Love at First

by Kate Clayborn

  “Is this him?” the reporter asked, as soon as he approached.

  Damn, he thought again, and pasted a smile on his face. “Hey there,” he said easily. “I’m Will. Big news day around here?”

  The reporter—Yael, her name was—was a freelancer for a monthly community newspaper, the kind you picked up inside of restaurants or coffee shops if you wanted to know what neighborhood festival or concert series or museum exhibit you might be missing. You also picked them up, he was now finding out, if you wanted to read a heartwarming story about a close-knit group of neighbors who’d lived together for decades, constant over the course of years of change, stalwart even against the most recent tide of rising prices and building-wide renovations all around this block.

  “We’ve only just gotten started, but of course we’d love to get the newcomer’s perspective, too!” Yael said. “Now as I understand it, despite inheriting your apartment from a family member—”

  “I told her that,” said Jonah. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  “It’s the facts,” said Will. “Where’s Nora?” Strangely, nothing about what he’d learned in the last five minutes had dulled his sense of anticipation about seeing her; if anything, it was only heightened. This had to be her doing. This had to be why she’d been avoiding him. A newspaper article.

  This woman never ran out of ideas. Why’d he like that so much?

  “She’ll be down,” said Marian, but Will thought there was something funny about the way she’d said it.

  “We oughta get a picture,” said the photographer. “Light’s good at this hour. Golden.”

  Will clenched his teeth.

  “Oh, all right. Picture first, and then we can talk more?”

  “Is Will going to be in the picture?” said Sally, who Will had forgotten about. “If so, he should have Quincy and Francis with him.”

  “Who’re Quincy and Francis?” said Marian. “Who are you?”

  Sally shifted the kitten hamper to one hip, stuck out her hand. “I’m Sally! I’m helping Will get his place ready for rental.”

  “Golly, she’s tan,” Jonah said in a tone he maybe thought was a whisper.

  Benny stifled a laugh, and Sally beamed.

  “I just got back from vacation!” she said, seemingly delighted that he’d noticed.

  “You want to be in the picture?” asked the photographer.

  “Oh!” said Sally. And Will said, “We don’t need to be in the picture.”

  “We should wait for Nora,” said Mrs. Salas, but when Will heard the building’s front door open and turned to see the woman they’d all been waiting for there, he could tell she wasn’t camera ready.

  He could tell something was wrong.

  She paused as soon as she saw him, a brief but noticeable stiffening that made him think she was contemplating turning around to go right back inside. In spite of the warm weather, she wore a bulky, cream-colored sweater, stretched out around the collar and falling to the tops of her thighs, the frayed, cropped jeans she wore, faded and loose-fitting. Maybe he would’ve been able to tell more by the expression on her face, but it was hidden from him by the brim of her ball cap, faded blue with a familiar, embroidered red C.

  “Oh, is that her? I thought she’d be older,” said Sally.

  Will ignored her and took a step toward Nora.

  “Don’t,” she said sharply, and backed toward the door.

  He felt it like a slap across the face.

  “Marian,” she called across the length of the front courtyard. “Can you please . . . ?”

  “I’ll handle it,” Marian called back, and Will turned to her.

  “What’s wrong with her?” he said, and there was nothing easy to his tone, absolutely nothing. The static was back, snowier than ever.

  “I don’t think that’s your business,” said Marian, but she still had that funny look on her face, and Will saw Emily nudge her lightly.

  Mrs. Salas made a tsking noise. Well, this was bullshit, this little cabal of people blockading him. Will turned away from them, moved past Yael and the photographer.

  “Nora,” he said sharply, when she took another step back. “I need to speak to you.”

  “No!” she said, overloud, and Jesus, this was getting embarrassing. She made a vague gesture over her shoulder. “I . . . I’m actually in the middle of something.”

  Something was wrong with her voice. Something didn’t sound the same.

  “It’s an emergency,” he said, an exaggeration he delivered practically through his teeth, but then he got close enough to see her.

  And all of a sudden, it was an emergency. It was an emergency to him.

  The first thing he noticed was the skin he could see on her chest, flushed pink and flaring all the way up the column of her neck, fading to the sickly pallor of her cheeks. The brim of her hat cast a dark shadow over her eyes, but he could still see her nose, red at the edges and oh man, big, swollen at the tip and across the bridge, and he knew without even looking what kind of shape her eyes would be in.

  But he still took a step forward and gently tipped the brim of her hat back.

  “Nora,” he breathed, because it was worse than he expected. Puffy as all hell, red-rimmed, glassy. He had to get her out of here.

  She jerked her head back and tugged down the hat. “It’s fine!” she said, bumping against the door. “It is.”

  “You’re sick.”

  She looked up at him, squinting against sunlight that wasn’t even that bright, as though it was a struggle to keep her eyes open, her head upright.

  “It’s a cold. It’s fine,” she repeated.

  “You have a fever.”

  She reached a hand up, touched her neck. “I don’t. It’s hot out here.”

  “Then why are you shivering?”

  She stiffened, pushing her shoulders back from their hunched posture. “You’re imagining things. You work too much, that’s your problem. Probably you see sick people everywhere.”

