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Phoebe eyes the assortment of gadgets on the kitchen counter with a frown. “I’m not sure you’re making the right decision, Kat.”
She drops the collar with a loud clang and puts her hands on her hips, all but desperate to have her sister understand. “I need this, Pheebs. When I came back—I thought I would never be alright again. I thought there was nothing—“ she bites her lip, looking around the sparsely furnished kitchen and reigning her emotions back under control. Deanna said it’s a good sign when tears finally overwhelm her, that she should surrender to her need to cry and just go for it: but Kathryn has never been a particularly emotional person, and she doesn’t suspect this time to be any different.
“I’m sure about this, Phoebe,” she starts again, putting all the toys into a big, green bag. “I want to start putting my life back together. This is the first step—first of many. You have to trust me to know what I’m doing.”
Her sister remains skeptical, but something in the way her mouth softens just so tells Kathryn she’s won this round. “Alright. Your call. Do you know what you’re going to call her?”
Kathryn smiles, thinking of the dog she’s about to go pick up—a four-year-old border collie, alienated by her former family after they’d found out about a serious eye disease she suffers. They connected the instant they met, and Kathryn (the firm atheist and lover of everything countable and rational) believes it was destiny that brought them together. “’Voyage’,”, she says with a French affliction. “The name is supposed to start with ‘V’, and the shelter people insist on naming all their dogs after songs for some reason.”
“So you’re going with one of the arguably cheesiest songs in the history of French music? Who are you, and what have you done with my sister?”
“Oh, shut up,” she leans in to kiss a freckled cheek, and grabs her car keys from the counter. “I’ll see you when I see you.”
–
She takes one look at Jadzia’s face, and her heart sets heavily in her chest. “Is there a problem?” she asks in a voice much shakier than she’d like. Jadzia sighs, rubbing her palms together.
“A—complication of a sort. Maybe you should take a look for yourself.”
She runs the tip of her tongue over her suddenly dry lips, and follows the young caretaker into the shelter, down the main road and onto a large, sunny meadow where she took the dog—her dog—only yesterday. It’s mostly empty, due to the early time of day, save for two figures: the collie, her fur white-and-beige instead of the more common tricolor mix, running happily around, and a broad-shouldered man, crouching comfortably in the grass and calling to the dog in a soft, laughing voice.
Kathryn freezes, completely at a loss. Jadzia told her multiple times that the dog never responded to anyone until her: yet here she is, running in circles with the largest doggy grin Kathryn’s ever seen. How dare he take that from her? What the Hell is going on?!
“Hey, Chakotay,” Jadzia says, touching the man’s shoulder with familiarity that makes Kathryn take a step back, “Ms. Janeway’s here.”
The man looks up at her and stands up, turning to face the newcomer—and Kathryn’s breath catches.
Dog-stealer or not, the guy is absolutely gorgeous: with deep, brown eyes surrounded with laugh lines, a crooked nose and lips that should be considered a controlled substance. He gives her a small, wary smile and a polite nod, eyes traveling across her face (too freckled from the sun) and clothes (a casual set of old sneakers, jeans and a shirt knotted at the waist: great for playing with a dog, not exactly so for meeting men). “Pleasure to meet you—I hope,” he says carefully, and reaches down as the dog runs up to him, putting her muzzle in his palm imploringly. “I think we’d better talk.”
Jadzia takes her cue, leaning down to rub the dog’s ears. “I’ll leave the three of you alone. Let me know what you’ve decided.”
Kathryn nods mutely, her throat constricted with tears threatening to spill. This isn’t what the day was supposed to be like. She planned to go back home with a living, breathing, tail-waggling creature that would stay with her in the barely furnished apartment; they would keep each other company, share the daily grievances and learn to trust and love again; they would heal together and become whole again. There was no place in the plan for a kind-eyed man who sits down in the grass and pats the dog’s side, urging her to lie down next to him. There was no mention of Kathryn leaving the shelter on her own, swallowing yet another wave of tears.
A cold, wet nose touches her fingers, and Kathryn sniffles helplessly, looking down into a pair of slightly cloudy eyes and letting her legs fold under her, sitting cross-legged on the ground and burying her nose in the soft smelling fur. “Hey, girl,” she murmurs, scratching the collie’s flank, “what have you got me into this time?”
“I’m afraid I am responsible for that,” the stranger answers in the dog’s stead, grinning sheepishly from his place upon the grass, about three feet away. “I’m Chakotay.”
“Kathryn,” she nods stiffly, fingers tangling in soft fur. “You’re a friend of Jadzia’s?”
Chakotay frowns and tugs at his earlobe. “Did it look that way? I’m actually not from around here: I’ve only met her this morning. Guess I’m good with people?” he adds as a half-question; certainly good with women, is what Kathryn thinks in response, but doesn’t voice the thought. It’s not as if it’s his fault to have been born looking the way he does. She quickly abandons that line of thought, focusing on the problem at hand. She’s never been in a situation quite like this before, but from what little she understands about it, they’re supposed to be conducting some sort of an interview between themselves, to decide who gets to keep the dog in the end.
