Love at First

by Kate Clayborn

  “Startled me,” he finished, though nothing about his tone, or his still-quiet voice, suggested that he’d been startled at all. He shifted, finally letting his hand fall back to his side. There was still that glare shielding his eyes, but she could feel his gaze on her all the same.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, inching closer to the railing, resting her still-crossed arms against it. “I didn’t mean—”

  “No, I’m—” he began, and then paused. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. “I’m sorry if I woke you, coming out here.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, nodding her head toward the building. It felt like they were in a conspiracy of two out here, whispering in the dark. “You won’t wake anyone.”

  Three of the six units in this apartment were occupied by people with hearing that was . . . not sharp, to put it mildly. And Benny, in the apartment below hers, waxed poetic about his white noise machine at the barest provocation, so he certainly wouldn’t hear them.

  “And I’m always up at this time,” she added, then promptly pressed her lips together. Why had she told him that? It was a secret.

  He cocked his head to the side, and it was like everything expressive about his face tipped with it—one eyebrow raised, one side of his mouth quirked. Something about it—something about this expression of genuine interest, of curiosity—hit Nora in such a vulnerable, neglected place.

  It had felt like such a long time—months and months, really—since she’d felt interesting. Since she’d met anyone new.

  Her cheeks warmed with pleasure.

  “You are?” he said.

  “Yeah.” She meant to leave it at that, especially because it’d come out decidedly more . . . breathy than she’d intended. But before she could stop herself, she added, “It’s the golden hour.”

  Nora! her brain shouted (not breathily). What! Are! You! Saying!

  She had a fleeting hope he might not have heard her. Like, over the sound of his first-floor-exclusive hair breeze.

  “Golden hour?”

  Okay, well. He’d heard her.

  She cleared her throat. She would answer this, briefly, not weirdly (or breathily). Then she would somehow find a way to bring up Donny, offer the condolences that she was sure were necessary.

  “It’s what I call this time of day . . . or, I guess, sort of not quite day?” Brilliant, she thought, inwardly rolling her eyes at herself. “It’s peaceful, I’ve always thought.”

  He was unmoving again, nothing but his brow furrowing, as though he had to consider the definition. Then he sent her a lopsided grin that managed, somehow, to be both self-confident and self-deprecating.

  “Not so peaceful now,” he said, taking a step closer to the railing, and she tried not to notice how his smile, his still-soft voice, made her feel. Specifically, in the area beneath her crossed arms.

  Yikes, she thought. Better do something about that.

  She tucked them tighter against her chest.

  “It’s okay,” she repeated, feeling her own lips curve into a smile.

  “It means something different in my line of work. The golden hour, I mean.”

  “You’re a photographer?” That was the only other context in which she’d heard the phrase—something about the light at a specific time of day. A time of day that was not, of course, 4:00 a.m.

  The grin—and the confidence—faded. “Uh. No. Never mind. It’s not . . . very pleasant.”

  Now it was Nora’s turn to tilt her head in interest. What could be unpleasant about a phrase like the golden hour, in any context?

  “What do you mean?”

  Definitely after this she would find a way to bring up Donny. Absolutely she would.

  His chest rose on an inhale before he spoke again. When he finally did, he seemed almost sheepish. Apologetic.

  “It’s what we call the hour after someone’s been injured. Uh, traumatically injured. It’s the time where you have . . . it’s the best window you have to treat them.”

  “Oh.” She lowered her eyes from his face, took in a detail that made more sense to her now. Those weren’t pajamas he was wearing; they were hospital scrubs. “You’re a doctor?”

  “Yeah.”

  Wow, good thing Mrs. Salas from 2B wasn’t up. Nora could practically hear her now. A doctor, Nora! she would say. Wouldn’t you like to marry a doctor?

  Nora cleared her throat again, course-corrected that train of thought. She should bring up Donny. Now was as good a time as any.

  Instead, she said, “Do you work nights?”

  “I work whenever,” he said, and she thought she could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “I work all the time.”

  He sounded so . . . defeated, the way he said that. So weary. She opened her mouth to say something—that she was sorry, that it sounded difficult. But he spoke before she could.

  “Do you?”

  “Do I work all the time?”

  He smiled up at her, a different one, this time. She thought it looked like a sunrise, this smile, for all that it was still dark around them. It shined out every other thought in her head: Donny, the apartment, the building.

  “Do you work nights?” he clarified.

  “Oh, no. I’m an early riser, I guess. I work during the day. From home.”

  He hadn’t asked that, had he? But suddenly, to Nora, this conversation had taken a golden-hour quality all its own. Secret and special and hers alone.

  “Oh yeah?” he said, that delicious note of interest in his voice. He reached up and adjusted his glasses, and in that second Nora let herself be absurdly, giddily attracted to him. She almost missed it when he asked his next question.

  “What do you do?”

  She smiled down at him, shifting her feet against the wood in something like anticipation. She hadn’t had an opportunity to talk about, really talk about, her work, with someone who wasn’t an actual coworker, in a long time. She liked what she did, for all the headaches it had given her recently, what with her new situation and all. All right. She would answer this one question, then she would bring up Donny.

