“Can I hel—”
“Did you do something to my unit?”
Once again, Nora’s brain went directly to the most adolescent possible thing for a good two and a half seconds before she was able to blink herself back to sanity. To decency!
“Pardon me?” she said, because sounding stuffy seemed like good insurance against further thoughts regarding Will’s unit.Do not look down, Nora thought, with the determination of a person standing on a very narrow ledge of a very tall building.
“Did you put something in there? Something that would smell?”
Her eyes widened, and his narrowed.
“You did,” he said flatly.
“No!” she said, but it was a too-quickno. A guiltyno. Thenoof a person who definitely haddiscussedthe dead-fish idea at least once. But she hadn’t actuallydoneit.
“I promise I didn’t,” she added, which was also probably a hit man’s first line of defense. It sounded unconvincing even to her own ears.
“Your face got all red. As soon as I said it.”
She resisted the urge to uncross her arms, to press her palms to her hot cheeks. “It’s probably a stress rash. From your aggressive knocking.”
“Just tell me where you put it, and quick. I don’t get the sense that it’s the kind of smell that stays local, if you know what I mean.”
Yikes, that didn’t sound great. She hoped to God it wasn’t something with the building’s septic system. She had a sudden and unpleasant memory of the details Nonna had provided—during one of their regular Sunday night phone calls—about a street-wide issue involving sewers about five years ago.
“I didn’t put it anywhere, because I didn’t do it.” But already she was shoving her feet into the sneakers she had by the door, because if there was a smell seeping its way through this building, it was her responsibility, even if she hadn’t made it happen. “What’s it smell like?”
“Like hell’s toilet bowl.”
Yikes yikes. Thatdidsound septic in nature. She straightened, grabbing for her phone and shoving it in her back pocket. There was a whole corner in her contact list related to building maintenance, and also a whole corner in her brain that was well aware of how much it cost to get repair people to come on short notice.
“A poetry reading is one thing,” he said.
“Will,” she snapped, pushing past him and closing the door behind her. “I did not put anything in your apartment. I wouldn’t do that.” She could feel the heat of his body beside her, and the reaction of her own—a gut-deep desire to lean into him—was so sharp, so acute, that she practically flung herself down the hall to get away from it.
“Would anyone else?”
She stopped at the staircase railing, turned back to face him. It was one thing to suspect her of something like this, but she’d bet her life no one else in this building had ever done a dead-fish teleconference. She was ready to scold him with a passionate defense of her neighbors’ upright standards of conduct, but when she saw his face, she realized that his mask of tight, impatient frustration had temporarily slipped. He looked almost . . . chastened.
“No,” she said, more gently than she’d originally intended. She was helpless against that look. “They wouldn’t.”
He cleared his throat, dropped his eyes briefly, then nodded toward the door across from Nora’s. “I ran into Jonah the other day. After I had the dumpster here. He seemed pretty pissed.”
“It wasn’t really a dumpster,” she blurted.God!What was she, his attorney? It was asgood asa dumpster. Sort of. Either way, she was already doing exactly what she’d been chastising herself for only a few minutes ago—forgetting herself.
She turned back toward the stairs, eager to get out of this hallway. At the very least, she couldn’t get moony-eyed around a man who was meant to be her enemy while she was inside of hell’s toilet bowl.
“Come on,” she said as she descended, but the truth was, she was talking to herself as much as to him.
“I don’t smell anything,” she said, standing inside the shockingly bright, shockingly clean space formerly known as Donny’s apartment. It hadn’t been that long since she’d last been in here, piles of Donny’s things everywhere, the apartment messy and stale-smelling in a way that’d been hard for her to confront. For all the boasting she’d been doing to Will Sterling about the community-mindedness of the building, the inside of Donny’s apartment had not, on first sight, suggested the surroundings of a community-supported man.
But now, the place looked sunny and felt fresh—the sliding door, open to the balcony, casting bright light over the newly painted walls, the floor mostly clear of debris except for a few boxes stacked tidily against one of the walls. Even with its old cabinets and countertops, she could see that the kitchen practically gleamed. Sure, it was still too bare to seem welcoming, but already it was a massive improvement.
Will had obviously put in a ton of work.
And he was obviously really, really close to finishing.
“I smell paint and bleach,” she added, because she had a feeling her stunned silence was noticeable.
