“Really? It’s terribly cheesy,” he said with a scoff. But the smile that followed was so warm and inexplicably familiar, she ignored the scoff.
Stay in the moment, her therapist’s voice said in her head.
They did a tour of the food trucks, studying the chalkboard menus as they chatted easily. Turned out he, like her, had grown up in Florida. In West Palm Beach, not far from where Mom had grown up. He’d recently moved to the Fort Myers area for work.
They picked up their food: vegetarian tacos for him and sweet potato fries for her, because she just couldn’t order meat around someone who was vegetarian. Certainly not around a vegetarian veterinarian.
They settled into a bench, where an older couple scooted over to make a place for them. They had three dogs with them, all of whom headed straight for Gaurav the moment he sat down.
The frail old man tried to pull them away, politely scolding the pups. But Gaurav lowered himself to the dogs’ eye level and patted their heads and said it was okay. This somehow led to three tiny dogs pressed into him as he ate.
The fries were good. She asked him if he’d like some, and he complied, eating one and then offering a few to the dogs. Then letting them lick the heck out of his hands. Which he then used to eat his tacos.
When he offered Cullie a bite, she feigned disinterest. Dog-slobber tacos were on her no-no list, but she was determined not to judge him, since both Bharat and Dr. Tandon seemed to be perched on her shoulders, whispering in her ear not to do it. The conversation meandered lazily, touching on people they knew in common from West Palm Beach, friends of her grandparents.
“So, your profile said you loved animals. I thought you’d enjoy a trip to my sanctuary.”
“Sanctuary? I thought you were a veterinarian.” She watched as he fed pieces of shredded cabbage to one of the mouth-breathing pugs.
The couple got up to leave. The dogs did not like that. They started whining, and the owners had to drag them away. Gaurav bid them farewell with at least an equal amount of regret.
“I’m a veterinary therapist,” he said, shoving his dog-slobber-covered fingers into his food. “But my life mission is to rescue and foster traumatized animals. The ones no one wants to adopt. I’ve built a sanctuary for them.” He reached out and patted her hand with those very hands, and she reminded herself that she’d meant to wash her hands anyway.
There, she could too live in the moment! She even tried to focus on the fact that the touch of his hand felt nice, the slobber notwithstanding. Her family would be proud of her.
“I think you’re going to love it,” he said as they got out of their cars after a short drive and approached a blue-vinyl bungalow on a shady street.
Gaurav jogged up to his front door and threw it open with the excitement of someone sharing the entrance to a treasure-filled cave.
The first thing that hit Cullie was the smell. Like a punch to the nose, knocking the breath out of her. She was trying to stay in the moment and everything, but the place smelled like a full-body immersion in animal slobber, tinged with alarmingly acrid poop. So escaping the moment seemed much more sensible.
Not that there was any escape from . . . well . . . from any of it. The sanctuary was basically his house. It might have been cozy if it didn’t look like a tornado had hit it. A tornado that had hit a pet store first and then carried all its contents and dumped them in here. Oh, and the tornado had also churned up a sewer. And a septic tank.
He ran his hand through his nerdy hair, which suddenly didn’t look as cute when she considered how many times he had touched it with hands he’d determinedly refused to wash when she’d stopped to wash her own before leaving the food truck pavilion.
He took her hand—God, could he please not do that—and dragged her into the backyard. She reminded herself not to touch her face, something she tended to do when she was nervous.
Okay, so she’d been wrong. In there wasn’t the sanctuary. This fenced yard with bald patches on brown grass was the sanctuary. Some twenty dogs ran at him at once. Also a pony. Unless that was a very large donkey. She couldn’t be sure.
There was a wild gleefulness to the animals as they jumped all over him. A glee he mirrored as he let each one lick him across his face. Suddenly Cullie was certain this was not a moment she wanted to stay in. The deathly smell was multiplied a hundredfold out here. The sensory onslaught of what was happening was so consuming that she didn’t notice something slithering by her feet until that something thumped against her leg. She jumped.
A flipping iguana!
Correction: a yard full of flipping iguanas.
There was a picnic bench behind her, and she jumped onto it, all the way on top of the table, the touch of the iguana still crawling across her skin.
If Gaurav Amin noticed that his date was doing a terrified, violated dance on a tabletop, he hid it well. With utmost calm, he tried to hand her what looked like wilted cabbage. She could no longer identify vegetables because the smell was killing her brain cells.
“Here, feed them. It will help you get over your fear,” he said condescendingly.
She was quite happy with her fear, thank you very much. What she needed was a new set of olfactory nerves. Correction: he needed that more than anyone else in the world.
“They’re harmless,” he said, condescension turning to annoyance.
She was feeling quite harmed. “They look like they want to eat me.”
“Iguanas are vegetarian.” Yup, definitely annoyance. “And there are no recorded cases of domesticated iguanas eating live humans.”
Where was the sweetheart who’d sung a Bollywood song with her?
She shoved his cabbage back at him, and he started tearing it up and giving it to the iguanas, fortuitously drawing them away from her.
“What is that smell?” she asked, unable to contain herself any longer.
“I’ve been gone all day, so I haven’t done my pickup,” he said with the kind of meanness people reserved for empathyless jerks.
“Pickup?” Yes, she squeaked.
Now he looked at her like she was stupid. No one had ever—ever!—looked at Cullie like she was anything but intimidatingly brilliant. “Yes, healthy dogs poop. There’s no stigma in it. Want to help me scoop?”
That would be a no. She reared back, trying not to fall off the picnic bench and refusing to think about scooping ice cream. She loved ice cream, and she would not allow this experience to ruin that for her.
Too late. She was never eating ice cream again. If she got out of here alive.
“I thought you said you loved animals.” That whine was certainly not attractive, and her Neuroband was backing up the realization that her initial reaction to this guy had been a complete and utter lie. She was never again, ever, staying in the moment.
“I do. But when was the last time you bathed these poor creatures? Also, is having so many animals in a backyard this size legal?” She heard Mom in her voice, and it was oddly comforting.
“Overbathing dogs can give them eczema.” He picked up what looked like an old two-gallon ice cream tub （seriously, she was never eating ice cream again） and a hand shovel. “Do you know why your nose is all scrunched up right now?”
She had no doubt he was going to tell her.
“A lack of love.”