Brown eyes. He had brown eyes, a shade or two lighter than his hair and eyebrows. It was so easy to notice them now, what with how focused they were on her.
“Uh. It’s complicated.”
“Complicated,” he repeated. She felt pinned by his gaze, by this softly spoken word, and for a second, she forgot about their audience. About what they were doing there in the first place.
But then Jonah shouted, “What’d they say?”
She looked away from Will, back to her neighbors. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Will move, but she didn’t look over to investigate.He’s leaving, she thought, and tried to be relieved about it. If nothing else, at least she’d stopped his charm offensive before it could get started. He’d be gone for now, and she could get back to figuring out how to fix this.
She waited, eyes ahead, for him to offer at least a cursory goodbye to her neighbors.
But he didn’t.
“Ms. Clarke,” he said instead, exactly like his awful letter. “Can I see you outside?”
He hadn’t waited to see if she would follow.
No, he’d left the basement in an upright stride that was the exact opposite of the lanky, casual charm with which he’d walked in, and when Nora made her way up the musty rear stairwell, her palms still sweaty, she half expected him to be gone already.
It had taken a few minutes to disentangle herself from the cacophonous aftermath of his departure, her neighbors bursting with various assessments of Will Sterling (“Rude!” according to Marian, agreed upon by Jonah and Benny; “Seems a bit moody,” offered Mr. Salas, countered by Mrs. Salas’s more generous “Maybe he was nervous!”; and, finally, “Very tall!” per Emily, who seemed not to mean this as a compliment). After that, there’d been a sweeping instructional impulse: everyone wanted to remind Nora of their own particular grievance with the short-term rental idea. As she took the steps up to the yard, she could hear their various pleas and insistences:
You’ve got to tell him, Nora—
What he needs to know is—
He has to understand that—
When she pushed open the back door and walked into the bright, warm afternoon sunshine, Will was there waiting. Middle of the yard, arms crossed, staring down at the black, wrought-iron tabletop of their collectively held patio furniture.
He hardly seemed to notice her approach, didn’t move when she came to stand even with him. He kept his eyes on the table, his brows furrowed, as though he was expecting to find something there. Weirdly, she felt compelled to stare at it, too. They probably looked like they were solemnly standing over a casket, or a headstone, rather than over the spot where Benny and Jonah had an extremely regrettable potato-skin-eating contest last week.
“You said last year,” he finally said, and she looked over at him, though he didn’t return the gesture. He was really focused on this table, and also an incredibly specific thing about her life timeline that extremely didn’t matter.
“That’s not untrue. I moved back here last year. As a kid I used to . . . I lived here every summer, with my grandmother. And I came for a lot of holidays. That’s what Jonah meant, about twenty years.”
The arms he had crossed over his chest shifted, tightened. But he didn’t say a word.
She chafed under what felt like an admonishing silence. What did he expect, that she’d give him her whole life story in a few minutes of golden-hour conversation? Anyway it’s not likehe’dgiven her a full accounting of his terrible rental-property scheme. She should be admonishing him! She would start with his behavior in the basement. No matter that she’d wanted him gone; it’d been rude, the way he’d walked out. She would say that. She would tell him about his manners! Nonna definitely would have done that.
But when she turned to him and opened her mouth, the admonishment that came out was, “I thought you wore glasses.”
And then she promptly looked back down at the table, which she very much would have liked to crawl under. It could conveniently serve as the headstone for her oncoming death from embarrassment.
Beside her, Will cleared his throat. When he spoke there was possibly another smirk behind it, but she wouldn’t know, what with all the attention she was paying to her new backyard tomb.
“I do, sometimes. I also have contacts.”
“Right, of course. That must be very convenient.”
There was a long silence. Surely he was using it to suppress his laughter.
“Ms. Clarke,” he said finally, and the best thing she could say about that as a reopener was that it at least made her angry enough to feel like speaking again; it at least reminded her of his letter, and what they were here for in the first place.
They turned to face each other again, Will dropping his arms and returning his hands to his pockets. Whatever frowning, frustrated countenance he’d left the basement with, he’d smoothed it. Obviously he’d been helped along by her ridiculous comment about his glasses, and she kicked herself for giving him the upper hand.
“You don’t need to call me Ms. Clarke,” she said, though the stiffness in her voice suggested she was exactly the kind of person who would prefer to be called Ms. Clarke. “You can call me Nora.”
