Love at First

by Kate Clayborn

  But then Jonah shouted, “What’d they say?”

  She looked away from Will, back to her neighbors. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Will move, but she didn’t look over to investigate. He’s leaving, she thought, and tried to be relieved about it. If nothing else, at least she’d stopped his charm offensive before it could get started. He’d be gone for now, and she could get back to figuring out how to fix this.

  She waited, eyes ahead, for him to offer at least a cursory goodbye to her neighbors.

  But he didn’t.

  “Ms. Clarke,” he said instead, exactly like his awful letter. “Can I see you outside?”

  He hadn’t waited to see if she would follow.

  No, he’d left the basement in an upright stride that was the exact opposite of the lanky, casual charm with which he’d walked in, and when Nora made her way up the musty rear stairwell, her palms still sweaty, she half expected him to be gone already.

  It had taken a few minutes to disentangle herself from the cacophonous aftermath of his departure, her neighbors bursting with various assessments of Will Sterling (“Rude!” according to Marian, agreed upon by Jonah and Benny; “Seems a bit moody,” offered Mr. Salas, countered by Mrs. Salas’s more generous “Maybe he was nervous!”; and, finally, “Very tall!” per Emily, who seemed not to mean this as a compliment). After that, there’d been a sweeping instructional impulse: everyone wanted to remind Nora of their own particular grievance with the short-term rental idea. As she took the steps up to the yard, she could hear their various pleas and insistences:

  You’ve got to tell him, Nora—

  What he needs to know is—

  He has to understand that—

  When she pushed open the back door and walked into the bright, warm afternoon sunshine, Will was there waiting. Middle of the yard, arms crossed, staring down at the black, wrought-iron tabletop of their collectively held patio furniture.

  He hardly seemed to notice her approach, didn’t move when she came to stand even with him. He kept his eyes on the table, his brows furrowed, as though he was expecting to find something there. Weirdly, she felt compelled to stare at it, too. They probably looked like they were solemnly standing over a casket, or a headstone, rather than over the spot where Benny and Jonah had an extremely regrettable potato-skin-eating contest last week.

  “You said last year,” he finally said, and she looked over at him, though he didn’t return the gesture. He was really focused on this table, and also an incredibly specific thing about her life timeline that extremely didn’t matter.

  “That’s not untrue. I moved back here last year. As a kid I used to . . . I lived here every summer, with my grandmother. And I came for a lot of holidays. That’s what Jonah meant, about twenty years.”

  The arms he had crossed over his chest shifted, tightened. But he didn’t say a word.

  She chafed under what felt like an admonishing silence. What did he expect, that she’d give him her whole life story in a few minutes of golden-hour conversation? Anyway it’s not like he’d given her a full accounting of his terrible rental-property scheme. She should be admonishing him! She would start with his behavior in the basement. No matter that she’d wanted him gone; it’d been rude, the way he’d walked out. She would say that. She would tell him about his manners! Nonna definitely would have done that.

  But when she turned to him and opened her mouth, the admonishment that came out was, “I thought you wore glasses.”

  And then she promptly looked back down at the table, which she very much would have liked to crawl under. It could conveniently serve as the headstone for her oncoming death from embarrassment.

  Beside her, Will cleared his throat. When he spoke there was possibly another smirk behind it, but she wouldn’t know, what with all the attention she was paying to her new backyard tomb.

  “I do, sometimes. I also have contacts.”

  “Right, of course. That must be very convenient.”

  There was a long silence. Surely he was using it to suppress his laughter.

  “Ms. Clarke,” he said finally, and the best thing she could say about that as a reopener was that it at least made her angry enough to feel like speaking again; it at least reminded her of his letter, and what they were here for in the first place.

  They turned to face each other again, Will dropping his arms and returning his hands to his pockets. Whatever frowning, frustrated countenance he’d left the basement with, he’d smoothed it. Obviously he’d been helped along by her ridiculous comment about his glasses, and she kicked herself for giving him the upper hand.

