Love at First

by Kate Clayborn

  And because she was still in the habit of forgetting herself, it took everything she had in her not to reach up and touch it.

  “Right,” he said, but honestly he still seemed a little dazed. Was he . . . looking at her mouth? Or did she also have kitten scratches somewhere on her face? “That’s probably it.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Keep the door shut, I guess,” he said automatically, and this time, she didn’t bother stifling her laughter. It came out in a surprised burst, the moment—the entire situation—so ludicrous and unexpected, and Will’s answer so bland and matter-of-fact and unsuited to the moment. She laughed so hard she had to tip her head back against the wall behind them; she had to reach up to wipe tears from the corners of her eyes. She laughed so hard that she had to sigh when she was done, to catch her breath, and the best part was, Will laughed along with her—a quieter, more constrained version of her own, but enough that it made the ends of his messy hair tremble.

  When they’d finished—when they both seemed to remember that laughing wasn’t really something they did together—an awkward silence fell, the muffled sounds of ringing phones and barking dogs coming from the lobby outside their treatment room. Nora shifted on the bench, trying not to notice the way their thighs had come to press against each other during their shared outburst.

  “I meant about the kittens,” she finally said, because now, after the laughter, the quiet between them was killing her.

  “Oh. Well. I—I don’t know. I can’t keep them.”

  She looked over at him, saw that his face had gone all serious again.

  “Cats are very self-sufficient. Probably great pets for a workaholic doctor to have.”

  He quirked an eyebrow at her. “Probably even better for someone who works from home.”

  “Oh, I can’t keep them,” she said cheerfully. “Pets are against the bylaws. I’m sure you know that!” Truthfully, getting rid of the no-pets clause was something else she could’ve done after Nonna had passed; the main reason it was there was because Nonna had always had terrible allergies, and asthma, to boot. But she didn’t need Will to know that.

  “Listen, Nora—”

  The door to the treatment room opened, and there was Dr. Taylor again, holding two wide-eyed, freshly washed black-and-white kittens in the crook of each arm.

  Nora did the sensible thing, which was to make an unintelligible noise in a high octave range. Will stood from the bench, and immediately, she missed the warm strength of his body beside her.

  “You lucked out on the flea situation, so far as my techs could tell,” said Dr. Taylor, setting each kitten gently onto the exam table. “We had a good look over with a comb, and gave them each a little bath back there in our sink. Good sports, these two.”

  He scratched one of them gently under the chin with his index finger, and Nora cocked her head to the side. Dr. Taylor was pretty cute, actually, which she might’ve noticed earlier on any given day that she was not running an errand with her very attractive sworn adversary.

  “They’re healthy?” Will said, which was a better thing to be focused on than Dr. Taylor’s handsomeness in comparative terms. Nora stood, smoothing the front of her denim shirt.

  Dr. Taylor nodded, pulling a small tablet out of the pocket of his white coat and swiping his finger across it. “They both look good, though we’ll need a bit of time before we get results back on the tests we ran. Now in this apartment you two share, where do—”

  “Oh,” Nora said quickly, “we don’t . . . we definitely don’t share it.”

  Dr. Taylor looked up, moved his eyes back and forth between them, before settling his . . . interested? . . . gaze briefly back on Nora. Well! That was nice, to be noticed. Especially when she was covered in kitten hair. Possible presence of other kitten detritus, but best not to think of it at the moment.

  “Will’s my neighbor,” she said pointedly. “He has a very sensitive sense of smell but not very good detective skills, I guess. So I helped him—”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t need the full story,” said Will, tightly. She looked over at him and he was giving Dr. Taylor a pretty annoyed look! She recognized it, having been on the receiving end of many of Will’s annoyed looks.

  “I don’t mind,” said Dr. Taylor, winking at Nora. A wink, that was a little much. Probably he would talk about himself a lot on a first date. “Now will you be keeping the kittens, or . . . ?”

