Can't Touch This (Can't Touch This #1)

“And you’re the best person now and forever, Ry.”

My cheeks ached from grinning but my heart hurt from loving this girl. Keeping it a secret (although a badly kept one seeing as I insisted on hugging her every chance I got) weighed on me. I wanted to say it out loud. I needed to say the words and make it real.

I wanted to know what it felt like when she knew one hundred percent that I was irrevocably in love with her.

But she was right.

Something of that magnitude was best kept for face to face.

I could wait.

One more night.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

———————

Vesper

“I’M SO GLAD I’M ON the pill.” I rubbed my forehead with the back of my surgical glove as Polly and I helped extract yet another puppy from the poor Peke-A-Tese. She’d been knocked up by a renegade Jack Russell who pillaged the neighbourhood.

Being slightly bigger than her and Jack Russell’s notoriously having large litters; her poor birth canal would suffer too much to deliver naturally. Both her and the puppies would’ve died if her owner hadn’t had the foresight to bring her in for an ultrasound with our fancy equipment and book in a C-section.

Amanda stood beside me, while another vet student, Sophie, stood beside Polly. After we extracted each puppy, the girls towelled off the amniotic fluid, wiped down their scrunched-up faces, used a syringe to extract any mucus from their noses, and flipped them onto their stomachs to rub their tiny backs, mimicking mum’s licking to wake them up.

So far we’d delivered four out of eight and each one was alive and mewling for milk.

We had to work fast.

“I’m just glad most humans statistically only give birth to one. I mean, I know there’s the freak odd case of octuplets but that’s normally because of meddling with science not nature.” Polly shuddered as she cut the umbilical cord on another puppy. “Is it wrong of me not to want children? Not because I don’t want to go through the pain of childbirth but because I hate the way the world is becoming with chemicals in our food and danger all around?” She looked up, her eyes wide and slightly sad while her face was covered by a surgical mask. We all wore hair nets and scrubs, hiding most of our features.

“I don’t think that’s stupid at all. I get it.” Handing over the second to last puppy to Amanda, I added, “I’m still on the fence about having a baby. Partly because of what you just said but mostly because I think I’d drive myself nuts trying to protect it. I’d be that mum, you know? The one that doesn’t let her child walk to school even though they’re sixteen and threatening to run away from home if they don’t get some independence.”

Amanda quipped. “My mum was like that. Smothered us. So we did the opposite. I was doing pot with the badass dropouts from school at fourteen just because I wanted to prove I could be stupid and stay alive.”

“There, you see.” I pointed at Amanda while looking at Polly. “My point is made. I think I’ll stick to cats and dogs and a pig or two.”

“A pig?” Polly startled, passing the last puppy to Sophie. “What the hell do pigs have to do with it?”

I giggled. “Whoops, I forgot to tell you. Ryder has a pigmy pig called Hippo. She’s a darling wee thing.”

“By wee you mean a perfect pork chop?”

“Don’t be mean.” I glanced at Amanda. “Place the litter into the incubator and mix up the formula like I showed you. We’ll finish up here and put the mum into recovery.”

Amanda nodded. “Okay.” She and Sophie took the brand-new squirmy life from the room. I didn’t entirely trust her, but Polly and I would be busy for the next thirty minutes sewing up this brave little Peke-A-Tese.

As we got to work doing something we knew inside out, Polly said, “It’s getting serious with him, isn’t it?”

I shrugged, pulling a needle through the small incision we’d made.

“Don’t you shrug me, Vessie. I know you and I’ve never seen you this way. You seem older but younger. Wiser but sillier. You seem to have a relaxation and nervousness all at the same time.”

“Wow, I sound like a basket case.”

“I wasn’t going to put it in so many words, but yeah.” Polly laughed softly. “Kinda are.”

“So if you already know why I’m acting so strange, you tell me if it’s serious or not.”