“Not rent it?” he repeated.
“No!” She lowered her voice from outrage volume, then narrowed her eyes at him. “And don’t call it a unit.”
He pressed his lips together in a way she recognized, holding up his hands in mock surrender. Silence fell between them again, and she could tell he was waiting for her to explain herself. But even the suggestion, the misunderstanding—that she would ever rent Nonna’s apartment!—was so rattling to her that she barely knew how to start again.
“Want to walk a bit?” he said after a minute, tipping his chin up toward the shoreline.
She nodded, grateful for the suggestion, and they both stood—Nora brushing her sand-coated palms across the front of her jeans, Will shaking out his jacket. She was still thinking over what to say when they reached the shoreline, a cool wind blowing off the water that had her crossing her arms over her chest.
“Here,” Will said, and settled his jacket over her shoulders.
And like that—with that warm and perfect weight enveloping her, Will’s scent close and soothing—something inside her eased, shook free. It felt like that night two weeks ago, in her bed: the golden-hour perfection of those first few minutes of conversation they’d had, before things had turned so fraught and sad.
Before he’d gone, and before she’d got to thinking.
“Mostly it’s about the towel rod,” she blurted, which was maybe not that ideal thought to have shake free first. Then again, maybe it was. The towel rod was simple, specific. A change, but nothing drastic. Nonna, she was sure, would support it.
“The . . . what?”
She cleared her throat, reaching up to gather Will’s jacket tighter around her. There, that was better. “The towel rod that you put in your bathroom?”
“Yeah, I remember. But why—?”
“I want one of those. It’d be nice to have one, so I’m going to put one in.”
Even to her own ears, it sounded overly sharp, full of the same strained, nervous conviction she’d needed to get herself to come here today. You’re going to put the address into your phone, she’d told herself. You’re going to drive there, without getting lost, and you’re going to say thank you.
He stopped, and after a step she did, too, turning back to face him. When they’d gotten here, the light was a bright, stunning pink-orange, but now it was nearly dark, the planes of Will’s face lit by the harbor lights in the distance.
“Is this really about the towel rod?” he asked, with his doubtful doctor face on.
It’s about you, she thought, blinking down at the sand, at the soft lapping of the water that stopped short of her feet. It’s about what you told me, and how it made me see things differently. Donny’s apartment, Nonna’s apartment.
Instead, she shrugged and said, “It’s about settling in, I guess. I’ve lived there for a while now, and I’ve been so busy. I think I’m starting to notice that there’s a few things I could do to make things more—”
Mine, her brain supplied automatically, but it felt wrong to say it. Disloyal.
“Convenient,” she finished.
He tucked his hands into his pockets, his brow furrowing. They stared at each other across the stretch of sand and she knew he could tell she wasn’t telling him the full story. But the full story—the story of how she’d spent the last two weeks—felt too complicated, too tentative. Nora wasn’t even sure she understood it herself, really. All she knew was that after Will had gone, she’d waited, caught between some strange feeling of anxiety and anticipation, for someone new to show up downstairs. And when it’d been clear that no one was coming yet—that Will’s quiet efforts at caretaking via her neighbors had extended to his delay with listing Donny’s apartment—she’d almost felt . . . well.
She’d almost felt disappointed.
It wasn’t really that she’d come around to the idea; in fact, breaking the news to her neighbors—in a lousy, impromptu backyard building meeting during which she was still battling her sinuses—had been stressful enough to make her consider bricking over all of Donny’s doors and windows in the hopes that by some miracle everyone would forget it had ever existed. But beneath all that knee-jerk resistance had been something else, too. She understood something about Will now, about how he related to Donny’s apartment, to the building. And losing the battle over the rental—or maybe accepting that she’d lost it to a worthy enemy, for good reasons—had made her think differently about herself and how she related to Nonna’s apartment. If the rental was going forward, she needed to find some way to stay true to Nonna and to her neighbors that didn’t involve keeping every single thing exactly the same. She needed to take control of this new normal.
And maybe, maybe, the right place to start was in the apartment.
Minor changes. Adding a towel rod, and . . . that sort of thing.
“I could help,” he said.
At some point, she must’ve dropped her eyes from his, because now she had to raise her head to look back at him. His posture was exactly the same, but the expression on his face had eased into something more practiced, more casual, and for some reason, it soothed her. That’s how she wanted this to be. A towel rod! Very casual. No real disruptions there.
“You’re probably too busy.” Even as she said it, she hoped he’d put up a fight. Sure, she could make measurements and operate a drill—uh, once she bought one—but for some reason, no matter how nondisruptive a towel rod was, she didn’t quite feel up to doing it alone.
“Won’t take but a minute. I’ve done it once recently.” He added a small, crooked smile. Probably that would’ve looked like a smirk to her, only a few weeks ago. But now it looked like the most gentle, welcome encouragement. “I’ll have to be coming by anyway. I need to put a lockbox on the uni—um. Apartment.”
