She’d never be able to choose him.
“Well, I know, but . . . I don’t know. What everyone said, when they saw it.” Her voice tipped up at the end, an unintentional inflection. She wasn’t asking him any kind of question, not really. She was just . . . confused.
“They didn’t say anything wrong. They were young. They were in love. I shouldn’t have said what I did, about the memorial thing. They weren’t bad people.”
Nora pursed her lips, frustrated. Not so much at him as for him.
“I’m sure they weren’t,” she said, even though she actually wasn’t. “But they seem like they were pretty negligent. So I think it’s really fine if you’re still a little pissed about it.”
“I’m not, though,” he said, with such strained, insistent conviction. “I haven’t been, not for a long time. They were who they were, and I dealt with that years ago. I hardly thought of them, until . . .” He trailed off.
“Until Donny,” she finished for him, anger at her former neighbor flaring again. She couldn’t regret that Donny’s last wishes had brought Will back to this building and into her life, but she hated that the apartment he’d been left had made him feel all this pain.
“No,” he said, dropping his eyes to the counter. “Until you.”
She blinked in surprise, dread settling along the column of her spine. “I don’t know what you mean.”
He shook his bowed head, resting his hands on the counter, his arms spread wide. A familiar posture.
“You and me,” he said. “And what we’re doing here.”
“What are we doing here?”
A long, awful pause, another shake of his head. “I don’t know, Nora. Too much, I think.”
“Too much what?” The dread that had settled was transforming into something else—something harder and more defensive. No matter how things had changed between them, it was familiar to her, this stiffening. She’d spent weeks feuding with Will Sterling, with confronting him, and she’d do it again now, if it meant figuring this out.
She tapped a finger against the counter. “Look at me.”
When he raised his head, she had the feeling he was doing what he’d done with the photograph. His eyes were on her, but somehow not; somehow it seemed he’d unfocused his gaze.
“I only mean that it’s gotten pretty serious, and I’m—” He took his hands off the counter, tucked them into his pockets. “I’m not looking for serious. I never have been. Before, with the stuff we were doing to your place, and . . .”
“And the sex?” she said, her voice sharp, accusatory, probably overloud. Dee would be proud of this, she thought. But it was so hurtful, to hear him say that. Not serious? Not serious, when he’d seen her sixteen years ago? When now it felt to her like fate? When she’d decided to tell him . . .
“I don’t mean that.” One hand came out of his pocket, another frustrated swipe across his forehead. “I don’t mean any—Nora, listen. I shouldn’t be talking right now. I’m rattled.”
“It was a picture,” she snapped, but as soon as she said it, she regretted it, and not only because he winced. Not only because she clearly didn’t understand the full extent of what he saw in that picture. But also because she was being the worst kind of hypocrite. The towel rack. The lamp she’d looked at for an hour this morning! Who was she to accuse someone of overreacting to an artifact, when she had a houseful of them upstairs that she was wringing her hands over getting rid of?
And anyway, what was she going to do, stand here and fight with a man to get him to be with her? She surely hoped Marian wasn’t hearing any of this. Clinging to that thought kept her chin from quivering in hurt as she stepped away from the counter.
“This is me,” he said, his eyes full of the kind of sympathy that made everything feel worse. “I know this is all me.”
Oh, God. An It’s not you; it’s me speech. She was not going to stick around for that. “I’m going to let you get back to what you were doing.”
She turned to go, but he caught her hand gently. “Nora.”
She could’ve turned back to him, could’ve stepped into arms that she knew he would put around her. But she was afraid of that chin quiver starting up. So she simply stood still, her back to him, her hand held loosely in his.
“I don’t want this to be over,” he said quietly. “I only need—”
He stepped closer, close enough that she could feel the warmth of his body along her back. But she didn’t turn around. She bowed her head, and when he spoke again, she could feel the touch of his breath along her neck.
“A little time to think.”
She nodded once, trying to believe that time to think was what Will needed. He’d hurt her, taken the wind right out of her. But the feelings she had for him meant she didn’t want him to be hurting, either.
And she could tell he was.
“Sure,” she said, trying to draw on all that practiced charm she hoped she’d absorbed from watching him all this time. “We can talk when I get back.”
His hand squeezed against hers, a reflex more than an assent, or an encouragement. When he spoke, he sounded reluctant. “I can come up after—”
She shook her head, too desperate to leave, tears threatening. “Everyone’s around. Let’s wait.”
There was a long pause before he finally said, “Okay.”
She ignored the disappointment she felt. He was only doing what she’d suggested, after all. She thought about turning around, thought about giving him a kiss goodbye, some more settled encouragement about this not being over.
But she didn’t know if she could, not if he only wanted what they’d been doing so far.
So instead she squeezed his fingers back, not sure herself what she was trying to tell him with the gesture. She swallowed a lump of sadness and said, “I’ll see you.”
And when she walked away, he didn’t try to hold on.
Chapter 16
Well, this was a first.