  “I design w—”

  But before she could finish, a scream rent the air.

  “What the hell?” the man said, his head snapping to the side, out toward the inky-black no-longer night.

  Nora couldn’t help it.

  She laughed.

  He looked back up at her, his hand coming to his chest again, that same gentle rub over his heart. Easily startled, this tall, handsome, bespectacled man, and she was so . . . delighted by that. So thoroughly, completely charmed.

  “It’s a cat,” she said, the laugh still in her voice. “A stray. Probably one of the big toms.”

  Her laughter faded as she realized something. She hadn’t heard them in a couple of weeks, not since . . .

  “Donny,” she blurted.

  The man on the balcony dropped his hand away from his heart.

  There was a long, awkward pause, during which Nora’s soul certainly left her body. Not sticking around for this! it probably said, adding a cheerful wave as it went.

  She cleared her throat. “He—um. He used to put food out for them.”

  The pause that followed was even longer. Even awkward-er. What a terrible way to bring up the condolences conversation.

  The man turned his head again, out toward the yard, out toward where the frustrated feline scream had come from, his hands curling around the balcony railing again, as though he needed to ground himself. She was desperate to say something, anything, but she also wanted to give him a minute, if he needed it. God knows she’d needed a lot of minutes, over the last few months. That’s what 4:00 a.m. was good for, wasn’t it? The poor guy.

  It nagged at her, a little, that she’d never seen him before, never heard Donny mention him. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Donny wasn’t a talker, wasn’t a sharer, not even with Jonah, whom he’d known the longest. And he’d worked up until the day he died, leaving every weekday morning at se
ven and not returning until five thirty. He had a whole life away from here that Nora didn’t know about. Maybe he knew tons of people, but just never brought any of them to the building.

  “Did there used to be a tree out there?” the man on the balcony said, interrupting her thoughts.

  “Yeah,” she said automatically, her eyes going immediately out to its former spot. “We had to have it removed a couple of months after I moved in last year.”

  She’d been devastated, getting that tree cut down. Her first official act as the building’s association president, and it’d felt foreboding, damning, especially so soon after Nonna had passed. I don’t want to do it, she’d told everyone, afraid of what they’d think. I wish I could keep it exactly as it is. But it’d been rotten to the core, that tree, and frankly they’d been lucky it hadn’t fallen on its own. In the end, she’d watched it come down—a whole day of chain saws running, men in truck lifts, wood shavings in the air like snowfall. She hadn’t cried, but she’d really, really wanted to.

  “Wait,” she said, realizing that she’d neglected the most important part of what he’d said. She looked back down, found him watching her. “You’ve been here before?”

  “Once. When I was a kid.” Something had changed in his voice, though she wasn’t sure she could’ve said what. Maybe it was that the air was changing all around them—the sky lightening, the predawn pitch transforming into a velvet blue-black. She knew it well enough to know: golden hour, almost over.

  He cleared his throat. “He was my uncle.”

  Nora blinked down at him, shock and relief coursing through her. So it was a relative, then. Loyalty! Nonna was saying smugly, from somewhere, but it also wasn’t really the time to be counting chickens.

  “I’m so sorry,” Nora said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  The man dropped his head, something like a nod of acknowledgment, or maybe some kind of bow of respect for the mention of Donny. Inside her chest, she felt her heart squeeze in sympathy, in recognition.

  I hate that I’m all the way up here, she thought, though definitely being down there would be weird. What would she do, hug him? Without a bra on? Disastrous. Extremely inappropriate! Nonna, obviously, would never.

  “I didn’t know him very well,” he said, and there . . . there she could’ve said what. His voice sounded a little clipped. A little frustrated.

  A little . . . disloyal.

  No, Nora, she told herself. That’s only your 4:00 a.m. fretting talking. He’s probably still in shock, same as you.

  Below her, the man reached up, scratched at that same spot on his chest. He cleared his throat again. “Do you like it here?”

  Did she . . . like it?

  What a question. This place held the best memories of her childhood, her adolescence. And now, she’d happily moved her whole life here for it. She could talk all morning about this building, thus her PowerPoint idea. Maybe this was an opportunity to bring up the wallpaper! Though probably it made more sense to talk about the people first, and—

  They were interrupted again, this time by a shrill, urgent beeping, and the man quickly patted his leg.

  “Shit,” he said. “Sorry.” Within seconds, what she could see of his face was being lit by the bluish screen of his phone. The hand that wasn’t holding it rubbed absentmindedly through his hair, and she watched, transfixed. He had lovely hair, which was a compliment she absolutely would not offer out loud.

  “I gotta run,” he added. “Other type of golden hour, I guess.”

  “Right.” She felt suddenly, overwhelmingly flustered. She hadn’t had time to say that she had known Donny. She hadn’t had the chance to ask him so many things—what he knew about the apartment, for one, but also the small matter of his actual name. And she hadn’t had time to answer his question, which seemed like the most important thing of all.

  She loved it here.

  “Wait,” she began, wanting to say this one last thing before 4:00 a.m. was finished.

