She nodded and smiled. “That would have made it even better. I would’ve bragged when I got back to school. The cute high school guy who flirted with me over the summer.”
She took a step down, bringing herself closer to him, and it hit him almost as sharp as the moment with her phone and the fly and her laughing frustration. What he would’ve given, to see her up close that day. What he would’ve given, for one more selfish summer before everything had gone to hell.
Her smile slipped during his silence, and she paused, two steps away. “Then again,” she said, “At thirteen, I was in a pretty awkward phase, so maybe you—”
“I thought you were beautiful,” he said fiercely, because he wouldn’t let anything else stand.
She reached up, touched the edge of his glasses like he had only a moment ago. “I thought you said you couldn’t see me.”
Another out, but he didn’t take this one, either.
“I could, somehow. Your laugh, your voice. I could see you well enough.”
One step down, so now she was eye level. At some point, it seemed they’d become the last ones in the greenhouse, though he hadn’t remembered seeing anyone pass them by. He knew they were on short time, that they’d have to go soon. But Nora was looking at him like she was trying to see straight into the past, and he wanted to let her. He didn’t want to think about the words that had stopped him from calling up to her that day. He didn’t want to think aboutrash, reckless, selfish; he didn’t want to think about the future.
He took his hands from his pockets, reached out to link his fingers with hers. When she stepped into him again, he kissed her, like he’d wanted to do all along. Not since this date started.
Since before, since before.
And when the final announcement sounded, when they pulled apart and smiled at each other in sheepish delight, he didn’t notice the way he held on to her as she turned away, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright.
He didn’t notice that he kept holding on, right up until the second her fingers trailed away.
Chapter 15
It was possible she’d taken it too far.
In the backyard, Nora stood beside Mrs. Salas, staring down at the six boxes she’d set out this morning, all but one full up, sorted by type: kitchenware, linens, clothing, books, electronics, and decor. In thirty minutes, the time limit she and Mrs. Salas had given to their neighbors would be up, and in an hour a van from a neighborhood mutual aid organization would come by to pick up their contributions for an upcoming charity sale that Nora had read about only a week ago.
“The thing about that lamp is,” she said, and Mrs. Salas made a sympathetic noise—a tiny hum that was neither curiosity nor assent. Knowing that Mrs. Salas had heard a lot of Nora’s ruminating back and forth today, she tried to quiet herself, but soon enough her unfinished thought swirled inside her like smoke, hot and uncomfortable, until she had to open her mouth again to let it out. “It’s from Italy.”
Mrs. Salas did the hum again, and Nora sighed.
This was difficult, that’s all there was to it, and she had no one to blame but herself.
And maybe also Will.
Nora couldn’t pinpoint what had changed since that night in the conservatory, but something absolutely had. Between them, certainly, things had changed—a layer of caution removed from their interactions, a layer of freedom added in. They no longer only saw each other inside the walls of her apartment, no longer made such a production of the secrecy when they did. If Nora’s neighbors had noticed Will come back to her place that night after their first real date, when the sun hadn’t even gone down fully, no one had said a word. And if they’d noticed that Nora had been going out more than she had in—well, ever—no one said much about that, either.
That she wasn’t stressed over this—that she wasn’t lying awake, worrying over being disloyal—was the change she saw in herself. It wasn’t quite like the smoke that had forced her to declare the provenance of a (actually quite ugly!) lamp she’d inherited from Nonna, but it wasn’t all that different. This feeling, too, wanted out, wanted expression. But it found its way to the surface in other ways: ignoring Austin’s calls when they came in after eight. Telling Dee about LA. Painting that tiny bathroom all on her own, before Will even had a chance to come over and join her. Packing up her laptop and doing a half day of work at a coffee shop five blocks away.
Reading about a neighborhood charity sale and deciding to let go of a few things.
I guess I always had two lives, she’d told Will that night, and ever since she’d said it, she hadn’t quite been able to let go of it. When she’d come back to Chicago, she thought she was settling in to one of them, finally and for good. But everything that had happened since she met Will all those weeks ago now suggested something different to her—that she hadn’t so much settled into her own life as she had settled into someone else’s. That had been comfortable, and comforting, because it’s what all her summers here had always been: patterning out the days like Nonna did, loving all the things Nonna did.
Of course she’d started to know all this before the night at the conservatory; maybe she’d even started to know it sooner, during those lonely golden hours way back in the winter when she’d started to work through her grief. Something about what Will had told her, though—that he’dseenher, all those years ago, that there was some alternate version of her summer stories here that might have included Will Sterling—it had crystallized everything.
Two lives wasn’t what she wanted anymore.
She wanted one. With more patterns she would make for herself. With more loves she would choose for herself.
But it was easier to want things than it was todothem, sometimes.
“Maybe I should keep it,” Nora said. “If it seems like no one would buy it.”
“Someone’ll buy it,” said Benny, stepping up to drop a brightly colored throw pillow into the decor bin. “Probably the same kind of person who’d buy this pillow.”
“Ibought you that pillow!” gasped Mrs. Salas. “For Secret Santa, two years ago!”
