He almost regretted it, almost wished he could take it back. As best he could, he tried not to bring it up with people; it was nearly always embarrassing for everyone involved. It wasn’t so much that it was hard for him to say it—he’d had a lot of time to get used it, after all. It was more that it was hard for people to hear it. They’d stumble through some kind of apology, or worse, ask questions he didn’t want to answer. Bringing it up now—when she was still standing close enough that she could’ve taken his hand again, if she’d wanted to—it felt like a cheap shot.
But it was a cheap shot that saved him, because for a second there, he’d almost forgotten why Nora Clarke was not for him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and to her credit, she didn’t stumble at all. “I really, really am.”
He shrugged, and he hoped he made it look casual. Unaffected. “I’d like to get back to it, if you don’t mind.”
“Right, of course,” she said, carefully taking a step to the side, avoiding the newspapers. This time, he didn’t even try following her to the door.
But when she got there, she paused and turned back toward him. “I’ll see you,” she said, but he didn’t really notice that particular echo.
Instead, what he noticed—what he thought about long after she left—was how she’d been using the thumb of one of her hands to rub the palm of the other.
The palm that had been pressed to his.
Chapter 5
“He’s not happy.”
Nora looked past Deepa’s shoulder to the conference room door. Maybe Austin would come back after a few minutes, but honestly, she doubted it. The guy wasn’t known for showy displays of temper, so even a slight frown followed by a request to “pick this up later”—before their meeting timer had even sounded!—meant he’d well and truly had it. By now he was probably back at his ruthlessly tidy desk, squeezing the Verdant Media–branded stress ball he kept in a box on the upper-right corner.
“Well, we’re doing our best,” said Nora, trying to keep up the breezy, unbothered tone she’d maintained through the last forty-five minutes of this video call. It was her “business-as-usual” tactic, the one she’d been honing since Austin had grudgingly agreed to let her work remotely. As long as she acted like nothing important for her had changed, she figured, there’d be no reason for him to second-guess his decision. “It’s not like the client is making it easy.”
“Ugh,” Deepa said, rolling her eyes. “You don’t know the half of it. At dinner last week she asked whether we should consider building a game app. She showed me the bitmoji she uses of herself as an ‘inspiration pic.’”
Nora shifted in her uncomfortable desk chair, suppressing a wince. Some of her discomfort was definitely about this bitmoji story, but most of it was about theyou don’t know the half of it. Shedidn’tknow the half of it, because she never went to client dinners or lunches or coffees or juices now. She herself didn’t miss them—they’d always been the worst part of the gig—but she knew that Austin missed heratthem. More than once, Austin had privately lamented to Nora about Deepa’s F-grade poker face. That eye roll Nora had just watched through the screen of her laptop probably made an appearance at the dinner table, too.
“What if we try redoing the color scheme?” Nora offered, trying to stop herself from wading into this particular tide pool of guilt. She lived here now, and that was all there was to it. Austin needed to get used to not having her in San Diego, and the only way to make that happen was to keep doing what she was good at, and showing him how indispensable she was. “She’s always seemed lukewarm ab—”
“She’s not a good fit for us,” said Deepa. “She’s going to henpeck us to death before she realizes that she wants to be a celebrity more than she wants to save the world.”
Nora sighed, knowing Dee was right. When Austin had first started Verdant Media, his mission had been crystal clear: to become the premier digital design and marketing agency for sustainability-focused brands. Ten years ago, it’d been boutique, but now it was pretty much booming—Nora herself was currently maintaining thirty-five different major websites and had seven projects in the queue for build-out. Most of her accounts were corporate, but recently Austin had started bringing in clients like this one—“eco-influencers,” he called them, people who did things like stage Instagram photos of homemade cleaning products in pretty spray bottles.
Nora didn’t love this new trend, but it was Austin’s company, and Austin had given Nora her first shot as an intern when she was only twenty years old. Because of Austin, she was one of only a handful of people who’d had a job in hand when she graduated. Because of Austin, she’d gotten to have a front-row seat to the small firm’s success for almost ten years. And because of Austin, she got to keep doing what she loved, what she was good at, even though she wanted to do it from all the way across the country.
“I’ll talk to him,” Nora said, closing out all the eco-influencer-related windows she’d had up on her second, larger monitor, and blinked in relief. She still hadn’t gotten the setup right in here, still felt like everything was too close to her face when she worked.
Over on her laptop screen, Deepa went out of frame for a second, and then came back in, resettling in her chair with a small metallic pouch in front of her. Nora smiled at this new version of an old routine. When she’d still worked in the office, she and Dee would often debrief in the office building’s third-floor bathroom, which was almost always deserted. Dee would touch up her makeup and they’d chat about work or life or whatever. They did the same now, only with the video-call app serving as the makeup mirror. Nora supposed it was a little odd, talking to someone who was doing an extreme close-up of her mascara or lipstick application, but then again, Dee was really good at makeup.
“Okay,” Deepa said. “Give me the update. What happened with the new guy?”
This time, Nora didn’t even bother suppressing her wince. Whathappenedwas that she’d made an absolute mess of it, and so she’d been hiding out in her apartment for a day and a half, trying to recover—not only from what she’d pushed him into revealing about himself, but also from what touching him had revealed aboutherself. This morning, for the first time in months, she’d done 4:00 a.m. from her bed, her covers caught up around her legs and her eyes staring up at the ceiling, trying desperately to blink away the memory of an incredibly vivid, incredibly inappropriate dream she’d had about Will Sterling and what he might be able to do with the palm of his hand.
“Uh,” Nora said.
“Let me guess. Your ‘kill him with kindness’ plan backfired. I told you, hide a whole fish somewhere in there. You’ve got a key. The smell will beunreal.”
Nora shook her head firmly while Dee did something with a highlighter brush that deserved a YouTube tutorial. “No, we’re not doing stuff like that. We’re not criminals.”
She got another eye roll for that, but Nora knew that Deepa wouldn’t really go through with fish-hiding, either. Probably.
“Then you’re not going to stop him, I hate to tell you. You know my building has like twenty Airbnb units now? And I’ll bet at least a few of my other neighbors rent out their places during Comic-Con this year.” She paused mid-highlight. “Wait, should I do that?”
“No,” Nora snapped, annoyed, even though Deepa lived in a twelve-story building with a rooftop pool that bore no meaningful relationship to Nora and her neighbors’ beloved six-flat.
Dee shrugged, rooting around in her bag. “Good money, though.” When Nora didn’t respond, she looked up, a brushed gold tube of lipstick in her hand and her eyes narrowed. “Why are you acting so strange?”
“I’m not!” Shoot, she’d said it too loud. Deepa’s eyes narrowed even more.
