When Clem put a finger to his lips, shushing her, La La wanted to slug him.
“You’re pretty passionate about animals, aren’t you?” he said, smoothing the tablecloth.
La La sipped her beer, smudging the images on the glass. If he wanted quiet, he could have it.
“You have a calling. I envy you.” He pushed a piece of lettuce around on his plate.
“Don’t you feel that way about being a chiropractor?”
“My dad’s a surgeon. Both of my brothers are doctors. My parents expected me to be one, too, but I flunked out of organic chemistry. Twice. People think what I do is bogus, don’t they?” He tore a roll in half, then seemed to lose interest and dropped both pieces on his plate. “Technically, I’m a doctor, you know.”
“I don’t think what you do is bogus,” La La said.
“Well, it isn’t.”
After the waiter cleared the table, Clem took La La’s hand. Warmth rolled through her fingers into the crook of her arm, traveled from there like a small brush fire to her belly.
Examining a long scar above her knuckles, he asked, “How’d you get that?”
She rubbed the skin as if she could erase the jagged mark. “I wasn’t careful with a surgical instrument.” She remembered the first time Zev had let her break a window, glass shattering and blood pooling on a veneer floor.
After Clem paid the bill, they walked around the college town, his long arm around her small, square waist. La La leaned into him, surprised at how good it felt to be held, even by someone she hardly knew. Outside a falafel joint, she nodded to students she recognized from class, and they looked Clem over and smiled, as though at unexpected good news. Though she didn’t let on, no one was more shocked to find her on a date than La La herself.
When they got back to his car, Clem pressed her against the metal door and brushed his lips against hers, his breath coming in warm, doughy puffs. His beard was infused with the bright smell of a citrus styling cream. He towered over her, and even through his coat, she could feel how strong he was. She liked the sensation of being trapped. Others in her life had held her too loosely or not at all. His heat contrasted with the frigid door, and she pulled him closer, his beard chafing her chin. Desire raised a tumult in her body. His tongue swept her lips, her teeth. La La pressed hard against his mouth.
After a while they separated, the force of her desire rattling La La. Clem reached for his car keys, but they weren’t in his pocket. “Maybe I left them on the table.”
“What’s with you and keys?”
“I wanted to see if you had a trick for opening car doors, too.”
“I don’t,” she said, though she could use a wedge, a wire hanger, and a slim jim, and could sometimes break in through the trunk.
* * *
Clem washes the spaghetti pot, and La La dries. Preparing to take the dogs out, Clem dresses Black in a sweater because lately the dog gets cold. He helps La La on with her coat, then wraps his arms around her. She leans into him, feeling his rib cage and the tendons in his arms, and they remain that way until Blue begins to whine. Outside, the dogs race from one scent to another—coyote scat, a field mouse burrowing under the snow, a yellow hamburger wrapper—pulling the humans along. The air is crisp and fresh, and La La imagines it washing away the day’s corruption. If she focuses on the dogs more than she does on Clem, he doesn’t seem to notice.
She and Clem have a good life. They rarely fight, and when they do, the sex is rough and inspired after, and lasts till nearly morning. They like the same TV shows—reruns of Grey’s Anatomy and House—and the same classic country music. Clem has agreed not to eat meat in the house and La La looks the other way in restaurants. He listens when she talks about her work in the clinic, and if it bothers him that she never asks about his clients, he doesn’t mention it.
They furnished their house with a castoff sofa; an overstuffed chair, velvet worn in the center of the cushion; bookshelves and a desk they found on Freecycle; a scratched oak kitchen table from the Salvation Army. The used items gave the place a lived-in feel and a bedbug problem. La La hated to call an exterminator—insect life was life, too—but Clem pleaded with her and she gave in. She’d had the same problem deworming puppies, but in the end, she couldn’t avoid it if she wanted to be a vet. “Try to live a perfect life, you’ll live no life at all,” Dr. Bergman had counseled.
How far, La La wonders, can you stretch that logic before it breaks?
Clem clasps her gloved hand in his. “Thinking about school?”
“Something like that.”
Black lies in the snow. Older than Blue, he tires faster, despite having a complete set of limbs. Lifting the fifty-pound dog to his chest, Clem carries him back to the bungalow.
When they get home, Clem reads the new post on his One of a Kind blog to La La. The blog is supposed to be for unusual acts of kindness. Clem started it months before, telling La La he wanted to do something about the decline in civility he had noticed and how quick people were to anger. He hoped the posts would remind people of their better nature. Like the one from last May about a woman who sacrificed her chance to win a marathon, carrying her exhausted friend across the finish line. And the story a month later about a man who intervened in an assault, though he made himself a target. He’s looking for heroes. But today’s post is more like what he usually gets and not what he wants to highlight: a teenager in Denver helped a man carry groceries to his car. “With all these posts about groceries, a supermarket chain should sponsor me,” he says. La La knows that despite Clem’s disappointment, he’ll reply, thanking the visitor for his inspiring message, though it will just give others the wrong idea about what the blog is for. He has only ninety-five followers. Often the same people write in. “I should shut the thing down. Don’t you think?” he says, but he won’t. He’ll keep it up, hoping for more posts like those early ones.
On the bed later that night, television playing in the background, Clem unbuttons La La’s shirt. She’s as attracted to him as ever: his arms ripped from working on patients; the single crystal earring he never removes, a gift to himself—the only gift he received—upon graduating from chiropractic school. His chin sticks out like a fuzzy shelf. In her more devilish moments, La La wants to balance a biscuit there, the way she does on Black’s snout, the dog waiting for the command to eat it. Clem knows her the way few others do, from her connection to animals to what her life was like growing up. Knows her and loves her anyway. And she doesn’t have to worry about him getting picked up by the police.
He kisses a spot between her breasts. La La buries her fingers in his hair, but she’s preoccupied. She slips off her clothes. Goose bumps rise on her skin, not from cold but apprehension. Though Clem prefers to see her face, La La turns toward the wall. She bends over the bed and guides him from behind.
“Hey, slow down.” He kneels and grasps her thighs, turns her around, and presses his mouth to her. Desire wracks her body, but her mind is elsewhere, until he pierces her with his tongue and she gasps, forgetting about attorneys and prisons. He draws from her guttural sounds and shudders. When he rises from his knees, she lies back on the bed, and he lifts her legs and enters her. She rocks into him, her hands grasping his forearms.