“You are. Your face has that look about it. It’s the same face you had the whole time we worked on the—”
“Don’t say it,” Nora interrupted, her face heating automatically. Only a few months before she’d moved to Chicago, she and Deepa had been collaborating on the launch of a sustainable sex toy brand’s digital platform. Nora had never quite recovered from having to say the worddildoduring a work presentation.
“Eleanora!” Deepa said, her formerly narrowed eyes now wide as saucers. “Did youdo somethingwith this man?!”
“What? No! He’s not even mytype.” This was a lie, because Nora didn’t really have a type. If you went solely by her largely disappointing dating history, her type was probably something like “men who talk about themselves too much.” That described the type for a lot of women out here in the twenty-first century, she figured.
Dee was still staring through the laptop screen like she could see straight into Nora’s dirty dreams, though, so she absolutely had to correct this misimpression.
“We had this little—I don’t know. I caught the edge of my foot on some stuff in the apartment and tripped, and then we . . .”
“Had sex?”
“No! Keep your voice down; we’re at work!”
“I’mat work. You’re at home.”
Nora ignored that. “We didn’t have sex. He—he grabbed my hand, and then . . . I don’t know. We stayed like that. For a few seconds.”
Deepa blinked. “You . . . held hands.” She tipped back her head and laughed. “This is the most you story. So then what?”
Nora did not want to do thethen what. Thinking of the look on Will’s face when he’d saidI’m an orphanwas already one of the top ten moments in life she did not want to relive, just ahead of talking about dildos in a conference room. She’d never heard someone call themselves an orphan. It was a little Dickensian, to be honest, but then again, Nora had always liked to read.
Though judging by the look on Will’s face, he’d closed the book.
Firmly.
She shrugged. “Nothing. I think it was a blip. We both remembered ourselves, I guess. I tried to get him to reconsider, and he assured me that he won’t.”
“Hide. The. Fish.” Dee was mid-lipstick application, so it sounded more likeIde. Uh. Ish.
“I don’t want to ruin his life,” she said, although what she really meant wasI don’t want to hurt his feelings. She’d had the sense she’d done that, somehow. When he’d dropped her hand, she’d felt it in her stomach. Like a tiny stone of regret had lodged itself there.
Then again, what about the feelings of her neighbors? What about sitting with Emily yesterday, encouraging her to stop reading articles online about problems with short-term rentals? What about the way Marian had looked at her with expectation by the mailboxes, or the way Jonah had shaken a small fist at her and said, “We’ll get him next time!”
What about what Nonna would want?
“I only want him to . . . I need him to understand why this won’t work here.”
Deepa made a humming noise as she put the lipstick away and pulled out a setting spray. In the third-floor bathroom, if they were working out some design problem, this is the point at which Deepa usually got ideas. It was like all the touch-ups were brain calisthenics for her.
“No offense, Nora, but since you’ve moved back there you have told me no fewer than six things that your neighbors do that would absolutely have me packing a go bag and fleeing back to the wide world of living with people my own age.”
“That’s rude. They’re—”
Dee waved a hand, twisting her fresh-painted lips. “They’re your family. And they’re great, I know. I’m sure he got the sense of that with the food drop-off, or whatever it was. But you need this guy to see the stuff that his future renters would find absolutely bizarre. The stuff you hardly even recognize as unusual.”
Nora furrowed her brow, thinking. The fact that nothing came immediately to mind probably proved Deepa’s point, but then she looked down to the desk calendar and saw what she had written on it for tomorrow night. If she flipped the page, she’d see the same entry again, on the next month. And the next and the next.
“Like a monthly poetry reading?” she said, not even really to Deepa.
“There’s a monthly poetry reading at your apartment building? Uh, yes. I’d say that’s weird.”
Nora’s mind was already racing with ideas. Where this kind of creativity download had been when Austin had been in the room and they’d been trying to figure out this situation with the eco-influencer from hell, she wished she knew, but it didn’t really matter now.
“It’s not weird,” she muttered. Then she looked up and smiled through the screen at her friend. “But I’m about to make it a whole lot weirder.”
At first, there was no doubt in Nora’s mind that she had Nonna’s full support.
