by Mimi Strong
Aaron looked over his audience, making eye contact with everyone, and stopping on Nora. It was time for the chorus again, but he strummed, mouth closed, as though he'd forgotten the words. Still staring at Nora, he hummed a few bars, then started singing the words again, his eyebrows raised to show his dismay at having flubbed up, not that many people had even noticed.
Nora had noticed, though, and she realized with a start that she hadn't seen Aaron since her nose surgery. She'd gotten so used to her new look, but he was only seeing it now, and it seemed he couldn't look away.
Nora felt a pulse of pleasure through every part of her body. It was like the endorphin rush at the end of a good yoga class, when she'd lie on the mat, exhausted but invigorated, savoring that precious moment and stretching it out to infinity.
One of the administrators, a woman about the age of Nora's mother, commented about a desire to throw her underwear on the stage, and all the other women at their table laughed. Stevey talked about his own plans to buy leather pants, but Nora tuned him and the other guys out and focused on Aaron.
After a few more songs, Kylie leaned in and whispered in Nora's ear, “I may have been wrong about thinking something was up between you and Stevey, but I'm not wrong now, am I? Aaron is really into you. He's sexing you up ferociously with his eyes.”
“I used to be in love with him,” Nora whispered back.
“Used to be?”
“I don't know, Kylie. I feel like I'm about to make another mistake, and I don't care.”
“Just because he wears leather pants and sings in a band doesn't mean… oh, wait, actually, that's sort of the definition of mistake.”
“Kylie!”
“And exactly the kind of mistake a girl should make.”
Nora gave the idea of making an intentional mistake some consideration. A lot of consideration.
After Aaron and his makeshift band finished their set, the restaurant's DJ put on some uptempo Greek music, and the dancers came out: a man and a woman in midriff-baring outfits. They shook their bodies and clapped the castanets in their hands, working the crowd up. The woman was impressive and gorgeous, but the man was even more flexible, moving like water between the tables and chairs, batting his thick eyelashes at men and women alike.
Nora nearly ran into Aaron on her way back from the washroom. He said simply, “I'd like to show you my home studio before you leave town.”
“It's still early.” She leaned in toward him, standing in his space. “Why not tonight?”
The years that had passed disappeared.
He looked to the dark restaurant windows, shimmering with rivulets of rain. “I can go get my vehicle and bring it around front so your hair doesn't get wet.”
“It's just rain,” she said.
They stared at each other in silence. Time split apart and came back together, and she didn't feel the need to say anything else.
“Do you need to get your purse?” he asked, looking deeply into her eyes.
“My wallet's in my pocket.”
He took her hand in his, and led her out the door.
The summer rain was warm, the air in her lungs humid. He brought her to a black Range Rover and opened the door.
“Do you need a hand up the step?” he offered.
She turned and looked up at his face, the rain no longer catching in her curly hair but falling on her cheeks and eyelids. It had rained that night too; it was what had made the roads so dangerous. She shivered.
He grinned up at the sky and then looked down at her. “This rain is not great for my leather pants.”
“I guess we should get in the truck then,” she said, but she didn't move.
“There's something different about you.”
“I'm all grown up.” She reached up and ran her finger along his jaw. “So are you.” He caught her fingers and held them to his lips.
She shivered again, but not from the rain. The drinks in the restaurant, plus the knowledge she was leaving town in a matter of days, made her bold. “We never did get that kiss,” she said.
He bent down and kissed her on the forehead, like you would kiss a little sister. “You're getting soaked.”
“Really? A forehead kiss? You know, I could be home packing.”
“Maybe we should get you a taxi home,” Aaron said. He held back from her, his hands now in his pockets.
Feeling the burn of rejection, Nora narrowed her eyes at Aaron and wondered if her friend Bobby might be around his apartment.
Trying to sound light, she said, “Some other time,” and stepped away from the truck.
