Love at First

by Kate Clayborn

  He almost regretted it, almost wished he could take it back. As best he could, he tried not to bring it up with people; it was nearly always embarrassing for everyone involved. It wasn’t so much that it was hard for him to say it—he’d had a lot of time to get used it, after all. It was more that it was hard for people to hear it. They’d stumble through some kind of apology, or worse, ask questions he didn’t want to answer. Bringing it up now—when she was still standing close enough that she could’ve taken his hand again, if she’d wanted to—it felt like a cheap shot.

  But it was a cheap shot that saved him, because for a second there, he’d almost forgotten why Nora Clarke was not for him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and to her credit, she didn’t stumble at all. “I really, really am.”

  He shrugged, and he hoped he made it look casual. Unaffected. “I’d like to get back to it, if you don’t mind.”

  “Right, of course,” she said, carefully taking a step to the side, avoiding the newspapers. This time, he didn’t even try following her to the door.

  But when she got there, she paused and turned back toward him. “I’ll see you,” she said, but he didn’t really notice that particular echo.

  Instead, what he noticed—what he thought about long after she left—was how she’d been using the thumb of one of her hands to rub the palm of the other.

  The palm that had been pressed to his.

  Chapter 5

  “He’s not happy.”

  Nora looked past Deepa’s shoulder to the conference room door. Maybe Austin would come back after a few minutes, but honestly, she doubted it. The guy wasn’t known for showy displays of temper, so even a slight frown followed by a request to “pick this up later”—before their meeting timer had even sounded!—meant he’d well and truly had it. By now he was probably back at his ruthlessly tidy desk, squeezing the Verdant Media–branded stress ball he kept in a box on the upper-right corner.

  “Well, we’re doing our best,” said Nora, trying to keep up the breezy, unbothered tone she’d maintained through the last forty-five minutes of this video call. It was her “business-as-usual” tactic, the one she’d been honing since Austin had grudgingly agreed to let her work remotely. As long as she acted like nothing important for her had changed, she figured, there’d be no reason for him to second-guess his decision. “It’s not like the client is making it easy.”

  “Ugh,” Deepa said, rolling her eyes. “You don’t know the half of it. At dinner last week she asked whether we should consider building a game app. She showed me the bitmoji she uses of herself as an ‘inspiration pic.’”

  Nora shifted in her uncomfortable desk chair, suppressing a wince. Some of her discomfort was definitely about this bitmoji story, but most of it was about the you don’t know the half of it. She didn’t know the half of it, because she never went to client dinners or lunches or coffees or juices now. She herself didn’t miss them—they’d always been the worst part of the gig—but she knew that Austin missed her at them. More than once, Austin had privately lamented to Nora about Deepa’s F-grade poker face. That eye roll Nora had just watched through the screen of her laptop probably made an appearance at the dinner table, too.

  “What if we try redoing the color scheme?” Nora offered, trying to stop herself from wading into this particular tide pool of guilt. She lived here now, and that was all there was to it. Austin needed to get used to not having her in San Diego, and the only way to make that happen was to keep doing what she was good at, and showing him how indispensable she was. “She’s always seemed lukewarm ab—”

  “She’s not a good fit for us,” said Deepa. “She’s going to henpeck us to death before she realizes that she wants to be a celebrity more than she wants to save the world.”

  Nora sighed, knowing Dee was right. When Austin had first started Verdant Media, his mission had been crystal clear: to become the premier digital design and marketing agency for sustainability-focused brands. Ten years ago, it’d been boutique, but now it was pretty much booming—Nora herself was currently maintaining thirty-five different major websites and had seven projects in the queue for build-out. Most of her accounts were corporate, but recently Austin had started bringing in clients like this one—“eco-influencers,” he called them, people who did things like stage Instagram photos of homemade cleaning products in pretty spray bottles.