  “No. I see a sick person here. Right in front of my face.”

  She sighed, but he thought maybe she didn’t expect that sigh to sound so weak. So . . . wheezing. He felt panicked, half-crazed, sweat dewing his back like he was staring down a full-on crisis. He couldn’t think of any of the usual things; he couldn’t think of thermometers or throat cultures or drug names or IV drips. He could only think of picking her up and carrying her upstairs. Of setting his hand against her overwarm brow, of telling her to lie back on a bed he’d arranged, of bringing her water and medicine and whisper-coaxing her to take it. Of staying and staying, until she was better again.

  “Let me take you inside. Look you over.” He winced inwardly. Why didn’t he add a Dr. Taylor wink, to really creep her out? “Or I’ll take you somewhere. A doc-in-the-box, or wherever you want to go.”

  She shook her head miserably, her shoulders sagging.

  Baby, he wanted to say, which made no sense.

  “Nora,” he said instead, injecting every ounce of sternness he could into her name.

  She looked up at him, her swollen eyes even wetter than before. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t go anywhere with you.”

  Her chin quivered, and his heart cracked.

  “I think I’m allergic to the kittens,” she said, and then she burst into tears.

  When Will was in his third year of medical school, he spent four weeks on a family medicine rotation in small-town Wisconsin, long days stuffing himself in the same exam room over and over again with the physician, the patient, and whatever family members had come along. The office had one nurse and no receptionist, minimal equipment, and temperamental internet service, and while he was there, he learned more about medicine than he had from any classroom or clinical experience before or after. Over the course of her days—most of which clocked in at around eleven hours—Dr. Calhoun saw everything from pink eye to prostate cancer. She didn’t just know everyone’s health history; she also knew the names of their kids and their pets. He
r tiny office constantly looked like a bomb full of paper had gone off in it, she never had a pen when she needed it, and the maddest she ever got at Will was on a day three weeks in—right when he was starting to feel loose, confident—after he’d seen a patient for a minor cooking burn.

  “Never heard somebody whine so much,” he’d said, when the guy had finally left the office, a bandage around his arm that was more about placation than treatment.

  Dr. Calhoun had turned on him with the kind of speed he’d started to think, from the slow way she moved throughout the day, was impossible.

  “I know you did not say a patient whined,” she’d snapped, and then she’d read him a riot act he’d never really forgotten: about pain and perspective, about fear and loneliness, about respect and empathy and kindness. At the time, Will had thought he’d already known all about those things, had thought that losing his parents the way he had had taught him what he needed to know.

  But Dr. Calhoun had taught him that every patient—even the ones with minor cooking burns and a penchant for exaggeration—deserved the same kind of empathetic care as someone with a traumatic injury, or a chronic illness, or a life-threatening condition.

  Nora Clarke, though. Will thought Nora Clarke with an acute sinus infection brought on by allergies might even test the limits of Dr. Calhoun’s patience.

  “I don’t want to,” she said from her fussy, flower-upholstered couch, her legs tucked up underneath her.

  Will ignored her, because this was about the tenth time he’d heard her say a version of this sentence in the half hour since he’d come up to her place, out of breath from the frantic, terrified twenty minutes he’d spent after she’d covered her tear-streaked face and fled from him. A few barked instructions—for someone to go up and check on her, for Sally to take the kittens, for the photographer to put his goddamned camera away—had been followed by the hottest, most aggressively scrubbing shower Will could stand, a change into an extra, cat-danderless set of clothes he’d had in his car, and a dead run up the steps to Nora’s apartment.

  “I don’t want you to come in,” she’d said, at first, her voice still tear-soaked, but Marian, for once, had taken Will’s side and opened the door to him, and then she’d shouted at Nora that she’d needed a doctor for two days, and “this one’s probably as good as any.”

  Once he was in, Nora had given him a whole host of pouting do not wants—to get checked over, by either him or someone else, to have her temperature taken, to have her nasal passages examined, to take Tylenol, to drink water, to sit down. Every time, it was pretty toothless; he could tell that she was the kind of sick where simply every single thing felt bad, even the things that were meant to make her better. Between him and Marian—who’d only left a few minutes ago to start an aggressive group vacuuming project—they’d at least gotten her to do the basics.

  “Come on, then,” he said to her now, setting a metal bowl of steaming water onto the coffee table. “Lean forward.”

  She made a noise of protest, and Will bit his cheek to keep from smiling. An hour ago, with his heart pounding in his throat and his whole body gripped with irrational panic, a smile would’ve felt impossible, but now that he was here, close to her—being of some use to her—he’d calmed down. It was still straight misery, seeing her like this, but at least he was seeing her. At least he was helping her.

  With exaggerated effort, she leaned forward, turning her still-swollen eyes up to where he stood. “This is all pretty embarrassing, Dr. Sterling.”

  “Don’t call me that,” he said. “Put your head down.”

  She sighed, then coughed, then finally put her head over the bowl.

  “I’m going to set the towel over your head, okay? This is going to help with some of the pressure behind your face, until I can go get you a strong decongestant.”