His gaze was down on her shoes, watching closely. Sneak a peek at the freak show, she thought angrily. Unlike her parents, she'd never blamed Aaron for the accident, but in that moment, as she walked away from him, trying so hard to keep from showing any limp, any weakness, she did blame him.
He called after her, but she didn't turn around. The rain on her face and arms felt good.
She kept going.
After circling the block and getting thoroughly drenched, Nora returned to the party, and mopped herself off with paper towels in the washroom. She found Kylie, told her what had happened, and switched over to coffee for the rest of the evening. In the dim light of the restaurant, nobody noticed her rain-soaked shirt and hair.
Uncle Don seemed to be having the time of his life, so proud of his extended work family.
After the party wrapped up, Stevey drove Nora home, and they listened to the station along the way. As of that night, neither of them worked there anymore, and they exchanged looks as the station aired promo spots for both of their replacements. Stevey's former co-host Davey was getting a young man nicknamed The Jackal. Nora's afternoon show would be hosted by a gravel-voiced woman named Raven. She dyed her hair black and wore feathers as everyday accessories. Nobody was sure if she had Native American heritage, or if it was just part of her image.
One of the male intern's voices came on live, and he sounded thrilled to have the station to himself that evening. He rambled on, proclaiming Raven's voice to sound “like how long, sexy nails feel on your back.”
Nora clicked off the radio. “Why does everything have to be about sex? Why is everyone so obsessed with rutting like wild animals?”
“Uh, speak for yourself,” Stevey said. “I could take it or leave it.”
Nora slapped him on the arm. “Oh, come on. That's got to be a pickup line. Are you putting the moves on me? What, am I supposed to try to rise to the challenge and prove that sex is actually great?”
“I'm serious,” Stevey said. “I play the part of a red-blooded American male on the radio, but I'd much rather have a simple cuddle or play Scrabble.”
“So, you're gay.”
“No. Just… well, the technical term is asexual. Since we're going to be working together, I thought you should know.”
“So, you won't be hitting on me?”
“On air, I plan to pursue you relentlessly. It'll be good for our dynamic. Don't you think?”
“What if I were the one pursuing you?” Nora asked.
He shook his head and put on the turn signal to turn onto her street. “It doesn't work that way. The audience would never accept it. You should be enthusiastic about food, though. Talk about big juicy hamburgers and how you can't get enough. We could do something with that.”
“Are you pulling my leg about this asexual thing?” she asked.
Stevey's face went pale, and Nora realized what she'd said. She usually tried to avoid the expression, pulling my leg, because it made people think about things they didn't want to imagine, like what did that atrophied little stump of a leg inside her prosthetic really look like.
He said, “I swear it's the truth, but can you keep it between us?”
“I sure will, partner.” She pushed open the door when they reached her house. “See you next week! At our new job!”
“Nora wait, I got you something.” He rolled down the window and passed her a gift bag with f
our pounds of something in it. “Open it when you get inside, out of the rain. You can thank me later.”
He drove off, and Nora ran into her house. Her parents were already asleep, so she crept as silently as she could to her bedroom, where she opened the bag and the box inside.
It was a special alarm clock that lit up before the alarm sound went off. Starting next week, Nora would be getting up at four in the morning, in the dark, to go to her new job. Her new job. On a morning show. It didn't get much bigger than that.
She wondered if she would be on billboards.
CHAPTER 9
Aaron Edward
Aaron Edward drove up to his big, empty house. The live gig had gone so well that he was wondering if he'd made the right choice in stepping away from his career as a musician to focus on the recording studio.
The leather pants, which he'd bought as a joke to wear ironically, had felt good. On the tiny stage, even with the scent of fried cheese and hummus in the air, he'd lost himself in the magic of performing. The music flowed, the lyrics came from muscle memory without effort, and he'd been in that state of flow.