  “You don’t need to call me Ms. Clarke,” she said, though the stiffness in her voice suggested she was exactly the kind of person who would prefer to be called Ms. Clarke. “You can call me Nora.”

  “Nora, then,” he said after a beat, and as it turned out, she didn’t like that much better, primarily because she immediately liked it way too much—the way he said it, the way he looked at her when he said it.

  Like he knew her.

  Beneath her shirt, she felt warm with . . . annoyance? Yes, she would definitely settle on annoyance. No other feelings options allowed.

  “What you need to know,” she began, because thinking about her neighbors’ instructions absolutely made her feel less . . . annoyed, “is that this building can’t really accommodate what you’ve outlined in your letter.”

  “I don’t see why not. I have a unit I don’t intend to live in. I have a permit to rent it on a short-term basis. It’s accommodated.”

  Okay, now she was genuinely annoyed, not lying-to-herself annoyed. “It’s not about your . . . your unit.” Her cheeks heated. Why did unit sound so off-color when she said it? A mystery! She rushed on. “It’s about the people who live here. We can’t accommodate it.”

  “It’s not for you to accommodate. As I said in the letter, I’ll maintain the unit, and I’ll do my best to make sure—”

  “You won’t be able to do that. You live all the way across town, and you work all the time. You said it yourself.”

  Something ticked in his jaw. “I’m not here to make trouble for anyone.”

  “You are, though. You have to understand”—Good, she thought, remember your lines—“you have to understand that this building is really unique. Everyone who lives here has lived here for a long time, and we—”

  “Right. Twenty years for you, was it?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Whatever, yes! Twenty years, though I don’t see why it matters so much to you. In any case, I know everything you don’t about this place, and I’m telling you, you’ll be causing a lot of difficulty for the people who live here.”

  “But you don’t.”

  She blinked. “I don’t what?”

  “You don’t know everything. For example, you clearly didn’t know that it’s not on the prohibited-buildings list for short-term rentals.”

  Okay, that was at least two points to him, if she wanted to update Marian on the score later. He was right; that was the worst of it. He was completely right.

  But still. Still, twenty years! She had to remember that she knew lots of things he didn’t.

  And she intended to use them.

  “I know you said you didn’t know your uncle well,” she said, and almost immediately the look in his eyes changed—all that confidence gone with a blink, replaced at first with something cautious and vulnerable, and then, when she finished her sentence, something determined and hard.

  “But I did. And he wouldn’t have wanted this. He really loved that apartment.”

  He stared at her. Nothing like the starlit gaze from the other morning.

  Nothing like that at all.

  “I’ve heard,” he said flatly.

  “It’s only that,” she said, not really minding the note of pleading in her voice, “we’re a family.”

  For a second, she thought it might’ve worked. He dropped his eyes to
the grass and shifted his feet. She thought he might’ve even nodded his head.

  But if he did, it wasn’t in agreement.

  “Well, Nora,” he said (she did! not! like it!), raising his glasses-free, sympathy-free eyes to hers. “I’m not really a member of your family. So.”

  So?

  That so—it sounded to Nora like a declaration. Whatever soft conversation they’d started with on their balconies, there was no going back to that. They were on different sides now.

  Around them, the backyard seemed unusually still, unusually quiet, and she had the sense that they were being watched—that everyone had gone back to their apartments, pressing their curious, concerned faces against their back doors to see how Nora would handle this.

  So, she thought, making it a declaration of her own. She would not break first. She would stand here where it felt like the air got thinner and thinner between them, where it felt like her body buzzed with strange, stifling confusion: a cocktail of anger and attraction, disappointment and excitement.

  She would not break first.

  When his phone beeped again, she held herself still. But when he moved to pull it from his pocket, looking at the screen, she let herself breathe a sigh of relief. A win by default was still a win.

  “I need to go,” he said, but she could tell it cost him, to be the one who had to walk away.