  It was clear he hadn’t heard her, though. He was already moving toward his door.

  Before he ducked inside, he looked up at her one last time, the glare still winking off his glasses.

  “I’ll see you,” he said.

  But he didn’t stick around for her answer to that, either.

  Chapter 2

  Well, he figured he already knew the answer.

  You couldn’t like it there.

  First of all, there was a smell. Not a terrible smell, Will had to admit, but not the kind of smell you’d want greeting you every time you walked through the front door. It was sort of like opening a musty wooden box and sticking your face inside it. The only thing in the box would be dust bunnies and maybe a handful of old pennies.

  Second of all, there were the lights. Like any person who spent the majority of his days (and often nights) under the grim, fluorescent tray lighting inside most hospitals, Will appreciated a good old-fashioned incandescent, or even a modern-day LED. What he did not appreciate, however, was a bronze chandelier—hung low and made lower by a bunch of dangly glass things—that he hit his head on in the entryway, or a series of also-bronze wall sconces where round-cheeked cherubs seemed to watch his entire journey down the hallway.

  And speaking of the hallway: the wallpaper. It was . . . gold, or at least it’d once been gold, though under the lights from the (dangerous) chandelier and the (creepy) wall sconces, the color looked more faded mustard than fancy metallic. Every six inches or so, the texture changed, and Will had set his palm on it and thought, It couldn’t be.

  But it was. It was velvet wallpaper. Striped velvet wallpaper.

  Who could like that?

  It couldn’t be, he thought again, but this time, he wasn’t thinking about the wallpaper.

  It could not be her.

  The girl on the balcony from sixteen years ago, and the woman he met this morning. That . . . could not be.

  She’d said so, after all, or at least she’d said as much. Last year, that’s when she’d moved in.

  So it couldn’t be clearer, obviously.

  It could not be her.

  It was only that . . . there had been something about her. Something about her voice when she’d said Hey, something about the sound of her laugh, something about the ponytail that had slipped over her shoulder as they’d talked. Something about the way she’d looked up there on that balcony, no matter that she’d been far away, no matter that it’d been dark. Something about the way his heart had moved when he’d seen her, like a hiccup in his chest.

  But he could not let himself think about that.

  “Could I, uh—?”

  A voice interrupted, and Will blinked up to see the familiar barista he’d given his order to reaching gently for the travel mug he held in one hand. She gave him an understanding smile, used to seeing staff from all corners of the hospital space out in front of her while they waited for their next fix, while they recovered from whatever made them require it.

  “Yeah, sorry, Janine,” Will said, handing it over. “I’ll take an IV bag of the same, if you’ve got it,” he added, which was a bad joke, the coffee shop equivalent of Hot enough for ya?, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances, and the circumstances were that he’d been up since three o’clock in the morning, he’d seen about twenty patients since he’d shown up here four hours ago, and he also could not stop thinking about the woman on the balcony.

  No, not the woman. He could not stand around thinking about the woman.

  He would think about the apartment.

  He moved down the counter to wait for his order, willing himself to focus his attention on where it should be, at least for however many minutes he had until he got paged again.

  The apartment, okay. He had to unload it. As soon as possible.

  Which was in twelve months.

  Fucking Donny.

  It was a phrase he’d been repeating to himself with a fair bit of regularity since he’d gotten the attorney’s cal
l last week. Donny had apparently already been gone for several days by then, and Will had tried to take the news of his death in the only spirit his uncle really deserved: neutrally, and with the detachment of a person who dealt with death on a fairly regular basis. What did it have to do with him, after all, that Donny was dead? Exactly nothing, that’s what, which is what he’d tried to politely tell the attorney.

  But as it turned out, when you were both the sole executor and sole beneficiary of said uncle’s estate, it actually had a lot to do with you. And when that estate was tied to a petty, passive-aggressive, hostage-holding last will and testament, it was going to keep having a lot to do with you.

  Twelve months before he could sell the apartment. Twelve months of musty-smelling hallways, must-avoid light fixtures, and mustard wallpaper.

  Twelve months of the woman on the balcony, he thought, then clenched his jaw against it.

  Focus, Will.

  “Here you go, Dr. Sterling,” Janine said, saving him from himself.

  Any other day, he’d probably correct her. You can call me Will, he’d say, same as he always did, because almost six years out of medical school and he still didn’t much like being called “Doctor” outside the bay, and even there he sometimes—when he thought it’d make a difference, when he thought it’d make someone more comfortable—led with his first name.

  Today, though. Today he only smiled and said thanks. Today he’d get Dr. Sterling–ed all day if it kept his head on straight, if it helped give him the kind of distance he wanted: the distance between the man he was here in this hospital cafeteria, and the boy he’d felt like early this morning. First, when he stepped inside that stuffy, stale-smelling apartment he hadn’t seen in sixteen years.

  And then when he’d stood outside on that cool, dark balcony and seen the woman look down at him.

  He’d actually been nervous.

  “Fucking Donny,” he muttered.

  “And who is Donny?” said a voice from beside him, and he let his eyes close briefly.

  Of course. Of course it would be the person in this hospital most likely to make him nervous.