“Right.” She shifted on her feet, newly uneasy. Would her neighbors think of it as a betrayal, Will coming in and out of her apartment? Their reaction to the news of the rental going forward hadn’t been as extreme as she’d anticipated, but still—their memory of Donny was unchanged, this plan of Will’s seemingly as disrespectful as it was disruptive. To them, she and Will were still on different sides of this thing.
But like always, he seemed to see right through her.
“We can keep it between us,” he said. “It’s not as if we both don’t keep weird hours.”
She couldn’t help her smile, the flutter of excitement in her stomach. “That’s true.”
“One condition,” he said, and the flutter faded. If he asked her for some favor about his rental, she—
“You gotta let me have more of that sauce.”
She narrowed her eyes, pursed her lips in feigned, joking contemplation. He’s coming back, she thought, inwardly thrilled, and eventually—right when she thought he might be starting to sweat it—she let her smile break free once again.
She held out her hand. An agreement, not a farewell. Her palm tingled in anticipation.
“Okay, Will,” she said. “You’ve got a deal.”
Nora had always thought of herself as a patient person.
The art of waiting had been instilled in her early, and unlike most of the qualities she considered to be her best, she could mostly credit this one to her parents. In practical terms, honing this skill had been an essential part of her childhood days: waiting quietly outside her mom’s or dad’s office on campus after school, eavesdropping on the excited or concerned conversations they’d have with their research students. Waiting at the kitchen table, where she did her homework each night, for one of her parents to put together or bring home dinner, at least until she got old enough to handle the occasional dinner for herself. Waiting for her mom to have a few free afternoons to teach Nora how to drive when she got her learner’s permit; waiting for her dad to read over her college application essays.
But in philosophical terms, too, waiting had been an important part of her parents’ ethic. Their projects took a long time; they sometimes took years to get ac
cess to important dig sites, or to make a breakthrough on even the smallest, most banal part of a research argument. As a result, they seemed almost preternaturally calm about delays of any kind. They treated waiting like it was opportunity, like it wasn’t really waiting at all. When Nora was eight, she’d gone with her dad to a meeting he had with a colleague at UC Riverside, and on the way back they’d gotten caught in a twelve-mile-long traffic backup. Outside her window, Nora could see drivers on every side getting frustrated—slapping at their steering wheels, rolling their eyes, craning their necks to try to see what was up ahead. But Nora’s dad had barely been bothered. He’d put the old Volvo in park and said, “Well, we’ll get there eventually.” For two hours he’d helped Nora practice her spelling, picking out words he chose at random from the sonorous sentences of whatever NPR program was on.
To this day, Nora was a really good speller.
But her patience?
It was starting to wear thin.
It’d been three days since she’d shaken on their deal and set tonight as the date for Will to come by, and while she’d done fine for the first two—working and reworking the eco-influencer site into something she thought was finally bulletproof, having her regular lunch with Emily, driving Mrs. Salas to an appointment with the eye doctor—today had felt interminable.
Of course part of the problem had been that it started early—golden-hour early, because her body was trained for it. Out on her balcony, she’d watched the sky go from dark to light, already fairly twitching with awareness that the sun had a long way to go before it would set again. In her office, she’d readied herself for the remote presentation she’d be making later that afternoon, frustrated each time she bumped an elbow against something on her desk or accidentally backed her chair into the side of Nonna’s old dresser. When her stomach had growled for lunch, she’d stood and stretched before she realized it was only 9:30 a.m. Second breakfast, then, fine, but she sure would’ve liked things to move faster.
By the time her presentation came around, she’d somewhat recovered her sense of being in the moment: she’d done good work, and she was looking forward to showing it off. But the meeting, too, had been filled with tedious, aimless questions from the client—questions that barely related to the site at all, and in the end, she hadn’t even given her final approval for launch. Deepa had practically slammed her notebook shut; Austin had gone coolly silent, and Nora half considered bringing up the sustainable dildos, if only to get a conversation going.
If there’d been a bright spot, it’d been her post-meeting debrief with Dee, who had to retouch her brows after a rare moment of rubbing them in frustration when the client had brought up the bitmoji again. Dee fully expected to leave that conference room and get treated to Austin’s bad mood for the rest of the afternoon, so Nora—with no small amount of remote-work survivor’s guilt—did her best to fill her friend’s time, even if it did mean she had to answer fourteen questions about what Will Sterling looked like.
When the workday was over, that’s when the real waiting set in. She and Will had decided that he’d come by around 10:00 p.m., when her neighbors would almost certainly have turned in for the night, especially since the Cubs weren’t playing, and that had seemed like an exciting, clandestine idea during their lakeside rendezvous. But getting up before dawn made 10:00 p.m. a dim prospect on normal days, and so Nora had to fill her remaining waiting hours with keeping herself awake: a strong coffee; a shower; at one particularly low point, a few light slaps on her cheeks as she stood in front of the bathroom mirror.
Come on, she told herself, or told the setting sun, or possibly told the yet-to-arrive Will. Dimly she was aware that nothing about her impatience suggested a casual engagement with their planned project. But as the sky turned dark again, as the building quieted and the clock ticked down the minutes, she accepted the excitement that coursed through her body as her due.
