Only a few weeks ago, this comment might have made her feel flustered, angry. But by now—from the bathroom projects alone—she knew Will understood that every change she made in this apartment was significant to her. And by now she knew that he—even in spite of his own apparent lack of sentiment when it came to family heirlooms—didn’t judge her for it. A few days ago, he’d indulged her dozens of back-and-forth texts about the new sink faucet for the bathroom, Nora hesitant to pick anything too modern. Whatever you want, he’d text back, and every time, she liked it. Every time, she felt like he saw her.
“This room would be hard to change,” she said, casting her eyes around. Nonna’s bed and dresser, both from the year she’d been married: 1944, when she’d only been nineteen years old. Her lace coverlet, yellowed with age, purchased the year she’d moved to this building: 1990, when she was a widow of barely a year. A jeweled hairbrush and hand mirror, resting atop a silver tray that Nora dusted every week. Old pictures in elaborate frames. An infant Jesus of Prague statue on a small, delicate-looking table over in the corner. None of it was to Nora’s taste, really, but she loved it all the same, because Nonna had loved it.
And this is Nonna’s place.
She looked down at her lap, discomfited at the intruding thought. She had a familiar sense of being tugged in all directions. San Diego, Chicago. Austin, Deepa. Nonna, herself.
“You ever think about one of those coworking spaces?” Will asked, and their eyes met again.
“Like where you rent an office?”
“Yeah. My tenant downstairs uses one. You could ask her about it.”
“Oh, I—” Her own brow furrowed, considering. At first, not so much about the idea itself, but about the thought of going down two flights of stairs and knocking on the door of a person Will called a tenant. In Donny’s old apartment! She felt tangled up with the tugging sensation, tried to ignore it.
Anyway, a coworking space, that was definitely out of the question, no matter who she knew or didn’t know who used one.
“Austin wouldn’t pay for that,” Nora said. “It was already a leap to get him to agree to the telework.”
Will dropped his head in a nod. “Right, yeah.”
They fell into silence, and Nora felt ludicrously disappointed: everything good between them tonight ground to a halt with this additional disruption to their routine. See, Dee? she telegraphed, to her long-distance friend, a friend she’d just been asked to keep a secret from. We’re definitely not dating.
Will cleared his throat. “Is he—” He shifted against the doorframe. “Is he all right to you, though? Your boss?”
She opened her mouth to answer—a quick, uncomplicated yes. But that Will had asked at all made her close it again before frowning down at her hands and thinking. Even if her answer was basically going to be the same, she wanted to at least consider the question.
“He is, yeah. He’s going through something, I think, which probably has to do with whatever this move idea is about. But he’s a good boss. I owe him a lot.”
His answer was a quiet noise: not quite assent, not quite disagreement. Acknowledgment, and nothing more.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I left you sitting out there for so long.”
He shrugged. “I did the dishes. Started reading the instruction manual for the light fixture.”
God, she did not feel like installing a light fixture tonight. Not now, not after everything. In fact at the moment she felt like building a time machine and going back to the minutes before her phone had started ringing. If she could do it again, she probably would ask him to call her baby, no matter how guilty it would make her feel later.
“I’ll be honest,” he said. “I doubt I’ve got the hand-eye coordination for working with electricity tonight.”
Given her own feelings about the whole thing, she should have been relieved. But instead she was unaccountably disappointed now that there wasn’t a reason for him to stay.
“Yeah, of course. It’s so late.”
She turned to her desk, closed her notebook, fished her phone out from the space it’d fallen into behind her keyboard. When she swiveled back so she could stand, though, she found Will had taken a step into the room and now held out a hand to her.
She looked at it, then up at him, returning his soft, inside-joke smile. When she slid her palm against his, he grabbed hold of her and pulled her up to him. This, she thought, when she landed against his body, his other arm steadying her around the waist. This is the direction you want to be tugged in.
He kept tugging, in fact—kept hold of her hand while he walked her down the hall, past the bathroom and to the doorway of her bedroom. She halted him at the threshold, confused. “You’re not going?”
He looked down at her. “Do you want me to?”
“No,” she said quickly. “But I wasn’t sure if—”
Another tug, this one bringing their bodies flush, and then he released her hand to put both his arms around her instead. He ducked his head, put his lips close to her ear.
“Nora,” he whispered, and a delicious shiver went through her body, everything tense from the day and night somehow falling away. “I think we both know I’m not just coming over to deal with your bathroom fixtures.”
She pressed her secret smile against his chest.
“You’re not?” she said, feigning innocent surprise. “What’re you good for, then?”
He laughed and lifted her, walking a few steps and dropping her onto the bed. “Other things.”
“Psssht,” she teased, but she was already scooting backward, making room for him to climb between her legs. “I heard what you said about your hand-eye coordination.”
He paused, one knee on the edge of the mattress, one palm pressed flat beside her hip, and smiled wickedly down at her. Then he ducked his head, nudged up the hem of her shirt, and pressed a hot, openmouthed kiss low on her stomach. Good direction, she thought, reaching to tug her waistband down, and he followed it, licking along each new stretch of exposed skin. Best direction.
