“They’re healthy?” Will said, which was a better thing to be focused on than Dr. Taylor’s handsomeness in comparative terms. Nora stood, smoothing the front of her denim shirt.
Dr. Taylor nodded, pulling a small tablet out of the pocket of his white coat and swiping his finger across it. “They both look good, though we’ll need a bit of time before we get results back on the tests we ran. Now in this apartment you two share, where do—”
“Oh,” Nora said quickly, “we don’t . . . we definitely don’t share it.”
Dr. Taylor looked up, moved his eyes back and forth between them, before settling his . . . interested? . . . gaze briefly back on Nora. Well! That was nice, to be noticed. Especially when she was covered in kitten hair. Possible presence of other kitten detritus, but best not to think of it at the moment.
“Will’s my neighbor,” she said pointedly. “He has a very sensitive sense of smell but not very good detective skills, I guess. So I helped him—”
“I’m sure he doesn’t need the full story,” said Will, tightly. She looked over at him and he was giving Dr. Taylor a pretty annoyed look! She recognized it, having been on the receiving end of many of Will’s annoyed looks.
“I don’t mind,” said Dr. Taylor, winking at Nora. A wink, that was a little much. Probably he would talk about himself a lot on a first date. “Now will you be keeping the kittens, or . . . ?”
“You know what, Dr. Taylor,” Nora said, leaning in, “Will and I werejusttalking about that! I suggested thathemight want to keep them. On the way over here they kept wanting to crawl right out of that hamper to get to him.”
“They didn’t,” Will said, his voice clipped. “Listen, do you have ideas for a rescue organization? Rules say we can’t have them in the building.”
Nora pursed her lips, looked back at Dr. Taylor, who furrowed his brow and made a noise of concern. “Well, I have to say, that’s not the best news. Do you think your landlord could make an exception for a temporary period?”
“Probably not,” Will said. “She’s kind of a stickler.”
Nora rolled her eyes and nudged his side (muscles: still hard!) with her elbow. “Why a temporary period?” she asked.
“Kittens this young—I’d say the mother’s nearby, somewhere. Maybe they all got in when you were out one day, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she comes around looking for these little guys. We have a program here for spaying feral cats, so we might be able to help her if she does.”
“Oh,” Nora said, looking down to where the kittens playfully swatted at each other. Well, this was terrible. What if the mom cathadgone back to Donny’s, or what if she was nervously pacing outside somewhere, looking for her babies? The truth was, Nora didn’t even really like cats all that much, but this was sounding worse by the minute. She had a sudden, unbidden memory of the first morning she’d met Will, out on the balcony. She’d thought that loud, feline scream had come from a tomcat, but what if even then there’d been a mother cat in trouble? What if there was some kind of community cat crisis, all because of Donny’s sudden passing?
She didn’t want to be responsible for piling onto that.
“I’ll find a way to keep the kittens for a while,” she blurted. “Should I call here if I see the mom? Or—”
“I could give you my personal number,” said Dr. Taylor, and she really hoped he didn’t wink again. It felt like a wink was close. An imminent wink. “She probably comes around at night. If you see her, you can call me, anyti—”
“I’ll keep them,” interrupted Will.
Nora and Dr. Taylor both looked at him. Nora was pretty sure her mouth was hanging open. One of the kittens made a squeaky (celebratory!)mewnoise.
“If the, uh, mom”—he saidmomlike it had a question mark at the end—“comes back, it’ll be to my unit. I might as well keep them there.”
Keepthem there? Nora thought back to the bright walls, the mostly clean, impersonal spaces that now made up Donny’s apartment. You couldn’t keep kittens in an apartment you wererentingout. You couldn’t watch for a possibly angry adult cat if you didn’t evenlivein the place you thought it might show up.
What was hedoing?
He looked down at her, all stubble-faced and kitten-scratched and unwinking, and he may have had a serious expression on his face, but she felt oddly like their shared laughter still lived between them, same as the way their weeks-gone golden hour always did.
“It’s temporary,” he said, and he sounded so full of conviction—so full of something like a warning—that she really tried to take his word for it.
But deep down, she had a feeling she was about to be seeing a whole lot more of Will Sterling.
Chapter 8
He was starting to feel like he’d never again see the outside of this apartment.
In the four days since Nora Clarke had, once again, turned all his plans upside down, Will had found himself existing in a strange, outside-of-time universe where his daily tasks revolved around two small animals whose appetite for attention was matched only by their appetite for attempted destruction of every effort he’d made to ready Donny’s apartment for rental. During the day, he felt like he mostly worked at containment efforts—how to set them up in the room where he needed to work on completing a painting or cleaning or rearranging task, how to keep them entertained while he did. At night, he slept fitfully on the functional but deeply uncomfortable couch that’d been delivered only a few days ago, cold from the back door he left open, one ear always trained on the outside, waiting for some sound of the cat he’d done all this for.
Fool, he’d think to himself as he tossed and turned.You didn’t do it for the fucking cat.
The problem was, Dr. Taylor didn’t really care about any mother cat. He cared about finding some reason to come over at night to see Nora, probably so he could try to look down her top again, which Will had definitely caught him doing in that exam room, and then it was like his whole entire brain had turned to static. Will figured that agreeing to take the kittens was, on balance, a better static-brained outcome than punching Dr. Taylor in the throat and carrying Nora out of that room like he had some sort of claim on her.
