Love at First

by Kate Clayborn

  The second time, he was out in the hallway.

  It was mostly dark in the living room, a soft glow from the light left on above the oven, and when Nora first sat up, sweaty from her obviously broken fever, she thought at first—with no small sense of wholly unjustified disappointment—that he’d gone. But when she’d rubbed at her eyes and brought more of her senses back online, she’d heard the familiar sound of Jonah’s absurdly loud TV and noticed that the soft glow wasn’t only from the oven light; it was also coming through the narrow crack of Nora’s partially open front door. She’d hauled herself up from the couch, leaving behind the now too-warm blanket, and tiptoed toward it, peeking out to see Will’s broad back as he leaned against Jonah’s open doorway, the light from that huge TV flashing as Jonah shouted at him about the guy on first base. She could’ve stood and watched like that for a long time—Will watching baseball with one of Nora’s favorite people in the world, a member of this family she’d been trying so hard to get him to recognize—but when she reached up to scratch her head she made contact with the sweaty, sticking-up side of her hair, and so instead she crept into her bathroom to shower and brush her teeth. When she came out, dressed in a fresh set of pajamas, her wet hair twisted into a loose bun on top of her head, he was back inside again, folding up the blanket she’d left behind and looking like he was getting ready to leave.

  The third time, he was in her bed.

  It took her a few sleepy seconds to remember how he’d ended up there, and once she did, she squeezed her eyes shut in embarrassment. It’d started with his insistence on her taking another dose of Tylenol and drinking another full glass of water (the whole thing! He was so bossy about water. She did not reflect on how bossy he might be in other contexts; she did not!), and then a pretty effective scolding (no other contexts, none!) when she suggested she might go catch up on some of the work she’d missed during the day. She’d sighed and agreed that yes, she was, in fact, pretty tired, but maybe she’d sleep on the couch, because she had to change the sheets on her bed, and the couch was fine anyway, and—

  And he’d said, “Okay, let’s go change them,” and marched past her, and five minutes later they were smoothing clean linens across the mattress and not making eye contact, but it was all fine; she’d get in bed and he’d go, and that was fine and good and normal; it was silly that she’d asked him to stay before.

  But then—oh God, this was the embarrassing part—she’d asked him to stay again. She’d crawled into her cool, perfect bed and curled onto her side and asked him if he’d heard from Sally about the kittens, and he’d shown her his phone, three videos of the newly named Quincy and Francis happily exploring a cat tree and a small scratching post, and then she’d gotten sleepy again, real sleepy, talking-nonsense sleepy, and she’d said, “Sit right there for a minute,” and pointed to her mattress, and then she’d held his phone close to her face and watched the videos again, maybe even twice, feeling a little wistful about her stupid late-developing cat allergy, but not wistful enough, she guessed, to keep from falling asleep again.

  It was still pitch dark, so maybe it hadn’t been all that long, but judging by how rested she felt, and judging by how dry her hair was, she’d been out for a while. She even had a mean crick in her neck, which was weird, because her pillows were usually. . .

  Oh no. Oh no no no.

  She was not sleeping on her pillow.

  She was sleeping on Will Sterling’s lap.

  Her cheek on his thigh, rising and falling slightly from the long, even breaths that suggested Will had fallen asleep, too, sitting up in the same position she last remembered seeing him in, his back against her headboard, one of his feet still on the floor.

  She gently—so, so gently—pulled her cheek away, and with mortifying clarity realized that it was damp.

  Because she’d drooled on him.

  Please don’t wake up, she thought.

  “Hey,” he said, his voice low and rough, because of course she’d fall asleep on the lightest sleeper alive.

  Please don’t notice your leg, she thought.

  He unfolded his crossed arms and set a hand on his drooled-upon thigh, and Nora put her face in her hands and groaned.

  He chuckled. “Hey, now. Two nights ago a kitten crawled out of a hamper, peed on my torso, and screamed in my face. This is nothing.” He shifted, rolled his neck. “How’re you feeling?”