Then he'd seen Nora. Sassy little scrapper Nora, who'd caught tadpoles in her bare hands in the pond behind the school, and laughed at him for being squeamish. He wouldn't even touch them, let alone walk around with a wriggling handful, pants rolled up and ankles deep in more of them, clotting the edges of the pond. They were such troubling things, those half-frogs, with their budding arms and legs, caught between two states.
The other boys at school had teased her, called her names he couldn't remember. She was a gorgeous woman, and had been a cute kid. When she was fourteen, on the cusp of womanhood, she'd shot up in height. She would never be tall, but she did blossom out of the tiny range, and her once-boyish hands became slender and graceful. He'd been transfixed by her hands—so much that when he was playing his guitar for her, he would forget half the chords he knew.
Nora had a spotlight effect on him. Tonight, when they'd made eye contact during a song, it had broken his flow, washing away his well-rehearsed lyrics.
Aaron looked around, surprised to find himself in his driveway. He didn't remember getting there. He turned to the empty seat where Nora would have been if she'd come with him instead of running away.
He imagined her there, with those graceful hands poised together on her leg, and her, looking up at him with those wide, sea-green eyes.
How could he ever make it up to her? How much money could make it right? Because of his poor judgment, she'd nearly died, and she'd lost a foot. Aaron shuddered, imagining what it might feel like to lose a limb. Some people experienced phantom pain in the limb that wasn't there—nerve damage, or psychic pain, depending on your personal philosophy.
How could he ever tell Nora that the worst thing that had ever happened to her had turned out to be the best thing for him?
CHAPTER 10
Nora
Nora's new apartment—her first place that wasn't shared with her parents—was the kind of place you wanted to spend time in. The windows faced south and west, so she'd be getting plenty of sun in the afternoons, when she came home after her shift. The windows had thick blackout curtains to draw in the evenings, when she went to bed while other people were eating dinner.
The building had at one point been a cannery, and the big windows had saved the factory owners cash on electricity. The windows had all been upgraded when the building was converted to lofts and had new plumbing and electrical installed throughout. One of Tianne's blogging contacts had found the place listed for sale, but sitting empty for nearly a year, and had suggested Nora make an offer to rent. The owner, an interior decorator with a dozen investment properties, had been happy to rent to her. Nora suspected it was more about her good credit rating, and the market, than her friendly smile.
The loft was on the top floor, so she wouldn't be hearing noisy footsteps from above. Exposed red bricks along the exterior walls cried out for original art, and the stainless steel appliances were relatively new. The kitchen tap dripped if you didn't wiggle the handle, and the bathroom was painted an atrocious arsenic green, but those were flaws Nora could live with.
The first time Nora returned from errands, winded from walking up four flights of stairs, she dropped her grocery bags in the kitchen, stretched out on the new-to-her sofa in the living room with the soaring high ceiling, and felt the glamor seeping into her.
She didn't notice the ice cream melting and seeping out of its bag until it was too late. When she used her webcam to make a video call to her parents that evening, they laughed together over the ice cream. Nora walked around the apartment with her laptop, giving them a virtual tour.
Nora's mother wrinkled her nose. “Don't those old bricks smell musty?”
“Keep an eye out for spiders,” her father said. “You want to keep the spiders, though, because they eat the other bugs. So if you see a spider, pick him up and put him out of the way when you're vacuuming.”
“Is that tap dripping?” Nora's mother asked. “I can see something behind you, dripping. We'd better come down next weekend and make sure everything's safe. Show us the shower equipment.”
“It's fine,” Nora said. The previous tenant had installed safety bars, and Nora had picked up a shower chair from a medical supply store. It wasn't pretty, or as deluxe as what she had at her parents' home, but it would do.
“Leave the TV or radio on when you go out,” Nora's father said.
“Dad, I've got nothing in here to steal. Besides, I think burglars know about the old leave-the-radio-on trick.”
After another twenty minutes of home security tips, including leaving a large pair of men's boots outside the door, Nora signed off, pulled the blackout drapes, and prepared herself to wake up in six hours, at four in the morning.