  “You know what, Dr. Taylor,” Nora said, leaning in, “Will and I were just talking about that! I suggested that he might want to keep them. On the way over here they kept wanting to crawl right out of that hamper to get to him.”

  “They didn’t,” Will said, his voice clipped. “Listen, do you have ideas for a rescue organization? Rules say we can’t have them in the building.”

  Nora pursed her lips, looked back at Dr. Taylor, who furrowed his brow and made a noise of concern. “Well, I have to say, that’s not the best news. Do you think your landlord could make an exception for a temporary period?”

  “Probably not,” Will said. “She’s kind of a stickler.”

  Nora rolled her eyes and nudged his side (muscles: still hard!) with her elbow. “Why a temporary period?” she asked.

  “Kittens this young—I’d say the mother’s nearby, somewhere. Maybe they all got in when you were out one day, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she comes around looking for these little guys. We have a program here for spaying feral cats, so we might be able to help her if she does.”

  “Oh,” Nora said, looking down to where the kittens playfully swatted at each other. Well, this was terrible. What if the mom cat had gone back to Donny’s, or what if she was nervously pacing outside somewhere, looking for her babies? The truth was, Nora didn’t even really like cats all that much, but this was sounding worse by the minute. She had a sudden, unbidden memory of the first morning she’d met Will, out on the balcony. She’d thought that loud, feline scream had come from a tomcat, but what if even then there’d been a mother cat in trouble? What if there was some kind of community cat crisis, all because of Donny’s sudden passing?

  She didn’t want to be responsible for piling onto that.

  “I’ll find a way to keep the kittens for a while,” she blurted. “Should I call here if I see the mom? Or—”

  “I could give you my personal number,” said Dr. Taylor, and she really hoped he didn’t wink again. It felt like a wink was close. An imminent wink. “She probably comes around at night. If you see her, you can call me, anyti—”

  “I’ll keep them,” interrupted Will.

  Nora and Dr. Taylor both looked at him. Nora was pretty sure her mouth was hanging open. One of the kittens made a squeaky (celebratory!) mew noise.

  “If the, uh, mom”—he said mom like it had a question mark at the end—“comes back, it’ll be to my unit. I might as well keep them there.”

  Keep them there? Nora thought back to the bright walls, the mostly clean, impersonal spaces that now made up Donny’s apartment. You couldn’t keep kittens in an apartment you were renting out. You couldn’t watch for a possibly angry adult cat if you didn’t even live in the place you thought it might show up.

  What was he doing?

  He looked down at her, all stubble-faced and kitten-scratched and unwinking, and he may have had a serious expression on his face, but she felt oddly like their shared laughter still lived between them, same as the way their weeks-gone golden hour always did.

  “It’s temporary,” he said, and he sounded so full of conviction—so full of something like a warning—that she really tried to take his word for it.

  But deep down, she had a feeling she was about to be seeing a whole lot more of Will Sterling.

  Chapter 8

  He was starting to feel like he’d never again see the outside of this apartment.

  In the four days since Nora Clarke had, once again, turned all his plans upside down, Will had found himself existing in a strange, outsi
de-of-time universe where his daily tasks revolved around two small animals whose appetite for attention was matched only by their appetite for attempted destruction of every effort he’d made to ready Donny’s apartment for rental. During the day, he felt like he mostly worked at containment efforts—how to set them up in the room where he needed to work on completing a painting or cleaning or rearranging task, how to keep them entertained while he did. At night, he slept fitfully on the functional but deeply uncomfortable couch that’d been delivered only a few days ago, cold from the back door he left open, one ear always trained on the outside, waiting for some sound of the cat he’d done all this for.

  Fool, he’d think to himself as he tossed and turned. You didn’t do it for the fucking cat.

  The problem was, Dr. Taylor didn’t really care about any mother cat. He cared about finding some reason to come over at night to see Nora, probably so he could try to look down her top again, which Will had definitely caught him doing in that exam room, and then it was like his whole entire brain had turned to static. Will figured that agreeing to take the kittens was, on balance, a better static-brained outcome than punching Dr. Taylor in the throat and carrying Nora out of that room like he had some sort of claim on her.

