Love at First

by Kate Clayborn

  It also meant, she thought, that the last few days had been an exercise in mutual avoidance.

  From her cramped desk space, she resisted the urge to stand, to peer out the front window to look for some sign of him. The fact that she even had such an urge was the whole problem, frankly. It seemed like every time she saw Will Sterling, she forgot herself. Not for the first time since poetry night, her stomach fluttered with the memory of their conversation downstairs—how he watched her, how he listened to her.

  How he turned away from her, when she got too close.

  They weren’t all that with me when they were alive.

  He hadn’t meant to say it; that much had been clear in the seconds after she’d turned to face him. And it wasn’t only that he’d bolted, with his sloppy dumpster-based exit strategy. It was the way he’d looked at her before he’d gone—some combination of anger and betrayal and confusion. Like she’d tricked him somehow, when he’d been the one to follow her in the first place.

  The only comfort in that, she figured, was that at least he seemed to forget himself, too, every time they talked. When they were in each other’s orbit, nothing ever seemed to go to plan. After all, she hadn’t meant to say anything to him about Nonna, or about Mary Oliver, or about how she’d souped up poetry night for him. But one look from Will—one simple, soft use of her name—and it’d been the golden hour all over again.

  That feeling that she could’ve talked and talked.

  And that she could’ve listened and listened.

  All she’d wanted, in that brief, loaded moment of silence after he’d said it, was to stay with him, to keep the conversation going. There was no comparing their situations, of course—Nora’s parents were alive and well, probably right now covered head to toe in dust at some faraway dig site without a reliable cell signal—but still, Nora couldn’t help it. She’d wanted to know if Will’s parents hadn’t been with him in the same ways Nora’s parents hadn’t been with her.

  A chime from her computer snapped her attention back to her email screen, where an unread message sat waiting, a name she’d been watching for. A confirmation, she was sure of it, and she should’ve felt excitement, or relief. But so quick on the heels of her thoughts about Will and his past and what they might have in common, she hesitated to open it.

  Forgetting yourself, she thought, frustrated.

  Still, instead of clicking, she stood from her desk to stretch, closing her eyes to resist the persistent window-watching instinct. What she needed to do was focus, to get right in her head before she clicked on that email and proceeded with her new, not-seeing Will Sterling plan. The other night had been a mistake, trying to . . . bond with him, in some way. She needed to keep her mind on the bonds that mattered; she needed to—

  Answer the door.

  Nothing about that knock that rattled through the apartment indicated that it was one of her neighbors coming to call; in fact, more than once, Mrs. Salas hadn’t bothered knocking at all, though fortunately, Nora had always been dressed and decent on those occasions. And anyway, knocking wasn’t often the way of it around here, not when everyone knew each other’s routines so well, when it was easy enough to know when your neighbor checked the mail, or went for a weekly grocery shop. So a sharp knock? That was even more—

  It sounded again before she’d made it halfway down the hall, and she called out an agitated “I’m coming!” in response.

  A brief look through her peephole confirmed her quickly-forming suspicion, and she took a deep breath before finally pulling open her door to the man she did not need to be seeing, who was standing there with his loosely-fisted hand already raised, ready to knock again. His hair was a typically delightful mess and his mouth was set in a firm line, and no, she did not need to see him again, but damn if it didn’t make her heart beat a little faster when she did. She crossed her arms over her chest and prepared to pretend like she was entirely unaffected.

  “Can I hel—”

  “Did you do something to my unit?”

  Once again, Nora’s brain went directly to the most adolescent possible thing for a good two and a half seconds before she was able to blink herself back to sanity. To decency!

  “Pardon me?” she said, because sounding stuffy seemed like good insurance against further thoughts regarding Will’s unit. Do not look down, Nora thought, with the determination of a person standing on a very narrow ledge of a very tall building.

  “Did you put something in there? Something that would smell?”

  Her eyes widened, and his narrowed.

  “You did,” he said flatly.

  “No!” she said, but it was a too-quick no. A guilty no. The no of a person who definitely had discussed the dead-fish idea at least once. But she hadn’t actually done it.

  “I promise I didn’t,” she added, which was also probably a hit man’s first line of defense. It sounded unconvincing even to her own ears.

  “Your face got all red. As soon as I said it.”

  She resisted the urge to uncross her arms, to press her palms to her hot cheeks. “It’s probably a stress rash. From your aggressive knocking.”

  “Just tell me where you put it, and quick. I don’t get the sense that it’s the kind of smell that stays local, if you know what I mean.”

  Yikes, that didn’t sound great. She hoped to God it wasn’t something with the building’s septic system. She had a sudden and unpleasant memory of the details Nonna had provided—during one of their regular Sunday night phone calls—about a street-wide issue involving sewers about five years ago.

  “I didn’t put it anywhere, because I didn’t do it.” But already she was shoving her feet into the sneakers she had by the door, because if there was a smell seeping its way through this building, it was her responsibility, even if she hadn’t made it happen. “What’s it smell like?”

  “Like hell’s toilet bowl.”