  Nora didn’t love this new trend, but it was Austin’s company, and Austin had given Nora her first shot as an intern when she was only twenty years old. Because of Austin, she was one of only a handful of people who’d had a job in hand when she graduated. Because of Austin, she’d gotten to have a front-row seat to the small firm’s success for almost ten years. And because of Austin, she got to keep doing what she loved, what she was good at, even though she wanted to do it from all the way across the country.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Nora said, closing out all the eco-influencer-related windows she’d had up on her second, larger monitor, and blinked in relief. She still hadn’t gotten the setup right in here, still felt like everything was too close to her face when she worked.

  Over on her laptop screen, Deepa went out of frame for a second, and then came back in, resettling in her chair with a small metallic pouch in front of her. Nora smiled at this new version of an old routine. When she’d still worked in the office, she and Dee would often debrief in the office building’s third-floor bathroom, which was almost always deserted. Dee would touch up her makeup and they’d chat about work or life or whatever. They did the same now, only with the video-call app serving as the makeup mirror. Nora supposed it was a little odd, talking to someone who was doing an extreme close-up of her mascara or lipstick application, but then again, Dee was really good at makeup.

  “Okay,” Deepa said. “Give me the update. What happened with the new guy?”

  This time, Nora didn’t even bother suppressing her wince. What happened was that she’d made an absolute mess of it, and so she’d been hiding out in her apartment for a day and a half, trying to recover—not only from what she’d pushed him into revealing about himself, but also from what touching him had revealed about herself. This morning, for the first time in months, she’d done 4:00 a.m. from her bed, her covers caught up around her legs and her eyes staring up at the ceiling, trying desperately to blink away the memory of an incredibly vivid, incredibly inappropriate dream she’d had about Will Sterling and what he might be able to do with the palm of his hand.

  “Uh,” Nora said.

  “Let me guess. Your ‘kill him with kindness’ plan backfired. I told you, hide a whole fish somewhere in there. You’ve got a key. The smell will be unreal.”

  Nora shook her head firmly while Dee did something with a highlighter brush that deserved a YouTube tutorial. “No, we’re not doing stuff like that. We’re not criminals.”

  She got another eye roll for that, but Nora knew that Deepa wouldn’t really go through with fish-hiding, either. Probably.

  “Then you’re not going to stop him, I hate to tell you. You know my building has like twenty Airbnb units now? And I’ll bet at least a few of my other neighbors rent out their places during Comic-Con this year.” She paused mid-highlight. “Wait, should I do that?”

  “No,” Nora snapped, annoyed, even though Deepa lived in a twelve-story building with a rooftop pool that bore no meaningful relationship to Nora and her neighbors’ beloved six-flat.

  Dee shrugged, rooting around in her bag. “Good money, though.” When Nora didn’t respond, she looked up, a brushed gold tube of lipstick in her hand and her eyes narrowed. “Why are you acting so strange?”

  “I’m not!” Shoot, she’d said it too loud. Deepa’s eyes narrowed even more.

  “You are. Your face has that look about it. It’s the same face you had the whole time we worked on the—”

  “Don’t say it,” Nora interrupted, her face heating automatically. Only a few months before she’d moved to Chicago, she and Deepa had been coll
aborating on the launch of a sustainable sex toy brand’s digital platform. Nora had never quite recovered from having to say the word dildo during a work presentation.

  “Eleanora!” Deepa said, her formerly narrowed eyes now wide as saucers. “Did you do something with this man?!”

  “What? No! He’s not even my type.” This was a lie, because Nora didn’t really have a type. If you went solely by her largely disappointing dating history, her type was probably something like “men who talk about themselves too much.” That described the type for a lot of women out here in the twenty-first century, she figured.

  Dee was still staring through the laptop screen like she could see straight into Nora’s dirty dreams, though, so she absolutely had to correct this misimpression.

  “We had this little—I don’t know. I caught the edge of my foot on some stuff in the apartment and tripped, and then we . . .”

  “Had sex?”

  “No! Keep your voice down; we’re at work!”

  “I’m at work. You’re at home.”