  Then again, he had also spent the last fifteen minutes cleaning up a kitten-shredded roll of toilet paper and he hadn’t seen Nora for days, so.

  So it didn’t seem like any of his instincts were all that great.

  “Now,” he said sternly, setting the kittens inside the stuffed-shirt hamper they still preferred as a resting spot, “you gotta behave if you want treats.”

  Three days ago he might’ve chastised himself for engaging in the absolutely ridiculous process of negotiating with these two tiny terrorists, but by this point he’d abandoned all pretense of normalcy within these walls. This wasn’t even that high on the list of weird shit he’d done over the last few days. Other examples included: borrowing two shallow dishes (decorated with the painted faces of characters from The Wizard of Oz) from Mr. and Mrs. Salas to help the kittens eat more comfortably; accepting a gift of three PVC pipe scraps from Jonah, who’d been right on in assuming that the kittens would like to crawl through and climb over them; drinking craft beer with Benny in the backyard while putting out carefully spaced out “food incentives” for the deadbeat mom cat; and following the directions provided in another note—this one, hand-delivered, with a shy smile—from Emily Goodnight, who had advice on which of his three plants should be kept out of reach with cats in the house.

  This didn’t even count all the times he’d thought about going up to Nora’s apartment.

  Go up there and knock, the static part of his brain would think. Take the kittens. Make her laugh like that again.

  Ask her why she’s stayed away.

  Ask her why she’s given up.

  Of course that had to be the static talking, because what did he care if she’d given up? In fact, her giving up—no sabotage, no scheming, no nothing—was great. Her giving up meant he was getting back to normal. This morning, in fact, he’d called up the pervert veterinarian himself, who’d all but owned up to blowing smoke the other day—the mother cat coming back had always been a long shot, especially since the kittens had obviously been weaned early, even before Nora and Will had found them. Probably, Dr. Taylor had said, she’d simply moved on, and that meant Will could do the same, rehoming the kittens or placing them with any one of the area rescue operations he’d already spent a bunch of time looking up.

  With that done, there’d only be the apartment left. Any minute now, Sally no-longer-Abraham—who’d checked on Will’s progress every few days, even on her vacation—would arrive to look over his almost-finished product, and once she gave him the thumbs-up, he’d list the unit for rent. In two days he’d be back at work, a newly free man, and he wouldn’t have the time to think about these kittens or Donny or his neighbors or Nora Clarke.

  It would be so normal.

  “I’m serious now,” he said to the wide-eyed kittens, when Sally’s knock came. “Don’t embarrass me.”

  When he opened the door it took his brain a few seconds to process to the truly outrageous tan Sally was sporting; it looked like she’d spent her entire trip with a foil-covered trifold of cardboard under her face. She beamed her extra-white-looking smile at him and went in for a hug like they were long-lost friends, but abandoned him quickly with a shriek of delight once she caught sight of the hamper.

  Will sighed, because he knew what was coming. Even Marian Goodnight had cooed and cuddled over those kittens for a good twenty minutes when she’d made an excuse to drop off a package he’d missed in the vestibule. The fact of the matter was, the fucking things were cute, even when they were trying to tear holes in his new slipcovers.

  Not that it seemed to matter to Nor—

  “What did you name them?” said Sally, who had turned the bottom of her oversized T-shirt into a hammock and was now settling the kittens into it.

  Will cleared his throat. “I didn’t name them anything.”

  Sally looked up at him with wide eyes, the whites of which, like her teeth, seemed newly bright against her tan. Will hoped for her sake Dr. Abraham hadn’t seen this; he felt very strongly about sun-protection factors.

  “How could you not name them?”

  “I’m not keeping them. Probably the shelter will name them.”

  Sally gasped. “My ex-husband must be rubbing off on you!” she exclaimed.

  “I found three good ones,” he said quickly, because God. He was not getting to be like Gerald Abraham, was he? “No-kill. Lots of volunteers. Foster homes, that kind of thing.”

