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“Come on, sweetheart,” Jack murmurs as he watches Goldie carefully limp out of the backseat, balancing precariously on her left front leg on her landing as the other, wrapped in a thick layer of gauze, is kept carefully off the ground. “Good job, Goldie.”
Goldie steadies herself, tongue lolling to the side as she stares back up at him with warm, brown eyes. She’s entirely too enthusiastic for the situation, Jack supposes — she’d come in from one of the local shelters with a nasty bite in her front paw, and the infection had left her rather ill. She’s on the mend, but he’s worried about her — the first two nights had required round-the-clock monitoring of her temperature, hydration levels and general liveliness.
She’s on a cocktail of antibiotics to keep the fever at bay, but none of the shelter volunteers could manage her care at home, and Jack’s always been too soft on the clinic’s animals. It’s not the first time one of their patients has come home with him — though he’s not the only vet tech working at the clinic, he’s usually the one who ends up taking the critical cases home — those that require full-time monitoring, or the kind of care they can’t fully offer at the clinic.
Case in point: Goldie. She’s an adorable five-year old Golden Retriever, who’d been turned over to the shelter because of an unfortunate barking habit. It’s nothing that she can’t be trained out of, eventually — but her previous owners hadn’t been willing to invest, apparently. She’d only been at the shelter for two days when she’d gotten in a spat with a particularly unamused terrier — and thus, she’d ended up at the clinic Jack just so happens to work at.
There’s already a polaroid of her stuck on his fridge — Jack takes a picture of all the patients that come home with him for a few days of care, and marks down carefully whether they made a full recovery or if his efforts had been in vain. It’s always a risk, taking on the most difficult and delicate patients, the ones left too close at death’s door for comfort — but he makes sure to remember them all. His fridge is half-covered in polaroids taped up and down — a few marked with a date of passing, and others with a second photo taken after they’ve made a full recovery.
It’s his own way of handling the constant worry thrumming behind his sternum — it’s nearly impossible to “leave work at the door,” as Lula tends to put it, when work has big, brown eyes staring sadly at you whenever you leave.
As if to drive the point home, Goldie shuffles a little closer and nudges his leg with her nose, as though telling him to hurry up. Jack huffs out a laugh and reaches down to run his fingers through the soft fur on the top of her head, watching her eyes close a little in appreciation.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re going,” he mutters, dragging his backpack off of the backseat and slinging it onto his shoulders, stacking the two boxes of paperwork on top of each other and balancing them upright as he closes the car door with his hip. “You’re not very patient for a patient, you know.”
Goldie huffs out a sound that’s likely intended to be a bark, coming out half-air, and Jack clicks his tongue in sympathy as he watches her eyes close tiredly again. She’s still running a rather spectacular fever, and the brief surge of energy she got after the car finally stopped and she was allowed out is already starting to diminish.
He shuffles the two of them through the entrance of his apartment building, watching the elevator doors slide open no sooner than he’d pressed the button. “Look at that,” he coos as Goldie watches the thin gap between the floor and the elevator’s bottom warily, “we’re in luck today. Come on, honey, we’re almost there.”
She flops down against his legs while they’re waiting, and Jack hums soothingly as the elevator doors slide closed again and they start their slow ascent up to the second floor.
It’s a relatively nice apartment building — he’d lucked out in getting it, the landlord picking him out of a seemingly endless slew of applicants for reasons he’s still not clear on. He’s not about to complain, though — despite the old building, the walls are thick enough that the noise filtering in is tolerable, and the neighbours have been nothing short of welcoming — even though he has yet to meet the mysterious new neighbour who’d moved in a little over a week ago.
He’s desperately curious — Lula’s already giddily assured him the new neighbour’s a “total hottie,” even though she’d seen him for less than four seconds in the complete dead of night. Jack’d been coming home off a late shift and Lula had kindly offered to bring over take-out — and apparently the new guy had shuffled out of his apartment right when she’d come out of the elevator.
They hadn’t even exchanged words — he’d nodded, apparently, and Lula says she nodded back even though Jack doubts she actually remembered to. Her social skills are appalling — rivalling his, and it’s part of the reason they’re such good friends.
It’s left him with more questions than answers, though — why was their mystery neighbour leaving his apartment at two in the morning? Did he have a nightly job, or was he sneaking out for nefarious reasons? He’d prefer not to have a drug dealer for a neighbour — it’d be just his luck.
The elevator dings — an awful, off-pitch sound, and Jack blinks himself out of his reverie when Goldie leaps to her feet, a bark immediately cut off by a sharp whine when she lands on her injured paw.