It felt good to be excited.
At 9:59, there was a soft knock at the door, and the secret-keeping nature of their meeting meant that Nora didn’t even have to stall before answering. She opened the door and hoped the waiting didn’t show all over her face, and Will Sterling stood there in his glasses, one hand holding a toolbox and the other holding two bags from the hardware store, and he looked so easy and unbothered that for a second she had the sinking feeling he hadn’t been waiting at all.
Still, she smiled (unbothered!) in greeting, stepping back so he could come inside. He set down his stuff and then held up a finger and retreated into the hallway again. When he came back, he was bearing the biggest towel rod Nora had ever seen.
“Uh,” she said, once she’d closed the door behind him. “That—”
“It’s for a shower curtain,” he clarified immediately, setting it onto the floor. “Like the one I put in downstairs. It’s got this curve to it, see, so when you’re in the shower it feels bigger in there. It matches the towel rod I picked up, and they’re pretty much right next to each other in the aisle, and . . .”
He carried on, something about his friend Sally’s advice, and also a sale at the hardware store, and the returns policy if Nora didn’t need anything new when it came to the shower curtain situation, and as he talked Nora realized, with a delighted sense of relief, that he had been waiting. Maybe as much as she had been.
Suddenly that shower curtain rod looked like the best thing she’d ever seen.
“Will,” she interrupted. He looked up at her, and maybe she was imagining the faint touch of color high on his cheeks, but she liked it all the same. “That was a good idea, thanks. You’ll let me know how much I owe you?”
He waved a hand. “We can figure that out after.”
“Okay.”
So this was it, the thing she’d been waiting for. Three days, or maybe—probably—even longer. Minor changes, and now she had the supplies. She had the will, and she had . . . well.
She had Will.
It was time to do this.
“Let’s get to work.”
“My God, you were right! It feels huge in here!”
In her bare feet, Nora stood inside her shower, curtain pulled closed, and admired the view. Above her hung her newly installed rod, sitting slightly higher than the previous one and bowing gently outward. She couldn’t quite account for how such a small change could make such a big difference, but it really, really did. She turned to the side, mimicking her hair-washing posture, exaggeratedly sticking out her elbows as she raised her hands to her head.
“I’m not even touching the curtain!” she exclaimed.
From the other side, she heard Will’s soft laugh, the clink of a tool being set down, and for a second, she relished this small moment of something like privacy. In all the time she’d been waiting these past three days, she hadn’t really given much thought to what it would be like to work with Will in a space as small as her bathroom, but over the last hour and a half or so she’d gotten a real clear sense, and the fact was, Will’s body was . . . effective. Effective at doing things like holding tools and fixtures, yes. But also effective at looking fantastic while doing such things. Thirty minutes ago, Nora had stood on the edge of this shower with a drill in her hand (Will was also effective at power-tool-use instruction, and at letting Nora do things herself), her partner-in-home-improvement holding up the rod that was destined to change her shower experience forever. One stray glance and Nora had caught sight of the narrow strip of skin exposed at his waist—the curve of his lean, strong hips, the line of dark hair above the button of his jeans.
She’d almost fallen right into the tub.
“Whoa, there,” Will had said, dropping one arm to steady her. So, another point for his hands in the effective column, especially since she was pretty sure she could still feel the spot on her waist where he’d touched her.
She lowered her arms, taking the occasion to use her own decidedly less effective hands to fan her face. She needed to look normal when she reopened this shower curtain, and not lik
e a woman who was wondering about what it would be like to fit a (specific) man into this newly expanded space.
But also, in here, would he be able to—?
“You ever coming out?” he said.
“I might stay in here,” she said, relieved to sound like she was joking, and not like she was halfway to a full set of deeply inappropriate fantasies. “There’s so much new ground to explore!”
Another chuckle, some more tool clinking, and Nora took a few deep breaths before finally settling herself enough to face him. She pulled back the curtain, smiling broadly (innocently!).
He straightened from where he’d bent to close the lid of his toolbox. “Happy?” he asked tipping his chin up toward the rod.
He asked it lightly, casually. But she knew Will better now—not only from the time she’d spent with him over the last couple of hours, but from the weeks she’d watched him and talked to him while they’d been feuding—and she had the sense that things weren’t always what they seemed, even when they seemed effortless. During their first project—the hand-towel fixture—Nora had had a brief but embarrassing moment of pause, and Will had done his best to act entirely unfazed.
“I don’t know why this feels so weird, to do this,” she’d said, Will’s drill resting heavily on her thigh. “It’s like . . . this wall has always looked exactly the same.”
“We don’t have to,” Will had said, shrugging. “You’ve still got that thing over on your counter.”
Nora had looked over at the cord-tangling, toe-crushing towel rack and had taken a deep breath. “Nope,” she’d muttered, and held up the drill. But after that, she could tell Will had been cautious, almost as if he worried that she’d blame him if she ended up regretting any of the changes.
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