  “You should be called Quincy,” Sally said to one of the cats, as though Will had not spoken. “And you, you look like a Francis.”

  “Would you like to have a look around?” asked Will.

  Sally stared dreamily at the kittens and nodded.

  Once they got started, Sally rallied. The kittens sat quietly inside her makeshift hammock while Sally praised his progress, asking the kinds of questions that let him explain exactly how much work he’d been doing for all the days and nights he’d been stuck in here. He’d taken all her advice; he’d focused on making it clean, on making it neutral, on making it simple. He could hardly believe the transformation, even though he’d made it happen himself.

  “Now in here,” he said, gesturing for Sally to go ahead into the front bedroom, “I still have to empty out the closet, but it’s mostly—”

  “Oh, this is where you found these babies, right?” She swung her T-shirt hammock gently.

  Will nodded, a dangerous, filthy static-signal kicking up at the edges of his brain as he remembered what it’d looked like, to see Nora get on all fours to investigate. He sent a silent, grudging apology to Dr. Taylor. Who was he to judge?

  “My neighbor found them,” Will said. “The one from the third floor.”

  “Oh, right. What was her name? Esther?”

  “Eleanora,” Will said, and did not rub his chest. “She goes by Nora.”

  “She’s the one that’s been giving you trouble?” Sally peeked into the closet, obviously checking out its size. It wasn’t like he’d been able to explain to her over text what a potato casserole or a poetry reading had to do with anything, so mostly he’d stuck to giving her bland, uncomplicated updates about getting “pushback” from the building residents.

  “Not so much the last few days,” he said, trying not to wince as Sally gently unfurled her T-shirt to let the kittens onto the recently purchased comforter. “I think I got some goodwill, having the kittens around. Lots of the neighbors came by.”

  Not Nora, though.

  “Humanized you, probably!” said Sally, cheerfully. “Who hates a man who rescues kittens? No one, that’s who.”

  “I didn’t rescue them,” he began, but Sally had become distracted, moving toward the picture window with her brow lowered. Will had hung up those room-darkening curtains only the day bef
ore. He’d read that those were good, and when they were pushed to the side like they were now they still let a lot of light in, but maybe he’d made the wrong call there. Or maybe she was noticing some of the claw-related damage caused by Quincy (What! Was! He! Saying!) climbing up one this morning, hanging on to it with all his tiny legs spread, a deranged look in his eyes.

  “Hmm,” Sally said, so she’d definitely noticed the damage. Well, who cared? Certainly short-term renters wouldn’t. But then he realized Sally wasn’t looking at the curtains.

  She was looking right out the window.

  “You said goodwill, huh?” she said, the lowered brow now rising with curiosity.

  Will had a sudden, not-entirely-sinking feeling about why Nora Clarke hadn’t come around. It was a feeling more like . . . relief?

  More like anticipation.

  He didn’t take a step toward the window, and deep down he knew it was because he didn’t want to be disappointed if it didn’t turn out to be her after all.

  “What’s she done now?” he asked, hoping it didn’t sound hopeful.

  “I hate to tell you, Will,” Sally said, crossing her arms over her chest. “But I think she’s gone and called the press on you.”

  Sally had overstated it.

  But not by much.

  When Will got outside, a short, dark-haired woman with a handheld voice recorder and small microphone was standing next to a guy with a high-quality camera, and every tenant in this building—with the exception of Nora—was gathered around, seeming like they were waiting their turn to speak.

  Damn, Will thought.

  “Don’t worry,” said Sally, from behind him. “I brought Quincy and Francis!”

  Will had no idea how this would help, but he didn’t have time to ask, because Benny was raising a hand to gesture him over. Honestly it was difficult not to feel a little betrayed; he’d sort of thought he and Benny were becoming friends, what with the beer-drinking and cat-incentivizing.

  Could be that he was overreacting, though. Maybe this lady and her companion photographer were doing some kind of story that had nothing to do with—