  That was nice, how he did that. How he moved right on, from the humiliating thing. Probably she ought to take back what she’d said about his bedside manner. On the scale of things, the I’ve seen worse approach worked pretty well, actually.

  She sniffed tentatively, relieved to find it was, for the first time in three days, possible to get some air through her nose. “Pretty good, compared to . . . yesterday? Is now . . . tomorrow?”

  He shifted again, patted the bed for his phone, which he found in the folds of her comforter. When it lit up she could see more of his face, the handsome, charming curve of his smile. She clutched uselessly at the sheets tangled around her, remembered the way it’d sounded when he’d called her baby.

  “Wouldn’t you know,” he said, and turned the phone screen toward her.

  She smiled back.

  4:14 a.m., it read.

  The golden hour.

  For what felt like long seconds, neither of them said a word—long enough that the phone screen went dark again, long enough that Nora began to feel a nervous anticipation set in. The truth was, no matter what had happened between her and Will since that first morning, pretty much every golden hour since, she’d thought of him: of him and her on their respective balconies, whispering to each other before they knew they’d be enemies.

  She wanted, desperately, to believe that he’d thought about it, too.

  But if he left now—now that he was assured the worst of her illness was over, or now that she’d removed her drooling face from his lap—she’d know she was alone in clinging to that memory.

  “Even on your sick days, you’re an early riser,” he finally said, his voice quieter, almost a whisper, almost like he had on that morning outside, and she breathed what she hoped was a silent sigh of relief, sinking back onto the pillows she’d apparently never slept on. She tried to imagine the space between them as fresh, cool, early-morning summer air.

  He was staying.

  “Guess so,” she said, reaching up to uncoil the bun from the top of her head, feeling the crick in her neck ease and more of her embarrassment fall away as the heavy weight of it came down on her shoulder. She moved, leaning against her headboard to mimic his position. Like this, it was civilized, normal. It might as well be a couch. It was sitting and talking, nothing more.

  “It’s kind of funny, to be sick,” she said, once she’d gotten comfortable.

  A volley! A normal, conversational volley.

  “What’s funny about it?” he returned, and she smiled in relief.

  “Well, it’s my first summer back, since Nonna passed. And I only ever used to get sick when I came here in the summers. It was like, the school year would end, and a few days later I’d come. And always, within the first month, I’d get sick.”

  Even with the space between them, she could feel something about his body change, become more tense. “Maybe you’re not allergic to the cats. Maybe there’s something in this building, a—”

  Nora snorted a laugh. “No, no. It was never one thing. Sometimes it was a cold, or a stomach bug. Two summers in a row I got a bad flu, the worst fevers I ever had.”

  “Surprised you have so many good memories here, if that was the pattern.”

  She smoothed the comforter, suddenly feeling cautious. Talking about this—it felt like a risk, given how their conversation on poetry night had gone. But he was as good as asking, wasn’t he? It’s what he’d been like on that first morning. Curious about her. Interested in her.

  “I never got sick during the school year, not ever,” she said, leaning into that interest, settling into
it like it was another cozy bed to climb into. “I got perfect attendance from second grade on. In first grade I broke my arm during a field trip, so I missed half a day for that.”

  “You only got half a day for a broken arm?”

  She shrugged. “I liked school. But also, my parents were really into their work.” She took a sidelong glance at him. The darkness around them was already changing, or her eyes were already accommodating it, because she could see that he’d tipped his head toward her.

  “Yeah? What’d they do?”

  “They’re professors. Both in archaeology.”

  “Shit, really? Like Indiana Jones?”

  She laughed quietly, the sound somehow so intimate. What else could it be, really, to laugh with someone in your bed? It felt like the most secret, private, special thing. It felt like a fever dream. She gave up on thinking there was anything normal or casual about it.