Will walked with Dr. Abraham down the corridor from the workroom toward the exit, his bag over his shoulder and his helmet held at his side. Beside him, Abraham was talking—something about an orthopedic surgeon who couldn’t seem to distinguish between the urgency of a broken finger and a possible brain bleed. The case had happened hours ago—an early morning vehicle crash—but Abraham had been seething about it for the entire shift, coming back to it during any break in the action.
“He was trying to splint the finger,” said Abraham, shaking his head. “I’d say it’s against protocol, but I think you would agree, Dr. Sterling, that this is an understatement. In fact it is against common sense.”
“Yeah,” Will said, nodding, not bothering to mimic the formality. He didn’t have the energy for it, not today.
Not for almost a week.
It wasn’t, of course, a first to be walking these hospital corridors with Abraham, nor was it unusual for Will to be a mostly silent participant in Abraham’s airing of grievances. But it was a first to have very nearly planned for it, to have hung around the bay until he knew Abraham would basically kick him out. It was a first to be grateful for it, to be dreading the moment they got to the exit doors. Frankly, Will could’ve listened to Gerald Abraham talk all evening, so long as it gave him an excuse to stay here.
An excuse to avoid going home.
“Orthopedics,” Dr. Abraham was saying, “needs to review their practices. I plan to call the chief up there tomorrow.”
“Good idea,” Will said, even though he knew that guy, and it probably wasn’t a good idea. He had an ego as big as the entire state.
When they pushed open the door, the heat and humidity felt oppressive, miserable. But Will didn’t much mind that, either. He’d get on his bike, take the long way back to his place. He’d sweat until he was so tired that he’d have to sleep tonight.
In fact it is against common sense, he thought, but ignored it.
“Dr. Sterling,” Abraham said, right as Will was setting his helmet on his head. “
I would like to make note of my concern for you.”
Will paused, a hand frozen on one of his chin straps. For the first time, he noticed that Abraham wasn’t wearing the white coat. It made sense, he guessed, since the man was leaving, but it still made Will blink in surprise.
“Uh,” he said, which was not an approach he typically took with his boss.
“I note, for example, that you have taken two extra shifts this week.”
“Dr. Barrett-Goldberg had to take two personal days,” he said, by way of explanation, even though it was a cheap one. The scheduler had those shifts covered weeks ago.
“I also note that during those shifts you worked longer than twelve hours and you are, in fact, over the appropriate limit for physicians in our department.”
“I’m off tomorrow.” A horrible thought. His stomach hurt when he considered it, all those hours free, and no hope of Nora. Even the clinic wasn’t an option; he’d maxed out his hours there, too.
“And this is to say nothing of your mood,” Abraham added, as though Will hadn’t spoken. “Sullen, is how I would characterize it.”
Maybe, on any other day, Will would have taken offense. But the truth was, sullen wasn’t the half of it.
He was miserable.
In hell, exactly as he’d predicted.
Because he’d messed up with Nora, and now she was gone.
He’d known it as it had been happening, had experienced it almost in slow motion, outside of himself. Fragments of it felt clear, acute: his mom’s handwriting, youthful even when she’d gotten older. Mrs. Salas’s fingers at the edge of that photograph, her nails pink and glossy. His parents’ faces—unlined, joyful, intense. Nora’s arms around his waist, her cheek against his chest, her hair against his chin. Her hand letting go of his.
But so much of the rest of it felt fuzzy, too fast. He’d seen that picture and it was like smashing straight into a brick wall of everything he was afraid of becoming. And then he’d told Nora he wasn’t looking for serious.
Ah, here was another crystal clear fragment: the look on her face when he’d said it. He was pretty sure his hiccupping heart had stopped right then and there, no matter that he was still standing here right now, relentlessly alive.
“I’ve had a rough few days,” he said to Abraham, which was a comically understated understatement. It was like mentioning your broken finger instead of your possible brain bleed. In fact, maybe he and that surgeon had something in common. After all, “splinting the finger” was a pretty apt metaphor for what efforts he’d made with Nora since she’d left him standing, still shell-shocked, in Donny’s apartment. A text before he’d left the building to see if she’d changed her mind about wanting to talk. A call the next morning, the day of her flight, which had gone to voice mail. When she’d texted him back a couple of hours later, her message had been brief, kind, tentative. Got your message. Hope you’re okay. Boarding flight. We’ll talk when I get back. Xo.
I love you, he’d wanted to reply, which couldn’t make any sense. Sending her a text like that when he’d all but sent her away the day before? Sending her a text like that when he was still reeling from the shock of having had the idea to type it out in the first place?
He’d written Good luck instead, and then he’d spent the rest of the day absolutely kicking his own ass for it, much like Gerald Abraham planned to kick the figurative ass of the finger splinter.
The problem was, if what had happened between him and Nora was, basically, a brain bleed, he wasn’t even sure if he should try to fix it. What he was going through now—this sullenness, this hell—this was the reason he didn’t belong in something serious with Nora. This intensity, this recklessness, this selfishness—all of it, he should’ve stopped weeks ago. He’d taken it to a place with Nora he knew he wasn’t capable of seeing through, not in the way she wanted. Not in the way she deserved.
