Nora wanted a chance to have that again in the place she called home.
So. More changes to the apartment. Looking for a new job. That was the plan.
With or without Will.
“Why don’t we FaceTime him now?” said Dee, always impatient. “I’ll stay out of frame, and I’ll leave if it gets weird, I promise. Here, I’ll get you more wine so you can really lean in to it,” she said, moving to swing her legs over Nora’s.
“No, no,” Nora said, draining the small amount of wine that was left in her glass. “I don’t want to have too much before I fly tomorrow. It always makes me woozy.”
“Waaaaaaah,” Dee said dramatically, grabbing at Nora’s shins in playful desperation. “You’re leaving me tomorrow and you won’t give me anything entertaining to watch tonight!”
Nora laughed and bent her knees, gently toppling Dee to the side. “I ought to sleep,” she said. “You know me and my early starts.”
“I swear to God, Nora,” Dee said, standing. “If you make noise before six a.m. again, that’s it for you ever being my houseguest in the future. Even when I get a gigantic condo in Berkeley with my new huge salary.”
“I said I was sorry about the garbage disposal! I thought it was the light switch!”
For the next few minutes, they laughed and argued as they made up the couch into Nora’s bed for the night, Dee eventually giving Nora the same lecture she’d given her for the last several nights, which was all about how Nora didn’t take off her makeup at night properly. When Nora finally—after getting yelled at about washcloths a few more times through the bathroom door—settled onto the couch, calling a joking “Good night, Sleeping Beauty!” to Dee, she felt the fatigue from the wine and from the workday settle over her like a blanket. But even as her mind and body sunk closer to sleep, she still thought of Will, the same way she had every night she’d been away—whether he was okay, whether he missed her, whether he’d ever held his phone in his hand, like she had, and thought of calling. She did it now, too, out of habit—swiped her thumb across her screen, navigated to the text box where Will’s Good luck sat like a bad omen.
Maybe she should text something—a few words about how it had gone over the past few days? A question about how his week had been?
But no—no. She was too tired, and it was so late in Chicago. She didn’t want to take the chance on waking him, and anyway, she’d said they should wait. She’d text him when she landed; she wouldn’t force herself to hold off anymore.
She must’ve fallen asleep before setting her phone back down, and she must’ve slept deeply, because when she woke again, it was still clutched in her hand, still resting, face down, on her stomach. She blinked into the darkness, unsure at first what had woken her, until she registered that the phone she was holding was ringing. On instinct, she winced and silenced it, thinking of Dee in the other room. She sat straight up to squint down at the screen while her brain tried to wake up enough to figure out what was going on: how long had she been sleeping, who was calling . . .
Oh.
She smiled down at the screen when she saw: 4:30 a.m., and it was Will. The golden hour, she thought, and she could only blame the fact that she had missed him so much for not thinking of anything else at all.
But when she answered, he only had to speak two words before she knew something was well and truly wrong.
“Nora, baby,” he said.
The good news was, Will was exceptional at delivering bad news.
He’d told her the important things first: that Jonah was okay—in the hospital but okay, and not in any imminent danger at all. He told her that the fall had been the result of a middle-of-the-night trip to the bathroom and a pair of shoes Jonah had forgotten he’d left in the hallway, and not the result of any underlying balance or consciousness problems. He told her that the largest fracture had been clean—compound, right in the middle of the femur—and that the other three in the hand he’d used to break his fall were, all things considered, not devastating. He told her, too, that Jonah was awake and his mostly regular self, but that he’d need to have surgery soon.
He told her, again and again, that Jonah would be okay.
But the bad news was the bad news: that Jonah had fallen, that he was hurt, that it’d taken about ten minutes for Mr. and Mrs. Salas to wake up when Jonah had used his good hand to thud one of the offending shoes on the floor as a way to call for help.
That Nora had been all the way in California when she’d found out someone she loved was hurt.
“Marian called me from the hospital,” Will explained, while Nora’s heart pounded in the early-morning dark. “She thought I might be able to help, get additional information where I could. She was going to call you, too, but I—I thought it’d be better to wait, with you so far away. Until I could get more information. I hope that’s all right.”
“It’s all right,” she’d said, already scrambling to get her things together. “I’m coming. Tell everyone I’m coming.”
By the time she arrived at the hospital hours later—straight from the airport, her luggage hastily packed in order to catch the earlier flight she’d managed to snag with an assist from Deepa, who hadn’t once complained about the early hour—Nora was a wreck, nervous and stressed even though her phone was filled with regular, reassuring texts from Will, the limp Good luck from before long buried.
When she walked through the front doors, she followed the instructions he’d sent her for where to go, barely registering her surroundings. This was the same hospital Nonna had been in, at the end, and she was grateful that Jonah was on a different floor. Still, her hands trembled with nerves as she rode the elevator up, and she had to shake them out before grabbing the handle of her suitcase again, rolling it clumsily behind her as she disembarked, using her free hand to type a Here to Will as she turned out of the elevator bay.