  Good, she thought, relishing the thought that her neighbors would see him retreat. When he turned from her and started making his way toward the back fence, she felt a surge of reckless, unearned confidence.

  “I won’t make it easy for you!” she called toward him.

  He stilled in place. When he turned around, he seemed to look past her, toward the building, toward its balconies. She wondered if he could see her neighbors there, watching them both. That smile—no, smirk—played again on his mouth, and she thought (she couldn’t believe she thought!) that she’d like to kiss that expression right off his face.

  “It’s a good thing, then,” he called back, his voice carrying across the yard. “It’s a good thing I’m not used to easy.”

  Chapter 4

  It was easier, frankly, to think of her as an enemy.

  Will had a lot of experience with enemies. Not people, not exactly, though he guessed if he thought about it hard enough, the man in whose apartment he was standing would probably qualify. No, Will’s enemies had always been bigger, more . . . institutional. School systems, government programs, billing departments, that sort of thing. Becoming a doctor meant that he’d managed to keep these deep-seated blood feuds from his adolescence alive into his adulthood, though he supposed he had a more experienced perspective now. Still, when he’d been younger, full of fear and sadness and anger, having adversaries had helped him focus, helped him survive. Nothing was complicated when you had an enemy. It was you versus them, and you versus them stopped you thinking about the other problem, which was usually something more like: you versus you.

  You versus your fear. You versus your sadness. You versus your anger.

  So with Nora—the girl on the balcony after all, it seemed—it would have to be him versus her, and not him versus his memory of her. Not him versus his attraction to her. Not him versus his boyish, reckless feelings for her.

  In the two days since he’d walked away from her, he’d worked on it, this perspective. Instead of thinking about the way she’d looked up close—that long ponytail and those light blue eyes—he’d gone to big-box hardware stores, buying paint and trays and rollers. Instead of thinking about what she’d said—about protecting Donny, about this godforsaken pile of bricks being some kind of “family”—he researched haul-away companies and mattress deliveries and cleaning services. Instead of thinking about how he’d felt in that basement—unsure, unbalanced, unwanted—he’d scrolled through pages of similar-sized rentals in the neighborhood, drafting three different versions of the unit description he’d post when the time came. He got invested.

  And getting invested made it possible to think of her and her neighbors as an institution all on their own. An easy enemy, then. Nothing personal about it.

  When he’d arrived back at the building this morning, he’d prepared himself for confrontation, half expecting that there’d be some kind of notice taped on Donny’s door. A cease-and-desist, maybe, or at least a hastily scrawled “KEEP OUT” sign. But nothing greeted him, not even the flick of curtains in the front windows as he’d walked up, a stack of flattened boxes tucked under his arm. In the hall, even the cherub sconces seemed indifferent, not that it was healthy for him to imagine otherwise. And now, inside Donny’s apartment, the silence was deafening—he couldn’t even hear footsteps in the unit above him.

  Well, fine, then, a freeze-out. That made it even easier.

  He started in the kitchen, because he figured that would be easy, too—he doubted he’d find anything too personal there, and he had a good list from Sally’s binder about what essentials he’d need to have for renters. He put on an emergency-medicine podcast he liked, an episode about compartment syndrome he’d been meaning to listen to, and started sorting. Keep, donate, toss.

  Easy.

  Until there was a knock on his door.

  He almost missed it, what with the sound of pots and pans shifting and also the voice of a woman through his phone speaker describing—in great, gory detail—the right technique for a fasciotomy. But when he raised his head he heard it again, a definite knock, and also the sound of murmured, feminine voices.

  The institution arrives, he thought, controlling his breathing as he stepped around various piles of junk. Don’t think of her as Nora.

  When he opened the door, the doctor on the podcast was saying “infected surgical bulge” and there were two familiar faces—neither of them Nora’s—staring up at him from the threshold, each holding dishes covered in aluminum foil.