“Oh, honey,” Jack soothes, even as she shrinks back and stares at the elevator doors accusingly, as though they were to blame for her decision to bark at the noise. “It’s okay, I’ll have another look when we get inside. You have to be more careful.”
She trudges after him through the corridor as he makes his way to his apartment, eyes flickering over to the door next to his. There’s no noise coming from inside the apartment — no sign at all that his new neighbour is home, and not for the first time Jack wonders if the place is actually inhabited, or if the guy renting it is just using it as storage.
It’d be crazy to rent an apartment just to store furniture, but stranger things have happened in New York, and the lack of noise has been almost eerie. Maybe they’ve not moved in yet, but they’re just getting stuff situated — aside from a single door opening and closing a little over a week ago, and Merritt from across the hall swearing up and down he’d seen someone shove a couch through the doorway, there hasn’t been any evidence of anyone living here.
Jack fumbles for the keys in his pocket, tugging insistently as the keyring snags on the inside of the fabric, and he turns back to the front door. The lock’s been getting a little rusty, requiring a forceful jiggle at a certain angle to open, and with one arm still balancing boxes, he can’t quite get it right.
Goldie tugs on her leash, reaching to sniff at the leaves of an ugly, plastic potted plant across the hallway, and Jack swallows a curse as the movement jars the boxes. The end of the leash is wrapped around his wrist — the same one that he’s using to balance the boxes, and the jiggling of his key takes on a slightly more desperate speed as he tries to get the door open before they fall.
There’s a click, and for a moment Jack grins in victory — until he realises the click isn’t the sound of his door unlocking, but rather — the door next to him.
Several things happen at once. Goldie jumps up at the noise, leaping for their neighbour’s door as it swings open, the movement sharply jerking Jack’s wrist and tugging it out from underneath the boxes. “Shit—” Jack hisses as he stumbles to the side, years of practice and dexterity kicking in as his reflexes try to catch the boxes — and then he looks up into two piercing blue eyes, bright and glittering, and his reflexes fail him more spectacularly than he’d failed his third-year chemistry exam.
It could have been such a nice save, Jack would mourn later, thinking of how he might have been able to catch the boxes with his knee and keep them from tumbling onto the ground, or stuck out a foot to break their fall, or how he might have paid more attention and kept Goldie a little closer in the first place.
Instead, the boxes start plummeting towards the ground as Jack stares at crisp, clear blue eyes that widen in surprise when Goldie yanks Jack’s hand out from underneath the stack he’s carrying, and his reflexes kick in just in time for him to kick out a leg and launch the bottom box perfectly at the new neighbour’s shin.
There’s a pained grunt as the corner of the box makes contact with the spot just below the guy’s kneecap, the second box clattering to the ground and sending all the papers within scattering across the floor. Goldie barks again, the noise hoarse and low, and she jumps up at the new guy in excitement.
One foot still uselessly in the air, trying not to step on the two boxes now lying at his feet and with all of Goldie’s weight wrenching at his right wrist, Jack’s balance decides that it’s had quite enough of the entire ordeal and gives up, and with an ungraceful, entirely embarrassing noise, Jack topples over and crashes to the floor next to his over-excited patient and roughly forty technically-confidential files.
“Ow,” he grunts, quickly scrambling up onto his knees to make sure he hasn’t accidentally fallen on Goldie in his inadvertent acquaintance with the hallway floor, and then reaches out to run his hands through the long golden fur on her chest as Goldie hovers in front of him, hopping a little closer on her one good paw as she stares at him.
She’s okay, thankfully — and Jack realises quickly, suddenly, that he’s still kneeling in front of his neighbour’s open door, and that this is a truly terrible first meeting with whoever is the owner of both the apartment next door and the pair of bluest eyes he’s ever seen.
“I’m so sorry,” he stutters out, pulling himself to his feet and dusting as much dust and embarrassment off his trousers as he can manage. “I’m sorry,” he tells Goldie firmly, and then looks up at his neighbour and grimaces. “You have to be careful, honey.”
There’s a moment of stunned silence as his neighbour stares back — he’s all sharp angles and high cheekbones, with wavy brown hair swept across his forehead — and then uncomfortably clears his throat. “I was,” he says, and his voice is hesitant as he frowns down at Jack. “Are you— okay?”
You have to be careful, honey. Jack hears the words echo the moment they leave his mouth, and instantly debates simply turning around and walking away, finding a new place to live as of tonight. He’d apologised to his dog. He called a stranger honey.
