I have a fracture to splint, a vomit situation to manage, and only a few days to figure out how to survive being fake-in-love with a man I'm really in love with.
No big deal, right?
Chapter 3
Rules of Engagement
Arjun
Ihave made a calamitous error, and I am currently standing outside the source of that error's apartment building, holding a leather-bound notebook and questioning every decision I have made since approximately 4:47 p.m. yesterday.
Casey Welling lives in a walk-up in Kensington Market. Of course he does. The building is old Victorian brick, slightly crooked, wedged between a vintage record shop and a Trinidadian roti place that is pumping warm, spice-thick air directly onto the sidewalk. There are bicycles chained to the railing. A hand-painted sign on the door reads “PLEASE DON'T LET THE CAT OUT” in cheerful block letters, despite the fact that I am reasonably certain this is a no-pets building, which means either the sign is aspirational or the tenants are operating a covert feline underground.
It is a Sunday morning. The February sky is a flat, miserable grey, and the sleet from yesterday has hardened into a treacherous crust of ice on every surface. I am wearing a charcoal cashmere overcoat, Italian leather gloves, andOxford shoes that are inappropriate for Canadian winter conditions but are the onlyfootwear I own that isn't surgical. I look absurd. I am aware that I look absurd. I look like a man who got lost on his way to a Mayfair dinner party and ended up in a neighbourhood that sells artisanal hot sauce out of repurposed shipping containers.
I check my watch. 10:02 a.m. I told Casey I would arrive at precisely ten. I am two minutes late because I circled the block four times in my car, conducting what I can only describe as a mobile crisis assessment.
Here is what I have determined during those four circuits:I have committed myself to a deception of staggering proportions. I have selected as my co-conspirator the same man who once got a candy cane stuck in his hair during the hospital Christmas party and had to have it surgically extracted by a laughing scrub nurse. I am going to bring this man to my mother's estate in Rajasthan and present him to eighty-plus members of the Kapoor family as the love of my life.
This is going to be an unmitigated disaster.
I press the buzzer for apartment 3B. A tinny speaker crackles to life.
“Yo!”
I close my eyes. “Casey. It's Arjun.”
“Yeah, I know! I can see you on the camera.You've been circling the block.Come up, the door sticks so just shove it with your shoulder.”
The door buzzes. I shove it with my shoulder. It does not open. I shove harder. It does not open. I am a neurosurgeon. I have separated fused cranial plates with micro-instruments. I should be able to open a door.
I put my full body weight into it, and the door explodes inward with a violence that sends me stumbling into a narrow hallway that smells like cumin and Tide laundry detergent. Somewhere above me, I hear a bark.
Not a bark. A detonation. A deep, booming, chest-rattling BOOF that reverberates down the stairwell like cannon fire.
I climb three flights of stairs with increasing trepidation.The barking grows louder, accompanied by the distinct sound of enormous paws scrabbling on hardwood and a muffled “Oliver, OFF, buddy, we talked about this, OLIVER” from behind the door of 3B.
The door swings open, and Casey fills the doorframe like a human barricade. He is wearing grey sweatpants. The sweatpants are doing a great deal of structural work. I make a brisk, professional decision not to perform any further analysis below the equator of this man and lift my eyes, which is a tactical error of a different magnitude, because his t-shirt, faded Toronto Maple Leafs blue, is stretched so tightly across his chest that I can identify the individual heads of his pectoralis major without the aid of an imaging study. His blond curls are sleep-chaotic, pushed in seventeen different directions by what was presumably a pillow but might as well have been the hand of a benevolent god with a particular aesthetic agenda. He has a mug of coffee in one hand that reads “WORLD'S OKAYEST DOCTOR” in aggressive block letters.
I am, I note with detached clinical interest, experiencing a brief tachycardic episode. This is a normal physiological response to climbing three flights of stairs. I have a medical degree. I know how cardiovascular systems work.
“Hey! Come in, come in.” He steps back, grinning, and I step over the threshold. Into chaos.
Casey Welling's apartment is the physical manifestation of someone who has never once in their life heard the word “minimalism” and thought, yes, that's for me. Every single square foot of the small apartment is occupied. There are bookshelves stuffed past capacity, paperbacks jammed horizontally on top of vertically shelved hardcovers, medical textbooks stacked beside dog-earedTerry Pratchett novels. There is an overstuffed corduroy sofa in a shade of burnt orange that I suspect was purchased secondhand. There is a coffee table buried under hockey magazines, a half-completed jigsaw puzzle of a moose, and a plate with the remains of what appears to have been toast. The walls are coveredin framed photos everywhere: Casey in a hockey jersey, arms around teammates; Casey on a dock somewhere, sun-browned and laughing; a woman with the same warm blue eyes and chaotic blonde curls, who I assume is his mother, holding a pie.
There is also a blanket on the floor that is covered in so much golden fur it has achieved sentience.
And then there is Oliver.
Oliver is agoldendoodle who obviously didn’t get the memo about being hypoallergenic and non-shedding. I know this because Casey has mentioned him approximately nine hundred times in the two years we have worked together. What Casey has failed to adequately convey is that Oliver is not a dog.Oliver is a geological event. He is enormous, easily eighty pounds, with a massive, curly golden coat, liquid brown eyes the size of plums, and a tail that is currently wagging with such force that it is clearing the coffee table of magazines in rhythmic, devastating sweeps.
He sees me. His entire body vibrates. He lets out another BOOF, this one pitched upward with an almost musical quality of unhinged joy, and then he launches.
“Oliver, no. Oliver. OLIVER.”
Casey's warning comes approximately one-point-three seconds too late. Eighty pounds of ecstatic goldendoodle hits me squarely in the chest, and I stagger backward into the door frame, my leather notebook flying from my hands. Oliver is on his hind legs, his massive paws planted on my shoulders, his enormous pink tongue making a concentrated, dedicated attempt to lick every square centimetre of my face. He smells like peanut butter and wet carpet.
“Oh my God, I'm so sorry, he does this with everyone, he has no concept of personal space.” Casey is grabbing Oliver's collar, trying to haul him off me, butthe dog has the approximate mass and determination of a small horse and is not going anywhere.” Oliver. Down. Off. This is not how we make good first impressions,buddy.”