  “Uh,” he said, over the podcast host’s commentary on pus color. “Let me—” He stepped back and shut it off. Whatever they were carrying smelled like bacon and carbohydrates, which meant he was getting an institution, of a sort: the Midwestern welcome and/or bereavement wagon. It didn’t look all that much like an enemy cavalry had arrived, unless there were laxatives baked into those dishes.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, adding an embarrassed smile, because if this was a peacekeeping mission, he was going to turn the charm offensive back on. Easy enough, when it wasn’t Nora standing there.

  “We’ve brought you some dishes!” one of the women said, the one whose hand he shook in the basement. She was wearing lipstick so bright red he could almost hear it. “I’m your upstairs neighbor, Corrine Salas, and—” She paused, nudging the woman beside her with an elbow. When that produced nothing in the way of a reaction, she spoke again. “And this is Marian Goodnight, who lives across the hall from you.” Another nudge.

  “Not sure if you’ll have much of an appetite,” Mrs. Goodnight said abruptly, holding out her dish and nodding toward his phone. “If that’s the kind of thing you’re listening to.”

  “That must be an occupational hazard,” said Mrs. Salas excitedly. “Nora mentioned you’re a doctor! Now if I could scoot right by you here to set this dish down. . . .”

  And before he could say anything, that’s exactly what she’d done—moved past him in a cloud of perfume and chatter, her companion silently (and unscentedly) following her lead into the kitchen, pushing aside his Keep, Donate, and Toss boxes. It took a minute to realize that the two covered dishes were only the start, that each of them had also been carrying bags over their shoulders, and were now also unpacking those.

  “Now these things will keep nicely,” Mrs. Salas said, not really to him, not really to anyone, so far as he could tell. Her eyes and hands were busy on the absolutely insane amount of food that was being stacked up onto Donny’s stained laminate countertops. “So I’ll pop them in your freezer. As for this Tupperware, the red tops can stay on the counter, and the blue should be refrigerated, though I s
uppose if you’re not going to eat the red tops within a couple of days, you could refrigerate them, too.”

  He cleared his throat, confused. What the hell was happening? Could all this food be laced with laxatives? “This is very—”

  “Oh, shoot,” she said, her hands on her hips. “I forgot the shortbread! If you could give me one minute.” She was already shuffling his way, moving in the same path around Donny’s things that he’d taken, only she didn’t seem to have to think about it at all. “I’ll be right back. Marian, start telling him about the bathroom faucet!”

  Then it was quiet again, he and a stranger named Marian Goodnight staring at each other across a countertop of casseroles and the width of an apartment he thought no one wanted him in.

  “Mrs. Goodnight,” he said. “It’s nice to mee—”

  “I’d sure like to know how you got that permit so fast,” she said, abandoning the fussing she’d been doing with the food. She had a voice like his third-grade teacher—loud, insistent, permanently disappointed. She crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows over the gold frames of her glasses.

  For a second, he raised his hand to his face, as though to push up his own, but then he remembered he hadn’t worn them.

  Which was a choice that had nothing to do with Nora.

  Honestly, the look Marian Goodnight was giving him was pretty intimidating, but it was at least less confusing than the meal delivery. Clearly there was a good cop/bad cop situation playing out here, so he relaxed his shoulders, tucked his hands into his pockets, and prepared for battle.

  “I know someone,” he said, smiling.

  Marian narrowed her eyes. “Well, that’s Chicago for you, isn’t it? Who’d you have to murder?”

  He blinked. “What? No one.”

  She looked him up and down, her lip curling. “It’d be easy for you, probably. You and all your . . . medicines.”

  Man! This lady was mean. He sort of liked it.

  “I have not murdered anyone.”

  She sniffed. “We’ll see.”

  He pressed his lips together, though he wasn’t sure why being accused of a felony made him want to laugh for the first time today. Either way, whatever Mrs. Salas had meant about the bathroom faucet was information that was not going to be forthcoming, because Mrs. Goodnight went back to completely ignoring him, opening Donny’s fridge and refilling shelves that Will had only finished cleaning out a half hour ago.