At midnight, she was still awake, and thinking about Aaron Edward.
In elementary school, he'd been two grades ahead of her, and one of the good ones. While the boys her age teased her and called her Nosy Nora, leading to scuffles, Aaron Edward, called Eddie in those days, would split the fights up, or take her side. Once, he held a boy down so she could spit on his face. Thinking back, this was not the best solution to dealing with bullies, but it certainly was fast and effective.
They didn't socialize much, because at that age the boys and girls stuck with their own groups, but by the summer she was fourteen and he was sixteen, and they found themselves at the same summer camp, everything had changed.
The girls in Nora's cabin were all aflutter over Eddie, who carried at minimum five packs of gum so he always had an excuse to talk to the girls, and they to him. The group of girls Nora shared a cabin with took turns at night wearing a men's black jean jacket from the Lost'n'Found, and talking in a deep voice, pretending to be Eddie. Then, the girls would kiss while everyone watched.
None of them thought there was anything queer about it, though when Nora thought back over those nights, the girl who found the black jacket had been the one to come up with the idea, and she did take more than her fair share of turns playing the boy. And she hadn't been a bad kisser at all.
Nora fluffed her pillow, rolled over, and wondered what that girl—her name was Jennifer, but she preferred to be called simply J—was up to.
At one o'clock, with only three hours of potential sleep, Nora regretted not having taken a sleeping pill earlier, but it was too late now, as the ones she had lasted eight hours. She got up, grabbed her crutches, and went to the kitchen to make a warm cup of milk.
A few hours later, when the alarm clock went off with its buzzing sound, the room was strangely bright. Danger? No, it was her new glowing alarm clock, and not, as she had imagined for a moment, that aliens had come to take her away.
Nora got dressed slowly, choosing a pair of slim-fitting brown slacks and a bright pink shirt. Her beaded necklace looked great with the outfit, and really dialed it up from casual to business, but the necklace was too noisy to wear on air. The beads
would touch the desk when she leaned forward, or she'd forget, and play with them absent-mindedly. She opted instead for a cameo pendant, a good luck charm from Tianne, who promised she'd be listening to Stevey and Nora's first show from her home miles away, via the station's internet feed.
“But it's so early,” Nora had said to her friend.
“Did you not notice I have a baby?” Tianne replied, and they'd shared their last laugh together before Nora got in her car and left Eugene.
And here she was, in Portland, at her new job.
Nora put on some tinted moisturizer, pleased to note how the tip of her nose was softening as the swelling dissipated. It had been a little stiff, and she'd worried that a lack of movement would give away her surgery, but now it moved. It was not as flexible as before, but then again, it also wasn't enormous. Her pale green-blue eyes looked pretty. Even her intensely curly hair didn't seem like such bad luck; some women paid a lot of money to get a spiral perm, and Nora had one for free.
The station was in the same part of town, and only ten blocks away, but it was still dark out, so Nora drove her car. The area seemed safe enough to her during the day, but she was small, and her father would have insisted she choose safety over exercise.
She passed two billboards on the way to the station: one with a whole group from the new station, and one with just her and Stevey, holding rubber duckies and covered in suds, as though they might be in a bath tub together. The picture had been taken just three days earlier, and Nora thought if she'd been a regular commuter looking up at that billboard, she would have turned the dial for Stevey. His biceps were visible, and he had a tattoo on one. It was an old-fashioned Mom tattoo that would test well with listeners, who didn't need to know it had been applied to the photograph by the graphic designer.
Stevey was an attractive man, and with his unclear genetic heritage, he could belong to any number of groups, from Latino to mixed Asian. Next to him, Nora looked very white. She made a mental note to wear more makeup to the next photo shoot so she didn't wash out. As she was driving past the billboard, she remembered to check out her nose on the billboard. It looked great, in the sense that it didn't stand out as anything but a normal nose.