“Maybe I can practice another kind tonight,” he said, his voice low, his breath warm.
And for the next little while, Nora only had to lie back in her bed, and go to the places Will took her.
Chapter 14
“It’s your turn, Dr. Sterling.”
Will looked up from his phone screen, where he’d been staring down at a little gray bubble that told him Nora was currently replying to his last message. He cleared his throat, embarrassed, shoving the phone back into the front pocket of his scrubs before stepping up to the counter.
“Sorry about that, Janine,” he said to the familiar barista. “I was . . .” He trailed off, waving a hand. Wouldn’t do any good to lie to her, and telling her the truth—that he was waiting for a text message from a woman whose bed he’d left only a few hours ago—didn’t make any sort of sense, either.
When his phone chimed with a notification a second later, though, he had to force himself not to reach for it again. He stared up at the menu, but basically only saw a big stretch of gray text bubbles in his brain.
“How about I keep it simple today?” he said, smiling across the counter at Janine. “Large black coffee, no sugar.”
This time he at least remembered to hand over his mug before he stepped to the side to wait for his order. Once he was out of the way, he gave up resisting, pulling out his phone again.
Paint makes total sense, it read, and he smiled, relieved.
That was settled, then—another occasion to see her, and soon, too.
Last week, on the night they’d both bypassed the light fixture project, Will wondered whether they’d simply go forward and drop the pretense—if he wasn’t only coming over for these increasingly simple household projects, why bother continuing to come up with them? Even after they’d finally gotten that light fixture installed, though, Nora had stuck to their script: the next afternoon, she’d sent him a link to a massaging shower head, and obvio
usly he was not going to argue with that as an idea.
It had been a good night, when that shower head got installed. And tested. Twice.
Still, there was a border to his relief—a hard line that felt like it kept him from breathing easy about seeing her again under these conditions they’d both decided were safe. Painting, after all, felt like a final frontier: the last real effort they could make without doing things that involved contractors, or at least more time, equipment, and know-how. And for Nora, he knew, that bathroom was a border of its own—the only place in that apartment, other than her bedroom, that she seemed willing to really change.
Not for the first time since that night, he thought of coming to find her in that cramped, sad excuse for an office she sat in every day. Dark, heavy furniture surrounding her. Curtains that very nearly shared a pattern with that awful wallpaper in the common hallways. Her computer equipment pressed up against her, looming and claustrophobic. That chair that made her look huddled, stressed.
He didn’t like that at all.
He also didn’t like that the home office clearly wasn’t the only problem: that Nora’s voice changed when she talked about this trip she was going to have to take, that lately she chewed on the inside of her lip when she checked email on her phone, that she’d gotten at least one more of those late-night calls from her boss, this one coming when Will had one hand beneath Nora’s shirt and she had one hand inside his unbuttoned pants. Nora had ignored it at first, keeping her determined lips against his, but when it quieted and rang again almost immediately, she’d huffed in apologetic frustration and pulled away.
Frankly, Nora’s boss seemed pretty—
“Dr. Sterling.”
Will cursed inwardly.
“I see you’re rather absorbed in your telephone,” Abraham said, coming to stand beside him.
No one calls it a telephone, Will thought, but he still tucked it away as though he’d been caught out at something. Besides, he figured he knew why Abraham was here. Two hours ago Will had taken over for him in dealing with the very anxious mother of a patient who’d been in the bay, an eleven-year-old who was probably right now up on the general surgery floor, getting his appendix taken out. Will knew his boss well enough to know that he wouldn’t get a thank-you, but he would get a request to debrief the entire situation.
“Have you spoken to Sally recently?” Abraham said instead, and Will’s eyes—pointed straight ahead—widened. There had been no talk of Sally since Abraham’s ill-conceived cat-gifting scheme, and since that was a few weeks ago, Will figured that things had stalled in the reconciliation department.
He cleared his throat, in preparation for Vader voice. “I—uh.” His eyes went pleadingly to Janine and her coworker, who were clearly a bit backed up today. Nothing for it, then. He’d have to answer.
“I believe I spoke to her yesterday,” he said, which was a lie. He didn’t believe it; he knew it. But feigning a vague memory about it seemed like the right move, especially because beside him, Gerald Abraham had the energy of a coiled spring.
“Hmm,” Abraham said, but that definitely wasn’t going to be the end of it. Will braced himself. “Did she happen to mention our recent date?”
Will opened his mouth, then closed it. Janine, please, he thought. Throw the coffee in my face, anything.
Janine did not look back at him.
“She did not mention a date, no. We only talked about my unit.” He thought of Nora and her recent laughing admission over this word, and shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “My rental property, I mean.”
“Ah, yes. On our date,” Abraham said, really leaning into his preferred conversation topic, “Sally mentioned that it’s gone more smoothly for you recently.”
I can turn this around, Will thought, seizing on Donny’s apartment like it was a lifeline. The irony did not escape him. “Very smoothly. My next tenant is actually a fourth-year medical student from—”
“Sushi,” Abraham said. “That was Sally’s choice.”
Will suppressed a sigh. “Good idea, to let her choose.”