But damn, he missed her. Like a hole right in the center of himself, a loneliness unlike anything he’d ever felt, and given the way he’d lived his life, that was really saying something.
“I’d like to invite you to dinner,” Abraham said, and Will coughed, and then stared.
He couldn’t even manage a reply.
“With Sally and myself. Let me assure you, though, that I have not fallen back into a routine.”
“Uh,” Will repeated.
“This dinner is at my home, and I am cooking, which is not something I often did during my marriage. Sally would enjoy having you with us.”
Will cleared his throat, fully aware of how absolutely ridiculous he must look, standing here in his bike helmet, staring down in shock at his boss.
“I don’t want to intrude,” he said, which he recognized was exactly what people said when they wanted to be told they weren’t intruding. And he realized that this was, actually, exactly what he wanted to be told. He wanted to have dinner with Gerald and Sally because he was confused and frustrated and lonely enough that a meal with a possibly reconciling couple sounded absolutely fine, or at least absolutely better than going back to his own place and staring into the void, thinking about how Nora would be back tomorrow night and he still had no idea what to do.
“You are not intruding because I already told Sally you were coming,” Abraham said. “I phoned her two hours ago.”
“What if I’d had other plans?”
There was a brief pause, Abraham looking up at Will like he’d just tried to splint a finger in the middle of a massive trauma.
“I’m sure you think you’re rather mysterious, Dr. Sterling,” he finally said, in that clipped, professional-rectitude voice. “But in fact it is very clear that your problem lately is that you have no plans at all.”
For the first hour or so, it didn’t really help.
One problem was that Gerald’s place—though larger and in a posher part of town—was disturbingly similar to Will’s own, at least in terms of the details. Like Will, Gerald seemed to have missed the memo on hanging artwork or putting furniture in places other than “up against a wall.” Also like Will, he seemed to have an aversion to household items that didn’t serve any particular function; beyond the couch, chair, and coffee table, the living room had nothing in it except a floor lamp and five shelves of books, most of them related to medicine. Will had two such shelves, and all of a sudden he saw the next three decades of his life built out in front of him: one shelf at a time, more and more books about the only thing he filled his time with.
There was also the problem of Sally’s arrival—not in and of itself an issue, since he liked Sally and also welcomed a break from the ongoing talk about the orthopedics department’s failures. But when she bustled through the front door—using a key, Will noticed, signaling him to the state of this reconciliation—she was holding a big, blue plastic cat carrier. When she set it down in the entryway and opened the door, Quincy and Francis ran to Will like they remembered him, and he coped with an outrageous longing for the nights he spent alone with them in Donny’s apartment, Nora only two floors above instead of all the way across the country. When they left him to rub themselves across Gerald’s shins, meowing until he gave them treats from a package he had on his counter, Will thought seriously about hiding in the bathroom to google (on his telephone) whether there were any hypoallergenic cats in existence. The hairless kind, maybe? Would Nora like one of those? Would that fix what he’d done, what he still couldn’t do?
And then there was the problem of watching Gerald and Sally this way, two people he’d known separately who had never really made sense in his mind as being together. Their reconciliation clearly wasn’t settled yet, and it was somehow both amusing and stressful to watch them try for it, like they were doing a dance they hadn’t quite learned all the steps to. In the small kitchen, a sweating glass of iced tea in his hand, Will could see Sally struggle not to interfere with what Gerald was doing with his roast chicken; at the table, Will could hear the way Gerald worked to acknowledge all the things Sally said, even the digress
ions—something about a sequined headband in the middle of a story about her book club, something about ankle weights while she talked about the city council campaign she was volunteering for. It was awkward and gentle and fascinating, and that was because, Will realized, he had never seen anything like it. His own parents’ togetherness had always seemed effortless, assumed. A default state of being that had been disconcerting in its own way.
Eventually, though, things eased: Will was hungrier than he’d thought, and Quincy and Francis sat on a chair next to him and watched food go from his plate to the mouth like they were at a tennis match. Once he was used to it, Gerald and Sally’s conversation became much like Gerald’s workday lectures and complaints—background noise that was welcome, at least, for the way it drowned out Will’s own thoughts.
But as soon as he set his fork and knife across his plate, Sally looked straight across the table at him and said, “Well, I guess Gerry isn’t going to bring it up.”
Who’s Gerry? Will thought.
“I brought it up,” the man Will would never call Gerry said. “At the hospital. I mentioned his work hours and his attitude.”
Sally rolled her eyes. Will didn’t want to be responsible for any friction, so he said, “I have been working a lot. With . . . an attitude.”
Sally put down her own knife and fork and set her elbows on the table, a move Gerald tracked with his eyes and then seemed to—with effort—look away from.
“Is this about the woman from your building?”
Will thought he could feel Quincy and Francis staring at him. “How do you know that?”
“You probably forgot that you went after her like she was a house on fire that day you almost got caught in a public relations disaster!” She looked dreamily toward the chair beside Will. “That was the day I took home my babies.”
Will swallowed. “Right. No, I didn’t forget.”
“I knew you had a thing for her.”
Love at First Page 24
