kara had suggested it. A vet school buddy of Kara’s had gotten a lead on an established veterinary clinic in Morningside Heights that the owners wanted to sell. “We’ve gotten everything we can out of this place” had been Kara’s argument when Caleb had asked why she wanted to move. So they’d picked up their lives and gone to another city, left their friends and their community behind, and bought the clinic on 110th Street, just a few blocks down Broadway from the Columbia campus.

Caleb had thought they’d been happy there, too, but something had felt off. He hadn’t been able to put a finger on what the issue was. Whenever he brought it up to Kara, she suggested it was because they were still adjusting to life in a new city.

And then one day Kara had said she’d met someone else and they were moving to LA. She had wanderlust, Kara had explained, and didn’t want to be tethered to any one location, and besides, they’d been together since the first year of vet school. Hadn’t their relationship run its course?

No, Caleb had argued. Their wedding had been the two of them making a lifelong commitment because they loved each other and would work together to keep their relationship sacred through good times and bad. They didn’t make a commitment just to end things when they got bored.

Dividing up the business had been the worst part. He’d been furious about Kara making these unilateral decisions without consulting him, about putting the clinic up for sale without telling him, about fighting him over every dollar, every piece of equipment, every filing cabinet. He hadn’t wanted to sell the clinic, but he hadn’t want to run it without Kara, either, and he’d learned the hard way that owning a business with one’s spouse and a joint bank account and a Gordian knot of tangled finances got to be quite messy. She’d used her half of the assets to hire one of the best divorce attorneys in the city, and he’d spent hours and hours in various law firm conference rooms haggling over which things they would keep, which they would sell, and who got which cut of the profits.

He understood intellectually that Kara had probably been restless all along and just