She’s thinking about the right question to open up with, when he speaks up, stroking the dog’s hide, “You’re from around here?” At her nod, he presses on, “Living by yourself?”
“I am now,” she replies, trying to forget an empty doggy bed, a bed stripped off her favorite sheets, shelves and closets opened forlornly. Chakotay looks at her expectantly, probably hoping to find out more, but that’s all she’s willing to give him for now. “I have quite a bit of time to take care of her, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He smiles, shakes his head gently. “I’m just trying to get to know you a little,” he says, still petting the dog, although his eyes are glued to Kathryn’s face, curious, but not demanding: soft. “I’ve never fought with anyone over a dog before, I’m completely out of my element here.” He leans back against one of the wooden poles of the fence, quirks his head to the side. “Well, I live alone as well, so we’re even here. May I ask what you do for living? Are you often out of the house?”
She shrugs, playing with the soft end of the collie’s ear. “I used to be—worked in a lab a lot. I’m a scientist, you see. Molecular physics. But right now I’m about to stay put for some time, and write a book on some research I’d done in Australia in the past two years. Yourself?”
He shakes his head with a smile, clearly impressed by her occupation. “Nowhere near that fancy.” He extends his hands towards her, palms up—Kathryn can see the callouses and small scratches, evidence of physical labor. “I’m a carpenter; wood sculptor. Artisan furniture, some house woodwork, the like. Just moved into a new house; I want to set up a studio around here.”
She frowns thoughtfully, understanding now. “So you’re starting afresh, and want a dog to be a… what? Commemoration of a new chapter in your life?”
“A simple company would suffice,” he answers casually, but there’s a sudden tension in the quirk of his lips. He pulls a flat blade of grass from its root, places it between the sides his thumbs and blows into his cupped hands, producing a sharp, sorrowful sound. “I don’t have much of that right now. You see, Kathryn,” he looks up into the sky, squinting, and laughs bitterly, “I’ve been in a rather… intense relationship with someone for the past year and a half. Recently I’ve found out that my girlfriend was copying my designs and selling them to one of the biggest manufacturers in the state. They put them in mass production and marketed them as original pieces, all rights reserved. I tried fighting them in court, but it only made me even more broke than I’d been.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she says with genuine compassion, looking down to find the collie watching him, her tail moving hesitantly. She nudges the animal gently with her foot and the dog turns, putting her head on Chakotay’s knee, and pressing her hind legs into Kathryn’s hip. “It’s always difficult when you get uprooted from your home, thrown straight into the deep end.”
He smiles, dismisses her worry with a shrug. “I like beginnings. I like challenges. Besides, you probably move around quite a bit yourself—you should know how to cope with change better than anyone.”
Oh, she should, shouldn’t she? “Well, I didn’t exactly expect my fiancé to leave me and take my dog along with him while I was away, so I probably know shit,” she snaps, angry—with herself for saying even this much, with him for making her admit it in the first place. The dog whimpers, turning to look at her, but she pats her on the back, urges her to lie back down. She doesn’t need pity right now, not even from an animal.
“Would you like to take her, then?” Chakotay’s voice is low and intense—she thinks the offer is a kind of apology, the only kind she’d accept right now, to be honest. She looks up at him, into those soft, open eyes; then back down to the dog, so comfortable and happy in his presence.
Maybe Phoebe was right after all. Maybe it is too early for her to make this kind of a commitment.
Maybe she’s been a fool to think that getting a dog would solve any of her problems.
“No, you do that,” she says, coming to a sudden, yet final decision and brushing grass off her jeans as she stands up. “She’ll probably be happier with you anyway.”
She leaves them in the meadow—the man and the dog—without as much as a second look.
–
Days pass in a blur, turn into weeks, a month, then another. She spends them cooped up at home, typing furiously, bent down over her laptop for hours at a time, until her bones creak in protest. She ignores half of the calls from her mother and sister, lets the therapist go and limits her everyday contact with people to emails and text messages. This is what she knows: following the course of a complicated reaction and deriving a sound hypothesis out of it; analyzing data and presenting new theories.
Physics is sound, most of the time. There’s no place for emotion: no place for mistakes.
She still can’t sleep at night, curled up in bed, avoiding what used to be Mark’s side.
–
One night in August, she gets up and walks barefoot to the living room window, looking out to the quiet street and thinking about people struggling to get through a day, a week, a month without a hitch—and yet still making the most of their lives, and being happy.
Then she thinks about herself, miserable by her own insistence to stay this way.
This isn’t me, she thinks. I can’t let it be me.
The following morning she buys a new bed, sends the final draft of her book to the editor, and contacts the lab to establish a new work schedule, starting as soon as possible.
She considers contacting Jadzia, too, but there really is no use—there is only one dog she would have wanted.
–
It’s probably one of the last warm days in September, and Kathryn is strolling through the local farmer’s market, choosing bell peppers and apples and putting them into an old-fashioned basket she carries on one arm, when her equilibrium is seriously compromised by a ball of fur colliding with her legs. She looks down at a familiar doggy face, and drops into a crouch immediately, a wide grin spilling across her face. “Hey, girl,” she says, allowing the overly exciting animal to lick her chin in greeting. “What are you doing here?”