She’d taken only a few steps before she saw him down the corridor, stepping out of the wide doorway that must’ve opened to the family waiting room he’d already told her about, his phone in hand, his head tipped down toward its screen. When he looked up and over, spotting her, he moved so swiftly and so purposefully that she simply stilled in place, as though all the residual stress from her rush to the airport and her long, tense flight finally caught up to her, filling up her body like concrete, like lead.
She set a hand across her eyes, unbearably relieved to be back, and to have Will here, and with the full force of the chin quiver she’d tried so hard to hide last time she’d seen him, she started to cry.
“Nora,” he said, getting close, and then he was surrounding her, his arms encircling her, pulling her close and tight against him.
“He’s okay,” he said, ducking his head to put his mouth closer to her ear.
“He’s okay,” he repeated.
She nodded and kept right on crying, because she was glad Jonah was okay and also upset that he wasn’t, not in the way she wanted him to be. She cried because she hated this hospital and because she missed Nonna. And she cried because this hug, by this particular person, felt about as good as anything she could imagine, and she hadn’t even let herself realize how much—over the course of these past few days—she’d missed being held by him.
“I’ve got food down there for you,” he said softly, and she thought he might’ve said other stuff before that, too, doctor-type stuff, only she hadn’t been paying attention to anything other than his warmth and his strength and his familiar scent for long minutes. “Marian and Emily are here now, and Benny just took Mr. and Mrs. Salas home for the night.”
She nodded against his chest, felt his hand slip down the length of her hair, felt him let out an uneven breath as his arms tightened briefly around her. When he loosened them again, she leaned back so she could look at him even through her tears, and almost as soon as she did he moved, too, lifting his hands from her body so he could gently wipe his thumbs across her cheeks.
“Okay now,” he said softly, and she closed her e
yes at the tenderness of it, a few more tears slipping out as she did.
When she opened them again, she could see him better, her eyes drier and her mind calmer, and she smiled softly as she saw his ridiculously messy hair, his slightly crooked glasses. She reached up and straightened them. She wanted to say, I love you, but she also didn’t, not when she felt like a throbbing, raw, exposed nerve, not when she felt like she’d be holding him hostage to her current state of emotional distress.
So instead she said, “I’m glad to see you.”
“Nora, you’ve got no idea.” He breathed in, his lashes lowering, his head tipping down and briefly shaking side to side. “You’ve got no idea how I missed you.”
“I’ve got some idea.”
“Let me say how sorry I am, about before you left. About that text message. I’ve been thinking, and—”
“Will,” she interrupted, pushing his hair back from his brow. “Let’s not talk about it here, okay? Not in a hospital.”
Will blinked, his brow furrowing, like he couldn’t imagine why a hospital wasn’t a perfectly fine place to have any sort of conversation at all, but then he nodded and said, “Right, yeah. That makes sense. You must want to see Marian and Emily, and I can go check—”
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she blurted desperately, because she was, and also because she hated the way he’d looked when he’d said that—cautious and maybe even a little scared. She moved to grab his hand, to link their fingers together, to reassure him in the same way she wanted to feel reassured—not just about Jonah, but about her relationship with Will. Her future with Will.
For hours she hadn’t thought about it at all, not really; from the minute he’d called her she could only think about getting back, about Jonah and whether he would be well. She’d clung to each of Will’s updates like a lifeline, but she hadn’t thought much beyond that, hadn’t thought about how they’d left things before she’d gone—Will telling her it was too much, Will telling her he didn’t want anything serious.
But now that she was standing here with him like this, she clung to other things: the way he’d called off work, hustling to get information from and about the doctors who were treating Jonah, the way he’d stayed with her neighbors and kept calm and responsible and practical for them all. She clung to the concern etched into every line of his face, to the wrinkles in his shirt and the hospital badge clipped at the waistband of his jeans. She clung to the way he’d done all this for her and her neighbors, the way he’d taken this all so seriously. He’d been so . . . so loyal to her, and to the people she cared so much about.
She thought of Dee last night—Had that only been last night?—asking whether she’d be okay, if Will didn’t come around. If Will didn’t want anything serious.
Now, though, after the day she’d had, after the things he’d done—that question felt ridiculous, insignificant.
Of course he would come around.
Of course he knew this was serious.
“I wouldn’t be anywhere else,” he said.
“Let me get down there and see this food you brought me. Check in with Marian and Emily.”
Will nodded and loosened his grip, untangling their fingers and moving to tuck his hands into his pockets.
Before he could hide them both away, she caught his hand again, relinking their fingers and setting her other hand back onto her suitcase, rolling it to her side. She looked up at him, a question in her eyes, and his eyes softened, his hand tightening around hers again in answer. There, she thought, a weight lifting. There, that’s settled. He kept hold of her as he shifted, gently moving her other hand off her suitcase and rolling it toward himself instead.
“I’m not going to have Marian and Emily see you carrying your own bag,” he said sheepishly, and she felt her eyes well again, relief and happiness mixed in with all her worry and nerves.