“I thought so. However.”
Janine had forsaken him entirely. Maybe she threw away his mug back there. He would never look at his telephone in line again.
“I have asked her to dinner tomorrow, and she said she’s still deciding.”
“Right, well—”
“Usually, when Sally says she is deciding something, she has already decided that the answer is no.”
Janine approached the counter with Will’s now-full mug, and he tried not to leap forward in relief. But when he turned back, Gerald Abraham was standing in the exact same spot, waiting.
And then he reached up and smoothed his lapel.
Damn, Will thought.
“Dr. Abraham,” he said quietly, though it wasn’t as if the volume of Abraham’s own voice indicated a desire for discretion on the matters of his of his marital problems. “I’m not sure I’m the best person to be talking to about this. I’ve never been married, and—”
“You will be,” said Abraham, because he never let Will finish a sentence. And also because he always interrupted him with deeply uncomfortable statements.
“No, I—”
“You’re the type people want to marry,” Abraham interrupted again. Still uncomfortably.
“Gerald,” Will said, taking a chance that this never-before-attempted first-name deployment would either prevent further interruptions or make his boss mad enough to end this conversation. “Given that you have in fact been married I’d say you’re the type, too.”
“Yes, but I’m divorced. The point is, even if you’re not married yet, I assume you date frequently.”
Will’s phone chimed in his pocket, and Abraham raised his eyebrows. If that was Nora, she had the worst timing in history. But his hand still twitched to check it.
“I don’t re—” he began, but honestly, this time, he was glad to be interrupted. What the hell was he going to say to Gerald Abraham about his dating history, which functionally did not exist? Had he . . . ever really been on a date? He shifted on his feet, that phone feeling suddenly heavier in his pocket.
“I believe I miscalculated, asking Sally to another dinner, even though sushi went well.”
Will stared. This tone. This was a let’s debrief the appendix removal situation tone. “Okay,” he said.
“I think there are two problems,” Abraham said, and then, in a familiar move, he turned to walk away, still talking. “The first is, during our marriage, I did not take Sally on dates.”
“Okay,” Will repeated, because now it was like he was in it, with this tone. It at least made him feel like he was on the job. “So you’re treating—” Jesus. He cleared his throat. “So you’re dealing with this by asking her on dates.”
“Yes, but this brings us to the second problem, which is that Sally has always felt I am too devoted to routines.”
Will cocked his head, nodding. He guessed that explained the white coat. The constant talk of protocol. The thing was, Gerald Abraham was a good doctor. What he lacked in bedside manner he absolutely made up for in precision, in the kind of careful, repetitive follow-through that meant he hardly ever missed a thing.
“Sally, as I am sure you have observed, prefers more spontaneity.” He looked sideways at Will. “And so in asking her to dinner again, what have I done?”
Will blinked. “I mean it’s only the sec—”
“Established a routine!” Abraham said, stopping.
Will stopped too, turning to face his . . . huh. Didn’t feel right to think of him as a boss right at this moment, even though this was basically the time in the debrief when Will was being asked to solve a problem. Abraham had done the diagnosis, and now he wanted Will to develop the treatment.
But with a sinking sense of clarity—and a fair bit of shame—Will realized he was even less qualified to help than he would’ve originally thought, because not only did he not have any meaningful experience dating,
he was also currently spending every free moment he had with a woman whom he’d never actually taken out.
Whom he’d confined to a very specific routine.
You’re not dating her, a familiar, focused part of his brain told him, and he supposed it was true. What he and Nora had, it was . . .
Something more.
That was another part of him talking.
He reached up, his palm bumping against the edge of the pocket where his phone weighed down the fabric of his shirt.
“Ideas to show I’m thoughtful,” Abraham said, and clearly he was repeating that last word straight from the mouth of Sally.
Will swallowed, thinking again about Nora behind that tiny desk that she wasn’t ready to change. He’d been thoughtful, hadn’t he? He’d watched Nora all these weeks—even in the weeks before he’d ever been in her bed—and he’d known, even when he was fighting with her, that her vise grip on the building was about something more than her concern for her neighbors. And now that he knew her better, now that he’d been in her space—he’d tried to be thoughtful, to help her in this project she hadn’t even admitted the full extent of to herself. Towel rods, faucets, whatever she wanted. He’d helped.
But he’d also never taken her out. He’d gone over to her place in the dark of night and left before dawn. He’d never lingered, not since that very first time.
He had a feeling Sally would not approve, though he wasn’t sure why that bothered him so much.
“Let me think about it,” he said to Dr. Abraham. “I’ll find you later.”
“Fine.”
Will watched him go, leaning a shoulder against the wall beside him. Taking Nora out, that’d be good. A break from routine. Giving her a little relief from her place, where work and home were the same spot—that was helping, too. It’s not like he was trying to (re)marry her or something, and anyway, Nora was as clear on the boundaries for this as he was. Hell, she might even say no; she might tell him to come over with a can of paint and to quit asking weird questions.
But it couldn’t hurt to ask.
He slid his phone out again, saw her latest message there. Same time? it read.
Love at First Page 21