  Yikes yikes. That did sound septic in nature. She straightened, grabbing for her phone and shoving it in her back pocket. There was a whole corner in her contact list related to building maintenance, and also a whole corner in her brain that was well aware of how much it cost to get repair people to come on short notice.

  “A poetry reading is one thing,” he said.

  “Will,” she snapped, pushing past him and closing the door behind her. “I did not put anything in your apartment. I wouldn’t do that.” She could feel the heat of his body beside her, and the reaction of her own—a gut-deep desire to lean into him—was so sharp, so acute, that she practically flung herself down the hall to get away from it.

  “Would anyone else?”

  She stopped at the staircase railing, turned back to face him. It was one thing to suspect her of something like this, but she’d bet her life no one else in this building had ever done a dead-fish teleconference. She was ready to scold him with a passionate defense of her neighbors’ upright standards of conduct, but when she saw his face, she realized that his mask of tight, impatient frustration had temporarily slipped. He looked almost . . . chastened.

  “No,” she said, more gently than she’d originally intended. She was helpless against that look. “They wouldn’t.”

  He cleared his throat, dropped his eyes briefly, then nodded toward the door across from Nora’s. “I ran into Jonah the other day. After I had the dumpster here. He seemed pretty pissed.”

  “It wasn’t really a dumpster,” she blurted. God! What was she, his attorney? It was as good as a dumpster. Sort of. Either way, she was already doing exactly what she’d been chastising herself for only a few minutes ago—forgetting herself.

  She turned back toward the stairs, eager to get out of this hallway. At the very least, she couldn’t get moony-eyed around a man who was meant to be her enemy while she was inside of hell’s toilet bowl.

  “Come on,” she said as she descended, but the truth was, she was talking to herself as much as to him.

  “I don’t smell anything,” she said, standing inside the
shockingly bright, shockingly clean space formerly known as Donny’s apartment. It hadn’t been that long since she’d last been in here, piles of Donny’s things everywhere, the apartment messy and stale-smelling in a way that’d been hard for her to confront. For all the boasting she’d been doing to Will Sterling about the community-mindedness of the building, the inside of Donny’s apartment had not, on first sight, suggested the surroundings of a community-supported man.

  But now, the place looked sunny and felt fresh—the sliding door, open to the balcony, casting bright light over the newly painted walls, the floor mostly clear of debris except for a few boxes stacked tidily against one of the walls. Even with its old cabinets and countertops, she could see that the kitchen practically gleamed. Sure, it was still too bare to seem welcoming, but already it was a massive improvement.

  Will had obviously put in a ton of work.

  And he was obviously really, really close to finishing.

  “I smell paint and bleach,” she added, because she had a feeling her stunned silence was noticeable.

  Beside her, Will tipped his head to the right. “We gotta go down the hall.”

  She nodded and took a nervous breath, indicating to him that she’d follow his lead. She could’ve made her own way, certainly—every apartment in the building was the same, with bedrooms toward the front of the building and the living areas toward the rear, all of the rooms stacked up single file in the long, narrow arrangement of countless other Chicago apartments. But letting Will go ahead of her at least allowed her the opportunity to openly gawk at the changes without his notice. Even the hallway seemed brighter, and when she tipped her head back to see that two modern-looking light fixtures had been installed, she felt . . . well! She felt almost envious.

  But then, she smelled it.

  “Oh,” she said, stopping past the first bedroom, right before the apartment’s bathroom door. It wasn’t quite so bad as Will had made it sound, but it sure wasn’t great, either. “I got it now.”

  “Yeah. So far as I can tell, nothing in the bathroom, though. No leaks, nothing in the cabinets.”

  She edged forward and peeked in, found it as gleaming as the kitchen—nothing on the countertop other than a full bottle of hand soap, a crisp white curtain hanging bright and smooth across the shower. There were fluffy white hand towels to match, hung from a shiny chrome rod on the wall. Hey, she didn’t have one of those! She had to use this annoying freestanding thing that took up extra space on her countertop and made it hard for her to blow-dry her hair without the cord getting caught. Twice she’d almost broken a toe because of it falling down. Also, had he put a new faucet in? That one looked nice, more functional than her—

  “I think it’s coming from in here,” he said.

  He gestured toward the apartment’s biggest bedroom, the one at the very front of the building with the large picture window. It was the copy of the room she’d been in inside her own apartment—the room that had once been Nonna’s. Seeing Will’s version of it—nothing much more than a (gulp) crisply made bed and a couple of nightstands—was a reminder of how big it really was when it wasn’t crowded with the furniture of Nonna’s that Nora had stubbornly kept even as she’d tried to fit in the things she needed to make her own life here work.

  Thankfully, there was no time to dwell on that, not with the reason for her visit becoming immediately more pungent. It still wasn’t quite as bad as she’d been imagining—it reminded her a little of the way the basement had smelled in the shared house she’d lived in for her last year of college—but it certainly wasn’t the kind of odor anyone would want hanging around or spreading.

  “You already checked under the furniture?” she asked.

  From the doorway, Will nodded. She followed his eyes toward where two vent covers had been lifted from where they were usually set into the hardwood floors, and she furrowed her brow in curiosity.

  “I didn’t know if—” he began, then cleared his throat again. “I thought maybe you’d put something in the vents.”