Scratch that — he’d told the man to be be careful as though it’d been his fault that he’d tried to leave his house and instead had a box kicked at him, got jumped by a dog and then watched a stranger fall at his feet.
“I— No,” Jack stutters out, with all the elegance of a brick to the face, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean that — I meant it for her, you were being plenty careful, you shouldn’t have to be careful— Hi. Sorry, hi, I’m Jack.”
Jack holds out a hand — the same one with the pink leash still wrapped around it, and the neighbour’s brows furrow in amusement as he stares down at it, a slight uptick at the corner of his mouth. “I’m Daniel,” he says coolly, entirely too put together and collected for a man who’s just been kicked in the leg by a box, and he shakes Jack’s hand slowly. His skin is cold to the touch, and it’s more than a little distracting. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Oh, I highly doubt that,” Jack blurts out, and cringes back the moment he says it. Below him, Goldie whines, as though to signify that she, too, thinks he’s said the wrong thing again. “I just meant— Well, this can’t have been nice.”
“A simple hello would have sufficed,” Daniel says, and the slight smile widens into a full-out smirk, “but I suppose having boxes lobbed at me is sure to leave an impression.”
“She’s just so excited,” Jack says quickly by way of explanation, nodding his head down to gesture at Goldie as though there’s anyone else he could have meant, “she’s been cooped up for a while and she’s a little reactive — and you startled her, so she just jumped, and—”
“— so this is really my fault?” Daniel says, raising an eyebrow challengingly, even as his tone remains light and playful, and Jack shrugs before he knows it.
“No, not at all, you were just here, you know,” Jack rambles, and faintly he realises his heart is racing. Lula wasn’t lying in her initial assessment of his new neighbour, and he desperately wills his brain to catch up and stop saying random things, to focus on anything other than how pretty Daniel’s face is and how much he wants to stare at the blinding grin that’s turning smugger by the second. “She reacted to you, and then I wanted to catch the boxes and then you were there, and you’re very distracting, and I just—”
Daniel stares at him for a moment, blinking quickly, and then his face straightens into something slightly more neutral, though he can’t quite smooth the smile out of it. His eyes are sparkling an unfair amount given the lack of light in the corridor, Jack notes, and promptly wants to kick himself in the kneecap for letting himself be distracted again.
“I’m distracting, you say?” He sounds unreasonably fond, and Jack decides he must be hearing things. There’s no world in which this interaction ends in anything other than himself, weeping into his daily log over meeting an unfairly handsome guy and fucking up spectacularly, and his neighbour locking his door and filing a complaint to their landlord over their crazy disaster of an interaction.
Still, though — he stares at Daniel as he tilts his head in a silent request for an answer, and Jack ignores the heat that slowly starts rising to his cheeks. “I was trying to catch the boxes, and when I looked up your eyes were very blue — has anyone ever told you that?” Both Daniels’ eyebrows raise at that, an incredulous expression taking over the carefully neutral one he’d had before, and Jack blinks as he tries to backtrack. “They are, and it just surprised me and then I kicked a box at you and fucked it all up, I’m so sorry— hold on, are you okay?”
“I’ll be okay,” Daniel says mildly, leaning to rest against the doorpost, “though I might require reparations for emotional damage.”
“Not the physical damage?” Jack says, and it’s only when he tries to put his hands in his pockets that he realises that he’s still holding Daniel’s hand in what might possibly be the world's longest handshake. They’ve long since passed the acceptable designated handshake-time for strangers, let alone neighbour-to-recently-assaulted-by-a-box-neighbour.
He pulls his hand back as if burned, and can’t keep the grimace off his face. “Truly, I’m so sorry about— all of this, really. Reparations, definitely — I don’t really know what would help, I can get you, uh—” Rabies medicine? A tetanus shot? Several pounds of grain-free dog food?
“—A coffee,” Daniel interrupts smoothly, even though his fingers are twitching where Jack’s let go of his hand as though he misses the contact already. Ridiculous, Jack hisses to himself, and then drags his attention back as Daniel keeps speaking, “from the cafe across the street. You’ll have to take me there, of course — I’ve only just moved in, and I don’t know my way around yet.”
