Flashes of a basketball game and a kiss cam had me biting my lip to keep from smiling. Elbows and armrests and hands lightly touching my face. The wedding crash, his house, and our night at the hospital. Breakfast. Teasing, flirting, and talking the entire night. Exchanging social media information instead of phone numbers. Saying goodbye. The moment when I called the hospital months later to inquire about the bill I’d never received and was told it had already been paid in full.
On occasion, during the dark and cold winter in North Dakota, I’d pull up his account and look at the three pictures total he had on there and relive the moments of the Jazz game. But that had slowly stopped. Soon after, he got himself a girlfriend, and somehow, pictures of him with his arm around a beautiful brunette kept making their way into my feed. I ended up unfollowing him and forced myself to stop looking him up.
A woman with blonde hair stood next to Duke, leaning in to tell him something, her hand resting on his back just below his shoulder.
Out of the almost nine thousand days making up my entire life, I had shared one night with him. One. A few hours. A date. I had no reason to feel weirdly possessive. I didn’t understand the surge of jealousy that burned for the briefest of moments. I wasn’t sure whether he worked somewhere in the building or if he was just here for a meeting. He probably still had a girlfriend. Or maybe a wife by now? No sense reliving something that was only a fluke. The back of his head was enough for me. He probably wouldn’t remember me, anyway.
I thought back to the kiss cam…okay, he probably remembered me. Crossing off a bucket list item of that magnitude with a stranger seemed like something a person would remember. Maybe he wouldn’t recognize me. My hair was in a ponytail and…okay, not much had changed for me, but for some reason I couldn’t explain, I didn’t want him to see me. A Duke sighting was something a girl needed to prepare for. Work up to. When it was dropped on me like this, my pulse shot through the roof. My frame of mind was a complicated mixture of dying for some interaction between us and staying hidden in the corner.
Tomorrow, I’d be ready—which, of course, meant that I would never see him again because I would now belookingfor it to happen.
Okay. New plan.
I’d wait for him and his posse to get off the elevator first before I attempted my fourteenth-floor drop-off. The last thing I wanted to do was shimmy past all these people.
Ding.
The elevator came to a sudden halt. My eyes shot up to the number above the door, indicating we were stopped on the fourteenth floor. The door opened. Nobody moved a muscle.
Apparently, he didn’t work on my floor.
I had imagined this going much differently. Fine with me, I would just wait them out and come back down by myself. I swallowed, trying to shrink myself in the corner while everybody glanced around, looking for the person who had obviously planned to get off on floor fourteen. Now it was too awkward to change my mind. I had waited four seconds too long.
The door had begun to close when the older gentleman nudged my shoulder. “Isn’t this your stop?”
An arm somewhere in the front shot out, stopping the door from closing while heads turned to look my way.
Yes, this was much worse.
“Thanks,” I mumbled and began moving out from my corner, squeezing past broad shoulders and suit coats.
I felt Mike’s eyes on me as I passed, but I couldn’t bring myself to look up, not when the floor at my feet was so interesting. When I stepped around him, Duke was holding the elevator door open, and when I inched toward the threshold, he moved his arm out of my way. My head had been turned slightly, but good manners dictated I give him a smile or a thank you. And I couldn’tnotgive him that.
I braved a look at him as I passed. “Thanks.”
To my utter delight, recognition flared into his widened eyes almost immediately. His mouth dropped open slightly as his gaze swept over me. The energy in my veins moved like a shot of caffeine zinging straight down my body, curling my toes and hitching my breath. An unbidden smile crept across my face as I stepped out. The fact that he recognized me made me breathe in this moment a little easier.
“Hey!” Duke’s rushed, soft voice carried to my ears. I turned and met his smile with mine, both growing wider by the second. He had a look on his face, almost calculating, as if he had a thousand things to say to me but couldn’t pick which to begin with.
And like all good romantic comedies, we were interrupted before we could speak. The doors shut, blocking his handsome face from my view.
All the adrenaline coursing through my body dissipated the second the elevator door closed. My shoulders dropped while my breath expelled in a dramatic whooshing sound. I hid behind my hands, not ready to face the world quite yet. I wanted to hide away in a room somewhere and relive every delicious second of the twenty spent in his company.
9
“Nora?”
I spun around, dropping my hands and forcing myself to remember the reason I was here. My Aunt Cathy stood just past the elevators, waiting for me, her eyebrows furrowing in question as she walked toward me.
“Hey.” I tucked a wayward piece of hair behind my ear and remembered myself. “Hi, Aunt Cathy.”
Cathy reached toward me and gave me a hug, a mixture of chlorine and citrus enveloping me as she did. Her curly blonde hair was down, and she wore dark-rimmed glasses and loose-fitting gray slacks with a stylish tucked-in t-shirt and a relaxed blazer. Her style was effortless and simple in a way that made me jealous. She was so much the opposite of my mom that it was always a trip seeing a nearly exact replica be so different.
“Thanks for hiring me last minute.”
“Sure, sure. Let me show you to the office. I need you to sign a few things before I turn you loose.” She turned and led us down a small hallway and into a doorway marked CCS - Cathy’s Cleaning Service. The room held a small office with Cathy’s nameplate on the front, and she gestured to me to sit down. “Your call came at the right time. We just had someone quit, and I’ve been a bit shorthanded.”
“Good. Glad it worked out.”
