Visiting with Reed

Raina

“Hey, Reed, over here!” I called to my brother, and it felt like half the coffee shop turned around to give me a hard look. I didn’t much care. I was just glad to see my twin brother, even if I knew it was only going to be for a half-hour before we both took off to work.

“Hey!” he called back, carefully navigating around the seats with his cup of coffee in hand. He slipped into the seat opposite me and let out a long sigh.

“How can this day be hard already?” he asked me, though I knew it was a rhetorical question.

“What happened?” I asked, checking my watch. It was only eight in the morning, but I knew my brother could have already gotten himself wrapped up in something serious. A lot of the clients he was representing were overseas, which meant that serious shit could go down overnight and he wouldn’t know anything about it until he woke up and checked his messages in the morning.

“It seems like Marco wants his hearing moved up a few weeks,” he explained. “Something about a family wedding? I’m not sure. It means that everything has to go into hyperdrive for a while.”

“Yeah, and you’re just so averse to working more,” I teased.

He grinned at me. “Am I that transparent?”

“You’re a workaholic,” I told him. “I don’t know where you get it from.”

“Yeah, like you don’t spend all day, every day doing more than you have to,” he shot back.

I grinned and held up my hands. “Hey, no rest for the wicked, right?”

“Raina, you’re a vet,” he said. “I don’t think you could get further from wicked if you tried.”

I took a sip of my coffee. He had a point. I supposed the two of us probably had the most stereotypical do-gooder jobs anyone could have come up with. I was a vet, and he was a lawyer who worked his ass off to bring cases that were being ignored in front of judges who could actually hear them. Even though he was younger than me—by ten minutes—we had the same drive to try and make the world a better place.

“You should take some more time off work,” I told him, playing the fretting big sister. We hardly saw each other, given how demanding both our jobs were all the time, and I needed to cram in all my motherly worrying over him into the half-hour we grabbed coffee every morning.

“And so should you, but neither of us are actually going to do that, are we?” he said.

I shrugged. “Nice idea though, right?”

“Nice idea,” he said.

“You know I’m so proud of you,” I told him, as though I didn’t tell him this every time I had more than a single glass of wine in me.

“I know.” He grinned, and he reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “Right back at you.”

“You can actually say the words, ‘I’m proud of you,’ you know?” I said playfully.

He cocked his head at me. “Okay, I’m going to start expressing my emotions right about the time that you start taking more time off work. Deal?”

“Deal.”

We chatted a little about the weather and gossiped about the couple we normally saw in here every day who hadn’t turned up for a few days in a row now. Had they split? Run off with other people?

I had little to no dating life to speak of for myself, so the most excitement that I got was talking over what could have been happening with complete strangers. Sad? For sure. But it was also fun and just the distraction I needed before I jumped headfirst into the long day of work that was ahead of me.

We bid each other farewell with a hug at the door and then took off to our respective offices. I didn’t have far to walk to mine, but Reed liked to jog to his just to squeeze in his workout. I didn’t know where he got the motivation to focus on keeping in shape. The best I could manage was running around the veterinary clinic all morning and hoping that it was enough to earn the bag of chips I practically inhaled with my afternoon coffee to keep me going.

I got to the clinic just before it opened. Thank goodness Hannah was there to open up for me. She was our tech and our receptionist all in one, or at least, she had to step up to that plate after Rita, my business partner, had gone on maternity leave. Things had been nonstop hectic since she had so selfishly headed off to have her baby, but if I was being honest, that was just the way I liked it.

“Morning,” I called as I dumped my bag in the makeshift staffroom we had converted out of a small closet next to the door.

“Morning!” she called back, ever cheerful, even in the face of the packed schedule we had today. It was unusually busy for a Monday, and I could be guaranteed that I would get a few last-minute emergency calls as well, whether we liked it or not.

“Good weekend?” I asked her as I went to clean myself up and get the back room ready for our first visitor.

“What’s a weekend again?” Hannah asked, pulling a face. “I think I’ve forgotten about them since Rita left.”

“Yeah, me too,” I agreed. I had been ordering in new supplies all weekend long over microwave meals, hoping we weren’t going to run out of shit before the end of the month when all our payments rolled over. I knew I should have been taking more time to myself, but that just wasn’t how it worked in this job. And I was just fine with that.