“Of course,” Jack says instantly, and then, damningly, “it’s a date!” Daniel freezes, and Jack’s brain starts overheating as a flush starts creeping up his neck, embarrassment flaring up hotly. “Or, no, it’s not a date at all, it’s an appointment—” Oh, God, be normal, please be normal, “as we will be going out as two newly-acquainted people—” please stop talking “doing very normal, neighbourly things and enjoying libations at a local establishment—”
The more words that spill from his lips, the more incredulous Daniel looks, and Jack winces deeply as he casts his eyes down, breaking the eye contact between them as he slows down, voice lowering into a mumble as he finishes, “— as neighbours are wont to do.”
The silence stretches on between them incriminatingly, not even Goldie making a noise to save him from the embarrassment, and Jack’s just about ready to simply turn tail and make a run for it — maybe he can ask Lula to swap apartments, or change his name and move to a different country altogether — when Daniel huffs out a quiet laugh and ducks forward a little, stepping closer to meet Jack’s eyes.
“While that sounds— nice,” he says, a brief halt before the word nice as though it’s a replacement for a different word, “what about going out as something… other than just, uh… what was it? Newly-acquainted people doing neighbourly things?”
Jack’s brain short-circuits, and he stares at Daniel rather dumbly for a moment as he tries to understand what the other man’s hinting at. Other than neighbours? What, as victim and perpetrator? Sworn mortal enemies?
He’s silent for too long, clearly, and Daniel shifts uncomfortably, hands tapping out nervous patterns on his sleeves — and for the first time, Jack realises he’s not as cool and collected as he’d seemed throughout this entire interaction. He’s nervous, too.
“Unless you’re spoken for,” he says quickly, and then he blanches, shaking his head. “Sorry, you probably— oh, God, right, the brunette, she went to your apartment— I’m so sorry, you’re probably together—”
“We’re not—!” Jack cuts in, entirely too quickly and entirely too eagerly, “Lula and I, I mean. She’s just a friend — a good friend. So I’m not. Spoken for, that is.”
“Oh,” Daniel says, rather intelligently, and then he clears his throat lightly. “So you’re— Uh. You wouldn’t be opposed, then? If we went as something— other than neighbours?”
“Not at all,” Jack admits, and he’s helpless to stop the excited grin from taking over his features. “That sounds— yeah. Quite the opposite.”
“Opposite of opposed, huh?” Daniel laughs, and Jack grins wider as he shrugs.
“I said what I said.” Jack leans down to swipe as many papers as he can back into the top box and stacks the two back onto each other again, this time setting them down on the floor to minimise the risk of dropping them again. “For what it’s worth, I really am sorry about the box.”
“Just don’t do it again and we’ll be fine,” Daniel offers, and steps out the door, pulling it close behind him. “I really have to get going, but— would you have time tomorrow?”
“Yeah, definitely,” Jack side-steps to let Daniel pass, and turns back to the key still sticking out of the lock of his own front door. “One non-neighbourly coffee date, tomorrow — same time?”
“Perfect,” Daniel agrees, “Just ring the doorbell when you’re ready. Oh, and feel free to bring your dog along as well — just so long as you’re being careful… honey.”
The term of endearment falls mockingly off his tongue, and Jack swallows any retort in favour of turning his head back to the front door, even as heat blazes on his cheeks. Daniel laughs — a high, clear sound, and Jack’s face doesn’t stop burning until long after it’s disappeared behind the ding of the elevator.
Goldie follows him inside cheerfully, her wagging tail adding insult to injury even as she limps over the threshold. “You’re a menace,” Jack tells her, pointing one accusing finger at her and breaking into a laugh as she licks it. “I swear — you knew what you were doing.”
Goldie yawns with a squeak and shakes herself out, trudging off to the dog bed that Jack’s installed for her in the living room proudly. He’s unwillingly amused at the whole thing, too — aside from his own deeply embarrassing lack of social skills, Daniel had seemed oddly charmed — and if not for Goldie, the entire interaction might have gone completely different. He might not have met Daniel at all, today.
He sinks onto the couch and buries his face in his hands, relishing in the coolness of his fingers against the hot blush on his cheeks. He’s got a date tomorrow. He’s got an actual date with his new neighbour, who isn’t just attractive — which he’ll grudgingly have to admit to Lula — but also has a sense of humour and a tolerance for being pelted with boxes, apparently, which does indicate a rather poor taste.
Lula’s going to have a conniption, Jack decides — and the phone’s already ringing by the time he’s decided that she can never, ever get the details of just how they met. Every single embarrassing detail will have to be cut out, and even then — he’s going to have to ask her for advice after she’s done laughing at him.
The phone clicks, and with a giddy smile on his face, Jack admits that she was right — the new neighbour definitely is his type.