Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

I was grateful for the excuse to escape when my rehabber friend Damian Rausch arrived to pick up both me and the red-shouldered hawk.
    The bird was less than thrilled about being grabbed just as he was settling down for the night, then stuck in a cat carrier and taken for a ride, and ultimately pinned on a cold steel table at the vet clinic. He protested the only way he could: he opened his beak and hissed. If Damian and I hadn’t been wearing falconers’ gauntlets, we might have lost a finger or two.
    “Ungrateful little bastard,” Damian said affably. He restrained the bird’s body while I extended its wing under the tube head of the x-ray machine. Damian, who looked a little like a hawk himself with his beaky nose and hooded dark eyes, had been rehabbing raptors for twenty years, and showed none of the tension I felt at handling such a dangerous yet exquisitely delicate creature.
    The clinic, closed for the night, was eerily quiet around us. From inside the cubicle housing the x-ray controls, Luke called out, “Ready. Hold it.”
    The machine hummed. The hawk’s body vibrated with rapid breaths and racing heartbeats.
    “Okay, now,” Damian said. “Let him up real easy.”
    We synchronized our movements, slowly allowing the hawk to get to its feet and fold its wing. The bird was back in the carrier and glaring at us from behind the grilled door when Luke came out with the developed radiograph. He slapped it onto the lighted view box. We studied the white-on-black image of a hollow bone healed around a tiny metal rod.
    “Looks great,” Luke said, beaming at me as if he took a personal pride in my achievement.
    “Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.” It was the first surgery of this type I’d ever done. “When I see him flying free, I’m going to pop the cork on a bottle of champagne.”
    “I want to go with you when you release him,” Luke said. “I’ll supply the bubbly.”
    “Won’t be long,” Damian said. He hoisted the carrier off the table. “Okay, pal, let’s get you to your new accommodations.” He had a big flight cage where the bird could get back into hunting condition before being freed. “You ready to go?” he asked me.
    “I’ll give you a ride home, Rachel,” Luke put in quickly. “It’s right on my way.”
    My house wasn’t even close to his route home. I hesitated, reading the question in his eyes. For the last two days I’d avoided being alone with him for a second, and it had felt like a form of self-torture. The so-near-and-yet-so-far method. Doubts clamored in my head, but suddenly I wanted him so much I thought I couldn’t get through another hour without him.
    “Okay, thanks,” I said, trying to sound casual.
    Damian glanced between us, then nodded with the same knowing expression I’d been seeing on my coworkers’ faces. Luke and I hadn’t so much as touched since his visit to the house, but we must be giving off some kind of signals. Alison, the desk manager, had even taken to wiggling her dark eyebrows at me when Luke walked by.
    When Damian was gone, we were alone on the darkened main floor of the clinic. Under the pale security light in the reception area, Luke put his arms around me and said, “I missed you today. The place seems kind of empty when I know I’m not going to see you coming around a corner.” His lips skimmed mine. “You know I’ll take you straight back to your house if you want me to, but—” His smile was nervous, boyish. “Will you come home with me for a while first?”
    The uncertainty and longing in his voice brought a rush of warmth that dissolved my doubts. “Yes,” I said, and put my arms around his neck and kissed him. I was going to do this, and I wouldn’t let myself think about anything else.
    ***
    He lived in a highrise off Leesburg Pike, in a congested area ten minutes from the clinic and a world away from the quiet streets of McLean.
    Going up in the elevator, Luke pulled me into his arms for a kiss that lasted to the eighth floor. The door opened on a white-haired woman carrying a small plastic basket of laundry. When we separated quickly, she smiled and said, “Don’t stop on my account. It looks like fun.” 
    Laughing, his arm around my shoulders and mine around his waist, we walked down the long hallway to his door.
    It was hard to believe he’d lived in this apartment for weeks. An open carton of books sat beside a half-filled bookcase. No pictures on the white walls. Venetian blinds, no