Don’t think about it, Will, he told himself.Do not think about going to a damned plants slideshow in the backyard of that building. That is not your future.
When an overhead announcement signaled the conservatory’s coming closing time, they made their way up the steps toward the greenhouse’s exit, Nora ahead of him, her phone already raised.
“Let me get one more of this one,” she said, not even really to him, and so he stood where he was, watching her climb a couple more steps to get the angle she wanted. He smiled as she bent close, by now knowing that this was one of the pictures where she was trying to show something to Emily about spores. He thought of Gerald and Sally, hoped their date—Will had given his boss three different ideas—would go as well as this one had.
“They’re gonna kick us out of here,” he said, teasing.
“I’ll get it done faster if you quit talking.”
He chuckled at this familiar ribbing, something they’d practiced during their various feuds early on and perfected during their projects over the last few weeks.
He was looking up at her when it happened—when her brow furrowed, when her lips pulled to one side. When she reached out the hand that wasn’t holding her phone to wave away a fly that buzzed lazily around the very leaves she was trying to photograph. When she clucked her tongue and said quietly, “Get.Get!”with a familiar trace of laughter in her voice.
When his heart hiccupped.
Like he was fifteen all over again.
“This reminds me,” he said, before he could think. Before he could yank himself out of the past he’d lulled himself into thinking was so safe tonight. “Of the first time I ever saw you.”
She straightened, turning to face him, to look down at him, and he almost wanted to check his hands for cherry tomatoes. But no—they were where he’d left them, still in his pockets, still in control.
“You mean the morning I knocked my plant over?”
Unbeknownst to her, she’d given him an out with this, and he could’ve taken it. Of course, it could’ve been that morning. Of course he could’ve said,Yes, when you knocked your plant over. But for some reason, down here like this, Nora above him like that, he couldn’t seem to stop himself.
So instead he said, “No. Not that morning.”
She blinked down at him, something seeking and intense in her eyes, and he knew he was going to tell her. He didn’t have to tell it all, but he knew he should tell her this, on this night they were breaking their routine.
“The day I came with my mom, when I was fifteen. I saw you, up on your balcony.”
“You did?”
From where he stood, he could see her chest rising and falling, quicker than normal.
“‘Saw’ might be an overstatement.” He reached up, touched the edge of his glasses, and her lips curved softly, her eyes still stunned.
“You were trying to get squirrels away from your grandmother’s tomato plants,” he added. “Nonna, you called her. I’d never heard that word before.”
He watched her throat bob in a swallow. “Yes.” And then, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wasn’t sure at first. Not until that building meeting, when you mentioned you came in the summers,” he said, but that wasn’t really true. Hadn’t he been sure, from the moment he’d heard her sayHey? From the moment she’d looked over the edge of her balcony, down to his? “And then . . .” He trailed off, an echo of Nora before.Donny, he could have said again.Me.
She shook her head, dropping her eyes to her skirt, smoothing it again. “I wish you would have said something.”
“It felt complicated, with the building.” Another half-truth.Hefelt complicated. From the second he saw her again, he was all complication.
“I mean back then. When you saw me the first time.”
“Oh. Well, I almost did. I almost called up to you.”
He could remember it so clearly, all of a sudden—all the things his teenaged mind had run through, trying to think of something to say to her while she rained tomatoes down on his head.Hey, did you drop something?That’s what he’d settled on, in the end.
He felt an unfamiliar tenderness for his teenaged self.
“I would’ve wanted you to,” Nora said. “I always wanted to meet kids my own age here.”
“I would’ve been a little older, I guess. Two years?”