“Trying to weasel me into a second visit to the butcher’s, I believe,” Chakotay says playfully from above her, and Kathryn raises herself back up to look at him. He looks more or less the same as he did two months ago, displaying a pair of terribly flattering dimples in a wide, friendly grin. “Hi. What are you doing here?”
“Hello. Stocking up my fridge,” she makes a vague gestures over her basket; from the way Chakotay’s eyebrows rise, she figures he’s noticed her paleness and weight loss and thinks the task long overdue. He wouldn’t be the first person to come to that conclusion.
“Good,” he nods, keeping any further comments to himself. “Would you mind tagging along once you’re done? I think Val missed you.”
“’Val’?”
“Short for ‘Valerie’. I would have preferred ‘Valjean”, but she is a girl, so…”
“A musical theater fan, Chakotay? I wouldn’t have put you down as one.”
“There’s plenty you still don’t know about me—Kathryn.” One of his dimples grows even more pronounced as his grin shifts ever so slightly, turning quite mischievous. He’s flirting with me, Kathryn thinks with a start, and then realizes something even more troubling: and I’m flirting right back, God help me.
He ends up carrying her groceries to her car, Val running between their legs and trying to tell Kathryn everything she’d missed in the past few months in her special, doggy way. At Chakotay’s insistence, Kathryn follows his car to a dog park at the outskirts of town and sits on the wooden bench with him, sharing a bad of apricots and watching Val play happily with other dogs. The collie keeps on returning to the bench, though, sniffing at their hands, making sure they’re still there—together.
“She’s been doing that a lot,” Chakotay says, halving a particularly big fruit and sharing it with Kathryn. “Looking for you. I think she really did miss you.”
Kathryn shrugs, biting into the proffered fruit. “She looks quite happy to be with you, though. I’m not sure I could have done this well by her if you gave her to me.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
She raises an eyebrow at him, intrigued. “Oh?”
“I was going to suggest that we tried some sort of a joint custody thing, though. You make her happy: and I think she makes you happy. Why lose something like this when you don’t have to? It’s not ‘do or die’, Kathryn. Compromise is what makes the world turn.”
“Not according to my experience,” she sighs, throwing a ball for Val to catch and following her progress instead of looking back at Chakotay.
“Then perhaps you should allow Val to help you build up new experiences. Look at her: she was half-blind, lost and abandoned—and now she’s thriving, even if I do say so myself. She let herself be cared for, and it did her a world of good. It might be the same with you.”
She shakes her head, not wanting to voice her opinion that it wasn’t as much as Valerie’s sudden passion for life as Chakotay’s gentle care that nursed her back to health, so it would not be the same in her case, now would it?—and then jumps a little as Val deposits a particularly slobbery ball into her hands. Chakotay laughs at both the dog’s grin and Kathryn’s startled expression, and pulls a packet of wet wipes out of his pocket. “I never go out of the house without them,” he explains, depositing the ball on the ground for Val to play with. “She’s very easily excitable.”
And then, just like that, he pulls her hands towards his lap and starts cleaning them with steady, gentle strokes, wiping off dog saliva and dirt, then running a clean wipe across her palms for good measure. “There you go,” he says, dropping the used wipes but not her clean hands. “All better, isn’t it?”
She nods, speechless, and finally looks up at him to find him staring at her with something akin to awe, and care, so much care; not pity, just—compassion, quiet understanding and a willingness to help. He grins down at her and releases her hands; she’s slow to drop them, pulling away from him without any haste.
“If not a joint custody—what would you say about a standing date for walks and play dates and such? I’m sure Val would appreciate it.” He pauses, drops his eyes for a second—there’s a new intensity in them when he looks back up at her. “As would I.”
She’s probably making some sort of a mistake that will come back and bite her in the ass sooner or later—but she nods anyway, and reaches for Val’s ball to throw it again, laughing at the eagerness with which the dog follows the projectile. “Alright. I’m sure we can work something out.”
“Good.” He looks down at her fingers, once again dirty from the ball, and raises an apricot up to her mouth. It should feel strange, accepting food from a man she’s only seen once before in such an intimate way—but as the sweet, ripe fruit passes her lips, Kathryn feels something settle within herself: a ripple of unease finally ceasing to float.
Valerie comes back with the ball, but instead of giving it back to Kathryn, she drops it to the ground and sits down with her tongue lolling happily out of her mouth. Humans, she seems to be saying, looking between the two of them. You only complicate what should be simple. Can’t you take a cue from us dogs?
Perhaps we should, Kathryn thinks, watching Chakotay get up from the bench and urge Valerie to chase after him, making noises unbecoming any other grown up male but him.
She smiles, and readies a handful of wipes—something tells her she’s about to repay a favor.
As for feeding him, well: she does get to touch his lips by the end of the day: but there’s absolutely no food involved this time.
/end