If Marian and Emily were surprised to see Will and Nora walk into the family waiting room hand in hand, neither of them showed it; in fact, if anyone was surprised, it was Nora herself. Months ago, when Nonna had been here, Emily had visited once, pale and shaken, stressed enough that Nora had reassured her repeatedly that it was okay for her to stay home. Now she sat beside Marian, a circle of needlepoint in her lap, her expression not quite calm but not nearly as tense and scared as Nora would have expected. Nora let go of Will’s hand to cross the room to them, greeting them each with a hug and an apology.
“You’ve got no reason to be sorry,” said Marian. “How would you be able to predict when Jonah doesn’t pick up after himself!”
Nora smiled, because that was really just like Marian. For however long it took Jonah to heal, she’d be giving him a lecture every single day.
“I wish I would have been here, though.”
Emily patted Nora’s arm. “He knew you were coming. We told him before they took him to surgery.”
“Anyway, I don’t see what help you would’ve been!” said Marian. “You know who helped is that young man across the hall.”
Nora furrowed her brow, and Will cleared his throat. She looked over to where he stood, his hands back in his pockets. “My tenant. He’s a fourth-year medical student.”
“Right,” Nora said, remembering now. “I forgot.”
“He was very calm for a person so young. I believe he means to be like your Will here. An emergency physician.”
Nora flushed at the phrase: your Will. Obviously, there’d been the hand-holding, and even before that, Nora and Will’s more lax approach to the secrecy of this whole thing. But looking at Marian and Emily now, she wondered if she ought to make some kind of . . . statement? Saying something out loud, though—was that too much, given that she and Will hadn’t had their promised conversation?
But Emily saved the moment, speaking first. “I might’ve noticed him come by some evenings. I only mentioned it to Marian.”
“I mentioned it to everyone else,” Marian said, wholly unashamed. “Corrine is thrilled, I’ll have you know. It’s taken her a lot of effort not to say anything.”
Nora cringed, embarrassed. Probably she’d seen them the night they’d come back from Garfield Park. She should’ve said something sooner.
Emily placidly worked her needlepoint. “I’ll tell you he’s hard to miss when he’s carrying a seven-foot pole up the walkway at almost ten o’clock at night.”
From behind her, Will made a noise—sort of a snort-guffaw. Emily had known since the shower curtain rod! That was . . . a while, then.
The actual whole time!
“I’m sorry!” Nora said, knee-jerk. “I mean, for not—”
“It’s your business,” said Emily quietly. “There’s no reason to apologize.”
Nora blinked at them in surprised silence, her brain still catching up to the stress of the last several hours, to the relief of having come back to Will’s waiting arms and her neighbors—these two and Mrs. Salas, at the very least—unbothered by the whole entire thing. She knew there was so much stress ahead, knew she still felt a rattle of nerves throughout her body when she thought of Jonah, but it felt good, for now, to have this part feel so easy.
Marian picked up a brown bag from the seat beside her and held it out to Nora. “Come on and eat your food. This man brought you a muffin that’s as big as a baby’s head.”
Nora took the bag, extremely wishing Marian had not compared its contents to a head of any kind, and then turned to look at Will, who was watching her, his expression a mixture of amusement and concern. When she moved to sit on one of the small couches across from Marian and Emily, he stayed standing, the lightness falling away from his expression.
“I’m going to go check at the nurse’s station,” he said. “To see if—”
“Will,” she said, patting the seat beside her, wanting him to feel as settled about things as she did. “Come on.”
“I tried to be careful,” he said quietly, when he sat down. “When I came over, I mean.”
She shrugged and opened the
bag, the smell of sugary goodness wafting up, and her mouth watered. “It’s okay,” she said, reaching in. “I’m relieved they know. I was going to tell them anyway, if . . .”
She trailed off, focusing on her head muffin. If you’d said you wanted to choose me, too. She was glad to have something to stuff in her face for the time being.
He set a hand on her thigh and checked his phone. “We should hear something pretty soon, I’d guess, judging by how long this surgery usually takes.”
Nora nodded and chewed, watching Marian and Emily across the way, watching as Will easily joined into their conversation—asking Emily about the plant in the corner (“It’s not a real plant,” Emily said, and Nora had a feeling Will already knew that but wanted to give Emily a laugh), talking to Marian about the next poetry night (“I’ve been getting into poetry,” Will said to her, and Marian gave him a look like he was 100 percent lying). She thought about all the things she’d feared that day Will had crashed the building meeting—all the ways she thought she was letting Nonna down, all the ways she thought she was letting her neighbors down.
But right now, in this bland, uncomfortable waiting room, Nora watched Will make conversation with two of her toughest-crowd neighbors, all the while waiting for a health update on the man who was, no doubt, the third toughest. She thought about Nonna and how she liked good manners and pleasant conversation and anyone who liked marinara sauce, and also anyone who liked Nora. Nonna would have been charmed, for sure. Real estate feuds aside, Nonna would have liked having Will as part of this little family.
He’s come around, she told herself firmly, and with a small sigh of relief, she finished the last of her muffin, rested her head against Will’s shoulder, and settled in to wait.
Love at First Page 26