  Nora ignored that. “We didn’t have sex. He—he grabbed my hand, and then . . . I don’t know. We stayed like that. For a few seconds.”

  Deepa blinked. “You . . . held hands.” She tipped back her head and laughed. “This is the most you story. So then what?”

  Nora did not want to do the then what. Thinking of the look on Will’s face when he’d said I’m an orphan was already one of the top ten moments in life she did not want to relive, just ahead of talking about dildos in a conference room. She’d never heard someone call themselves an orphan. It was a little Dickensian, to be honest, but then again, Nora had always liked to read.

  Though judging by the look on Will’s face, he’d closed the book.

  Firmly.

  She shrugged. “Nothing. I think it was a blip. We both remembered ourselves, I guess. I tried to get him to reconsider, and he assured me that he won’t.”

  “Hide. The. Fish.” Dee was mid-lipstick application, so it sounded more like Ide. Uh. Ish.

  “I don’t want to ruin his life,” she said, although what she really meant was I don’t want to hurt his feelings. She’d had the sense she’d done that, somehow. When he’d dropped her hand, she’d felt it in her stomach. Like a tiny stone of regret had lodged itself there.

  Then again, what about the feelings of her neighbors? What about sitting with Emily yesterday, encouraging her to stop reading articles online about problems with short-term rentals? What about the way Marian had looked at her with expectation by the mailboxes, or the way Jonah had shaken a small fist at her and said, “We’ll get him next time!”

  What about what Nonna would want?

  “I only want him to . . . I need him to understand why this won’t work here.”

  Deepa made a humming noise as she put the lipstick away and pulled out a setting spray. In the third-floor bathroom, if they were working out some design problem, this is the point at which Deepa usually got ideas. It was like all the touch-ups were brain calisthenics for her.

  “No offense, Nora, but since you’ve moved back there you have told me no fewer than six things that your neighbors do that would absolutely have me packing a go bag and fleeing back to the wide world of living with people my own age.”

  “That’s rude. They’re—”

  Dee waved a hand, twisting her fresh-painted lips. “They’re your family. And they’re great, I know. I’m sure he got the sense of that with the food drop-off, or whatever it was. But you need this guy to see the stuff that his future renters would find absolutely bizarre. The stuff you hardly even recognize as unusual.”

  Nora furrowed her brow, thinking. The fact that nothing came immediately to mind probably proved Deepa’s point, but then she looked down to the desk calendar and saw what she had written on it for tomorrow night. If she flipped the page, she’d see the same entry again, on the next month. And the next and the next.

  “Like a monthly poetry reading?” she said, not even really to Deepa.

  “There’s a monthly poetry reading at your apartment building? Uh, yes. I’d say that’s weird.”

  Nora’s mind was already racing with ideas. Where this kind of creativity download had been when Austin had been in the room and they’d been trying to figure out this situation with the eco-influencer from hell, she wished she knew, but it didn’t really matter now.

  “It’s not weird,” she muttered. Then she looked up and smiled through the screen at her friend. “But I’m about to make it a whole lot weirder.”

  At first, there was no doubt in Nora’s mind that she had Nonna’s full support.

  In the first place, there was the weather, which could be nothing less than a gift from above: warm but not humid, not a cloud in the dusky, early-evening sky, a light breeze fluttering the colorful line of paper lanterns strung up from one corner of the fence to the other. It’d seemed so unbelievably perfect, in fact, that Nora had even pulled up a radar app on her phone, double-checking to confirm there wasn’t some freak, fast-moving rainstorm on its way.

  But no—for the next six hours at least, it was nothing but clear skies ahead.

  And that was plenty of time for a poetry reading.

  It wasn’t the weather alone, though, that had Nora feeling confident. When she’d hung up the phone with Deepa yesterday, she’d set about making a list, and it’d been a long one—impossibly long, really—and when she’d made her way down to Marian and Emily’s afterward, nervous about how Marian would take a request to alter her monthly plans, she wasn’t actually sure she could get it all done.