  She nodded, and he took the same quiet breath that he had when he’d set his fingers against her neck, checking for swelling. He was staying professional, even if in draping a towel over her head he had to concentrate on not staring at the long, straight curtain of her hair that was spread across her back—the first time he’d ever seen it down.

  Nora made another noise, a moan of relief that prompted another professional failure on his part. Will took a step away from the couch, cleared his throat. “I’ll run over to the pharmacy.”

  She lifted her head. “You don’t have to.”

  “Head down,” he said, and she made a face at him.

  “Your bedside manner is terrible.” But she put her head down again, shifting even farther forward on the couch. The next time she spoke, it was so muffled by her closeness to the bowl that he had to step closer to hear her.

  “I didn’t want you to have to get rid of the kittens,” she said.

  “That’s why I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even know I was allergic, I swear. I never have been, before.”

  She sounded so miserable that he got even closer, moved around so he could sit on the coffee table, right beside the big bowl of water. “Allergies sometimes come on late.”

  The towel rocked in a sad, short nod.

  “I wasn’t ever going to keep them, Nora,” he said, because he thought it would make her feel better to know it. It wasn’t her fault that he wasn’t cut out to have pets, even if Quincy and Francis (sigh) weren’t so bad. “My friend Sally, you might have seen her down there, I think she’s going to keep them, and she’s great, so you shouldn’t worr—”

  “You stayed so many days,” she interrupted. “You stayed so many days, I thought maybe you’d changed your mind.”

  Oh.

  He swallowed, unsure of how to respond. He hadn’t changed his mind, of course he hadn’t. He was still on track to getting back to normal; he was still going to list the unit and go back to work. These last four days, it’s all he’d been trying to think about, no matter that he hadn’t always succeeded.

  But he didn’t even want to try to succeed right now.

  “That interview today,” she said, and he waved a hand in dismissal, but she probably couldn’t see it.

  “Forget about it,” he said, because that’s what he wanted. While he was here, sitting with her like this, caring for her like this, he didn’t want to talk about this thing between them—this feud they’d been carrying on. The one that he was, whether she liked it or not, about to win with a few clicks on his laptop and a return to his regular life.

  “I was going to cancel it,” she said. “I didn’t really want to do it anymore, not after we found the kittens, but then I felt so sick, and I lost track of the day, and then today I—”

  “Nora,” he said. “Let’s leave it for now, okay?”

  She pulled the towel back, her face pink and dewy, her eyes still puffy, and her mouth tugged down at the corners in the saddest, sweetest pout he thought he’d ever seen.

  “I feel awful,” she said, and for sure, she was whining.

  “I know, baby,” he said, and for sure, it was the static talking. They stared at each other, steam from the bowl between them, and in those silent seconds, it seemed like they were agreeing to something. For as long as she was like this, they weren’t going to be feuding neighbors. Nora wasn’t going to cheerfully smile, and Will wasn’t going to charm. She was going to admit that she felt bad, and Will was going to call her baby when she did.

  It wasn’t going to be normal at all.

  She slumped against the back of the couch. “I’m probably gonna fall asleep,” she murmured, already sounding halfway there.

  “Good.” He grabbed at a faded, crocheted throw that hung over one end of the couch, waited for her to put her feet up before he draped it over her legs.

  “Only for a little bit. I only sleep for a little bit at a time, since this started.”

  “Sure,” Will said, but he hoped she would sleep good and long; he could tell she needed it. And while she did he’d go pick up a scrip for her, and then he’d sanitize every cat-dandered surface in this building, even if
it took him all night. He’d barely slept the last four; what was one more?

  “I’ll go pick you up some meds, okay?”

  Her swollen eyes flickered open, and her brow furrowed. “You’ll come back?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, of course. I’ll leave it on the—”

  “And then you’ll stay?” she said.

  He stared down at her. Everything he saw when he looked at Nora, it was still a problem: his weaknesses, his past, his fear for how he figured he was destined to turn out, if he let himself get too close to her.

  But he knew she didn’t mean stay forever. He knew she meant for now, for while she felt like this, for the term of that silent deal they’d made only a moment ago. And he figured that was safe enough. He figured he was strong enough for that.

  One night, and then he’d go back to normal.

  “Yeah,” he said, bending down and tucking the blanket around her, barely stopping himself from setting his lips against her brow. Not that, he warned himself, before straightening again. “I’ll stay.”

  Chapter 9

  The first time Nora woke up, he was in her kitchen.

  He’d been to the pharmacy, a small white paper bag tipped on its side on the counter, but he’d also stopped by the grocery, picking up a small crate of clementines and a loaf of bread and three different kinds of ready-made soup, one of which she found him heating on the stovetop. When she shuffled into the kitchen, she could tell by the notch between his eyebrows and the tense set of his jaw that she looked about as good as she felt (which was to say: hideous!), and so when he set the bottle of Tylenol in front of her and uncapped her new prescription decongestant, she took it with the full glass of water he said she had to drink and she didn’t complain at all. She ate a bowl of soup, and they talked about her work and his, anything that wouldn’t get them talking about the building. When she’d finished eating, Will had pointed her back to the couch and told her to put something entertaining on TV for them to watch, but she’d fallen asleep again before he’d finished clearing plates.