  “More boring than Indiana Jones. Anyway, that’s how they met, in graduate school. They work a lot during the school year, teaching their classes, but also writing all these papers and stuff. They’re actually pretty famous.”

  “Not Indiana Jones famous.”

  “No. Like . . . nerd famous. PBS documentaries famous.”

  “Huh,” he said, then paused. “So they didn’t get summers off, or . . . ?”

  “They do their field work in the summer. Digs all over the place. They’re on one now, actually.” As they got older, it bothered Nora more, but she didn’t suppose that mattered much. Once her dad had told her he hoped he was lucky enough to die on a dig. Doing what I love, he’d said, and Nora—who’d been twelve at the time—had felt almost breathless with hurt.

  “They never took you along?”

  She shook her head. “It would’ve gotten in the way with their work, I think.”

  Now that—that was straight out of her mom’s script. Nora, it’s simply not practical for me to come to Nonna’s with you this year. Nora, it wouldn’t be worth it for you to travel all the way to Greece, not with the schedule your father and I have planned.

  “And anyway, I liked coming here. There were always people around.”

  Beside her, Will laughed again, a soft, knowing sound. Probably he was thinking of all the kitten visits she didn’t get to come over for.

  “Always,” he said, a trace of indulgent sarcasm in his voice.

  She smiled over at him. “I think maybe my body knew this was an okay place to be sick? A safe place. My parents, they weren’t really . . . nurturers. They didn’t have time for that.”

  She paused, caught herself tugging on the ends of her hair, an old habit that had been, in her younger years, a constant source of frustration to her mother, and also the reason for the infamous Ringo haircut she’d had for her first summer here. But she was probably being unfair to her parents. They still called her, still checked on her. They’d made sure she’d had what she needed, growing up. They were smart and interesting and worldly. They told her they loved her all the time, and she believed them.

  But . . . they hadn’t been like Nonna. They had never been like Nonna. They had never taught her about the things they loved; they had never cooked with her or stayed up late to do old jigsaw puzzles with her or planted pots of vegetables with her. They had never asked her what she was reading or told her about what they were reading; they had never regaled her with long, winding stories about their lives, full of the names of people she’d never met and never would.

  She shut her eyes against a wave of golden hour grief, the kind that had kept her company all through the winter.

  “That’s probably not how sickness works, I know,” she added, when she felt like she could speak again.

  The mattress shifted as he moved, lifting the leg he’d had on the floor up to stretch beside the one on the bed. “I only ever got sick during my residency when I had a run of days off, it seemed like. The body does all kinds of things, in response to stress.”

  “Oh,” she rushed out, embarrassed by the comparison. “I don’t want to act like it was stressful, with my parents.”

  It was, though. It was stressful to spend so much time alone. It was stressful that it wasn’t easy to make friends, that most of her socialization came from people who were way older than her. It was stressful to feel small and inconvenient, to feel like you spent nine months of your year looking forward to three, to come back at the end of them and feel like you had to get used to life all over again. It was still stressful, all these years later.

  Will was quiet, and Nora felt a sinking sense of embarrassment, of disappointment. That had been a bad volley, and now it was poetry night, all over again: this was not something he wanted to talk to her about. To bond with her about. No matter that she thought they might have this in common.

  “My parents, they were kind of like yours.”

  She stilled, desperate not to move, or to speak, to do anything that would break this brand-new early-morning spell.

  “Not about work, but about—” He broke off, ran a hand through his hair. When he spoke again, he rushed the words out, so quick that Nora couldn’t even be sure she heard him right. “About each other.”

  “Each other?”

  He cleared his throat, scratched at a spot on his chest. “Yeah. They were . . . they met pretty young, when they were teenagers. They were tied up in each other, always. Obsessed with each other. They never wanted to be apart.”

  Nora swallowed, a sick feeling that had nothing to do with her sinus infection settling into her stomach. Another memory from poetry night: My dad passed when I was seventeen, my mom about a year later.