  But like the weather, everything had fallen exactly into place. Marian hadn’t only been on board, she’d also—in the spirit of the great public school teacher she’d been for decades—set immediately to work on the evening’s . . . uh, elevated . . . agenda, while Nora and her other neighbors got to work on the logistics. Oh, nearly everyone they called last-minute could come? Great. The florist over on West Fullerton happened to have a whole bunch of flower crowns from a canceled event on deep discount? Terrific. Benny was looking to unload a bunch of that same American Wheat Ale he’d offered to Will a couple of days ago? Perfect. Hey, a guy two buildings down had a microphone and amplifier they could borrow? Well, why not?

  By seven, the backyard was packed, the air thick with conversation and the smell of the grilled meat Mr. Salas was proudly in charge of, having agreed to participate only if he had no poetry-related responsibilities.

  So really, the night only wanted for one thing.

  An appearance by the suddenly scarce Will Sterling.

  From her spot near the back fence, standing behind a “welcome” table she and Benny had set up earlier, Nora reached up to adjust the crown of daisies perched on top of her head, then moved her hand down to tug at the elastic band across the top of the off-the-shoulder cotton dress she’d chosen, a long, flowy thing that she thought matched the Late-in-May-Day theme they’d gone with. Beneath it, her feet were bare on the cool, dry blades of grass, and she tried to let the feeling ground her, keep her in the moment, but she kept fidgeting, kept looking up to see whether Will’s car would come rumbling down the back alley.

  He’d been around this morning, Emily had said; she’d seen him carrying two cans of paint into Donny’s place, but within a couple of hours she’d noticed his car was gone again, and he hadn’t made another appearance, not during all the time they’d been setting up. Nora had been under the assumption that he’d taken time off work, that his plan was to be at the building every day, every night. If he didn’t show, Marian would still have a great poetry reading, sure.

  But Nora would definitely have egg on her face.

  She was starting to give up hope, the prettily decorated box in front of her nearly empty of its contents, when Nonna came through again—Will’s car crackling along the gravel, pulling in to his spot—and she had to clasp her hands together to keep from raising them in victory.

  She felt a thrill of satisfaction
when he didn’t get out immediately. Since she couldn’t see him well through his windshield, she imagined the expression she most wanted him to have: eyes wide, jaw agape. She hoped she had him on the run already.

  But when he stepped out of his car and stood to his full height, closing his door behind him, he didn’t look like he was on the run.

  He looked calm and in control and extra handsome, because he had his terrible (terrific) glasses on. He was dressed less casually than she’d seen him before—not in scrubs or jeans or a faded T-shirt. Instead, he wore a pair of slim-cut, dark blue pants, a crisp, lighter blue button-up tucked into them, the sleeves rolled back neatly, almost to his elbows.

  She suppressed a sigh. Not a swooning sigh! An exasperation sigh, for sure.

  She tugged again at the elastic of her suddenly too-bohemian-seeming dress as she watched him approach. No need to be nervous, she scolded herself. You’re prepared for this.

  “Hi,” she said cheerfully. “Perfect timing!”

  But she was a little nervous, because for a second, when he stood in front of her, his eyes seemed to take her in, flower crown and then down, his gaze slipping briefly—so briefly, she might’ve imagined it—over the bare skin of her shoulders.

  He cleared his throat, reached up to adjust his glasses, and Nora thought: There. Right there is your type.

  “Whose party?”

  Nora shrugged, definitely not thinking about whether doing so made her shoulders look nice. “Everyone’s. The whole building! So glad you could make it.”

  “I’m pretty sure you know I didn’t have any intention of making it.” He looked around, his eyes snagging on the microphone across the yard. His brow lowered. “Whatever it is.”

  Nora smiled up at him. “It’s Marian’s monthly poetry reading!” She swept an arm out, gesturing to the whole setup. “Isn’t it great? It can get sort of loud, but it’s fun. Anyway, it’s good you’re here, to get a sense of it. Maybe you can leave a note for your . . . tenants, or whatever. So they know what to expect.”