She moved her flashlight so it wouldn’t beam directly on to the small storage door she already knew she’d find partway open.
And when she gently pulled it the rest of the way, two sets of wide, frightened eyes peered back at her.
“Congratulations,” she said to Will, a smile spreading across her face. “You’ve got kittens.”
“The storage door,” Will said, for probably the fourth time in the last hour. “In thecloset.”
Nora suppressed a smile. “Mrs. Salas tried to tell you about it,” she said, only a little smug.
“Kittens,” he said, that stunned quality still in his voice.
Nora hoped he couldn’t feel her shoulders tremble with suppressed laughter, but honestly, she doubted he could miss it. Inside what had to be the tiniest treatment room of an otherwise spacious veterinary clinic, Nora and Will sat, side by side, on a small vinyl-covered cushioned bench, waiting for the vet to return. Probably during any other time, Will would be leaning casually against the door, looking annoyingly unbothered while he kept his distance from her, but Nora had the feeling he was so shocked his legs wouldn’t support him anymore. It was pretty funny, but at the same time, now she definitely had her suspicions about the texture of his T-shirt confirmed (soft, indeed!), and she also was newly privy to what his skin and muscles felt like (soft andnotsoft, respectively) when they grazed against her, so some things about this were not a laughing matter.
She had not, in fact, laughed until they’d gotten here, a sort of spontaneous, half-stifled giggle that came out every time Will tried to explain something to a veterinary professional about finding two kittens inside a secret compartment in the closet of his not-apartment. Before, she’d managed to maintain at least a veneer of seriousness as they dealt with the practicalities—donning latex gloves Will had in his car before handling the kittens, setting them gently inside a plastic hamper they’d borrowed from Marian and stuffed with some of Donny’s shirts. Nora had called the vet while Will had dealt with some of the most immediate cleaning-related tasks associated with finding live animals in one’s closet, and then—without ever really addressing the weirdness of it—they’d gotten into Will’s car and driven to the vet’s office together.
“How’d they getinthere?”
“Now, don’t start this again,” Nora said, rolling her eyes.
“I believe you. I’m saying, how?”
This was really taxing Will’s man brain. She took a sidelong glance at him and he was staring into the middle distance like he’d gotten punched in the face by those kittens.
“My guess is, they came in through the back door you seem to be leaving open while you work.” She didn’t want to talk about her additional guess, which was that they had probably been led there by one of the strays who’d come looking for Donny’s regular handouts.
He turned to look at her, blinking. He didn’t have his glasses on but it didn’t really matter, not when he was up close like this. She thought he might’ve been the most attractive man she’d ever sat next to. Along the strong, stubbled line of his jaw, he had a hair-thin pink scratch from where one of the kittens had caught him during hamper transport. That was a version of getting punched in the face, she supposed.
And because she was still in the habit of forgetting herself, it took everything she had in her not to reach up and touch it.
“Right,” he said, but honestly he still seemed a little dazed. Was he . . . looking at her mouth? Or did she also have kitten scratches somewhere on her face? “That’s probably it.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“Keep the door shut, I guess,” he said automatically, and this time, she didn’t bother stifling her laughter. It came out in a surprised burst, the moment—the entiresituation—so ludicrous and unexpected, and Will’s answer so bland and matter-of-fact and unsuited to the moment. She laughed so hard she had to tip her head back against the wall behind them; she had to reach up to wipe tears from the corners of her eyes. She laughed so hard that she had to sigh when she was done, to catch her breath, and the best part was, Will laughed along with her—a quieter, more constrained version of her own, but enough that it made the ends of his messy hair tremble.
When they’d finished—when they both seemed to remember that laughing wasn’t really something they did together—an awkward silence fell, the muffled sounds of ringing phones and barking dogs coming from the lobby outside their treatment room. Nora shifted on the bench, trying not to notice the way their thighs had come to press against each other during their shared outburst.
“I meant about the kittens,” she finally said, because now, after the laughter, the quiet between them was killing her.
“Oh. Well. I—I don’t know. I can’t keep them.”
She looked over at him, saw that his face had gone all serious again.
“Cats are very self-sufficient. Probably great pets for a workaholic doctor to have.”
He quirked an eyebrow at her. “Probably even better for someone who works from home.”
“Oh,Ican’t keep them,” she said cheerfully. “Pets are against the bylaws. I’m sure you know that!” Truthfully, getting rid of the no-pets clause was something else she could’ve done after Nonna had passed; the main reason it was there was because Nonna had always had terrible allergies, and asthma, to boot. But she didn’t need Will to know that.
“Listen, Nora—”
The door to the treatment room opened, and there was Dr. Taylor again, holding two wide-eyed, freshly washed black-and-white kittens in the crook of each arm.
Nora did the sensible thing, which was to make an unintelligible noise in a high octave range. Will stood from the bench, and immediately, she missed the warm strength of his body beside her.
“You lucked out on the flea situation, so far as my techs could tell,” said Dr. Taylor, setting each kitten gently onto the exam table. “We had a good look over with a comb, and gave them each a little bath back there in our sink. Good sports, these two.”
He scratched one of them gently under the chin with his index finger, and Nora cocked her head to the side. Dr. Taylor was pretty cute, actually, which she might’ve noticed earlier on any given day that she was not running an errand with her very attractive sworn adversary.