  Her eyes snapped to his. “For God’s sake!” she said. “What kind of person do you think I am?” (The kind of person who has definitely thought about it once!)

  He shrugged. “I didn’t—”

  “Wait,” she interrupted. “Did you hear that?”

  She waved a hand to shush him before he could answer, turning her head. Silence. But she could’ve sworn she’d heard something a second ago, a barely audible, high-pitched . . .

  “There!” she said, waving him over to where she stood. “Did you hear that?”

  Slight miscalculation to usher him over, since once he was beside her she again felt compelled to move closer, to lean her body into his. If she pressed her face against his chest, if she breathed in the scent of his soft-looking T-shirt, she wouldn’t have to smell the—

  “I heard that,” he said, and she nearly jumped.

  Forgetting yourself, she scolded.

  “Right?” she said, even though she’d missed whatever he’d heard by virtue of her inappropriate olfactory fantasies about a rude man’s T-shirt. “It sounds like a—”

  “Oh, Christ. Is there an animal in here?”

  “Shh.” She tiptoed in the direction of the closet. After a few seconds of renewed silence, she looked back at him and whispered, “Did you already look in here?”

  He nodded, stepping forward to follow her. And then, like they’d choreographed it, Nora slipped her phone from her back pocket and flicked on its flashlight, and Will reached his arm out to slide open the closet door.

  Despite not-dumpster day, this hadn’t been emptied yet, and immediately, Nora felt a wave of sadness to see a line of Donny’s faded flannel shirts, so familiar to her.

  “This stuff still has to go to Goodwill,” Will murmured.

  Nora ignored that, stretching to her tiptoes and shining the light on the shelf above.

  “I said I already—” he said, but quieted when they heard the noise again, coming from somewhere lower, and before he could stop her, Nora dropped to her knees, bending forward to stick her whole head inside the closet. Will made a noise behind her, maybe some kind of cough-warning, and at that moment she realized both her awkward position and her suddenly increased risk of getting bitten or spit on by a rabid animal that was about to have its hiding place discovered.

  But from her spot on the floor, she could hear the noise clearly when it came again, and it was only because she knew this closet as well as she knew her own that she could tell immediately where it had come from. She thought of that bad-smelling basement from college, remembered the roommate who had an old and recalcitrant cat that had a sad habit of missing the litter box.

  She knew what that sound was.

  She moved her flashlight so it wouldn’t beam directly on to the small storage door she already knew she’d find partway open.

  And when she gently pulled it the rest of the way, two sets of wide, frightened eyes peered back at her.

  “Congratulations,” she said to Will, a smile spreading across her face. “You’ve got kittens.”

  “The storage door,” Will said, for probably the fourth time in the last hour. “In the closet.”

  Nora suppressed a smile. “Mrs. Salas tried to tell you about it,” she said, only a little smug.

  “Kittens,” he said, that stunned quality still in his voice.

  Nora hoped he couldn’t feel her shoulders tremble with suppressed laughter, but honestly, she doubted he could miss it. Inside what had to be the tiniest treatment room of an otherwise spacious veterinary clinic, Nora and Will sat, side by side, on a small vinyl-covered cushioned bench, waiting for the vet to return. Probably during any other time, Will would be leaning casually against the door, looking annoyingly unbothered while he kept his distance from her, but Nora had the feeling he was so shocked his legs wouldn’t support him anymore. It was pretty funny, but at the same time, now she definitely had her suspicions about the texture of his T-shirt confirmed (soft,
indeed!), and she also was newly privy to what his skin and muscles felt like (soft and not soft, respectively) when they grazed against her, so some things about this were not a laughing matter.

  She had not, in fact, laughed until they’d gotten here, a sort of spontaneous, half-stifled giggle that came out every time Will tried to explain something to a veterinary professional about finding two kittens inside a secret compartment in the closet of his not-apartment. Before, she’d managed to maintain at least a veneer of seriousness as they dealt with the practicalities—donning latex gloves Will had in his car before handling the kittens, setting them gently inside a plastic hamper they’d borrowed from Marian and stuffed with some of Donny’s shirts. Nora had called the vet while Will had dealt with some of the most immediate cleaning-related tasks associated with finding live animals in one’s closet, and then—without ever really addressing the weirdness of it—they’d gotten into Will’s car and driven to the vet’s office together.

  “How’d they get in there?”

  “Now, don’t start this again,” Nora said, rolling her eyes.

  “I believe you. I’m saying, how?”

  This was really taxing Will’s man brain. She took a sidelong glance at him and he was staring into the middle distance like he’d gotten punched in the face by those kittens.

  “My guess is, they came in through the back door you seem to be leaving open while you work.” She didn’t want to talk about her additional guess, which was that they had probably been led there by one of the strays who’d come looking for Donny’s regular handouts.

  He turned to look at her, blinking. He didn’t have his glasses on but it didn’t really matter, not when he was up close like this. She thought he might’ve been the most attractive man she’d ever sat next to. Along the strong, stubbled line of his jaw, he had a hair-thin pink scratch from where one of the kittens had caught him during hamper transport. That was a version of getting punched in the face, she supposed.