  “That sounds intense,” she said. She wouldn’t say—wouldn’t ask—anything else.

  He didn’t speak for a long time, and all Nora could do was lie there beside him, that not-balcony space between them feeling like floors and floors of distance. What would it be like, she wondered, to close it? To scoot her body across that space and lie right next to him, and to mean to, this time? To not fall asleep on accident, but to say with her body that she could tell he’d said something painful, something honest?

  “It was isolating,” he said, and then shrugged. “I had buddies from school, but then I—well, I had a lot of responsibilities at home that kept me pretty busy. I’m not even sure I ever learned how to be a good friend. And obviously, I didn’t have any . . .”

  He trailed off and made a gesture toward the air around them, to the structure around them, and Nora had to swallow around the shock of sadness she felt, seeing him do that. Exactly what she’d been trying to get him to see about this place, and it was the hollowest sort of victory.

  “Family,” she whispered, not even really meaning to. Once she realized she had uttered the word, she thought that would be the end of it, frankly. Mentioning his parents, that had been huge, she figured. There was no way he’d bring up—

  “Donny and my mom,” he said, and Nora held her breath. Easy enough, what with the sinuses. “They’d stopped speaking, a long time before. Back when my parents first got together and then when my mom left home for good. I never met him until we came here, the once.”

  She wanted to ask a hundred questions. She’d start with: What year, what month, what day?

  But all she said was, “Why did you come?”

  “My mom had found out my dad was sick. She was pretty desperate for help.”

  Nora thought about Donny—how he’d been good at hanging pictures and at fixing the dryer hoses in the basement when they got clogged. How he’d always been the one to put in everyone’s window AC units, back before they’d gotten central air, a huge, expensive project that Nonna had said he’d done all the legwork for. How he always hosed off all the outdoor furniture when it got dirty in the spring and summer, even though he himself never really used it. How he’d fed all those cats, for God’s sake. They weren’t even his.

  “And Donny . . . ?”

  “Didn’t help,” Will said grimly.

  Nora could only r
eally blame her loyalty for what she said next—her desperate instinct to bridge the gap between the Donny she’d known and the Donny this man in her bed was describing.

  “Donny never really seemed to have much money,” she said quickly. “Maybe he—”

  Will made a noise, something too flat to be called a laugh. “She didn’t ask him for money.”

  “Oh.” It was barely a sound, barely a breath. She felt cold again, almost like the fever was back, but she knew that wasn’t it. She knew that wasn’t it at all.

  “She asked him to take me.”

  Part of her wanted to turn on a light.

  The one on her nightstand would do—it was small and shaded; it gave off the kind of soft glow that was perfect for the in-betweens of her day: when she was waking up, when she was winding down. This moment, with Will—it felt like both, somehow. It felt like the beginning and the end of something, all at once, and so maybe that’s why the other part of her didn’t want to turn on any light at all.

  “For the summer?” she whispered.

  “No,” he said, in that same flat, matter-of-fact tone. “For good.”

  She swallowed, scratchiness in her throat reasserting itself. It was probably time for more medicine, or maybe for another shift over that hot bowl Will had made her use yesterday, but she wouldn’t have moved for all the decongestants and hot bowls in the whole entire world.

  “Could be that she didn’t mean it,” Will said, and Nora felt such terrible certainty about where he’d learned his I’ve seen worse bedside manner. Maybe he’d been I’ve seen worse–ing himself his whole life, only to feel better about this one awful moment.

  “Or that she would’ve changed her mind, eventually. I don’t really know. But Donny, he didn’t want to have anything to do with me.”

  “Why would she . . . why would she take you to someone you didn’t even know?” Nora had always known Nonna, even before the summer stays started. There wasn’t a week of Nora’s life that hadn’t included some interaction with her—a phone call, a card in the mail, the occasional visit.

  “She wanted to be with my dad, for the time he had. The two of them.”