“Yeah. Everyone reads a poem, unless they’ve written their own. I’m guessing you didn’t write your own! Though a few people here will improvise, probably.”
“Everyone. Reads. A Poem.”
She beamed out at the crowd. This was going to take forever.
“Yep.”
“Is this . . . always how many people come?”
She didn’t look over at him to answer. She kept her eyes focused on her neighbors, on the five to ten extra guests each she’d asked them to call.
“In the spring and summer months, yeah. Now in the colder months, it’s in Marian and Emily’s apartment, so it’s smaller, but not that much smaller.” She looked back toward him. “Sometimes it kind of—you know. Spills out into the hallway. I’m sure that won’t be a problem for you.” She paused meaningfully, adding a smile. “Or your tenants.”
For a second, she felt fully like she’d already won the evening—her smile, her snark, her surprise poetry reading. No fish-hiding necessary. He’d been caught completely off guard, and Deepa had been exactly right—she hadn’t needed to tell him what this building was all about in the day-to-day. She’d needed to show him. This wasn’t the kind of place some weekender could find peace in. This wasn’t the kind of place where people came and went.
But then he lifted the scroll of paper he held in one hand and slowly—meaningfully, teasingly, she thought—tapped the edge of it against the palm of his other hand. His dark gaze locked on to her, the corner of his mouth crooking up to match the tilt of his laurel wreath.
She wanted to snatch the poem back. She wanted to cut her own hand off, for all she could feel it vibrating with the memory of touching his.
He took a step back, the curve of his smile widening. Like he knew exactly what she’d been thinking—about his poem, about his palm and hers.
“I’d better get over there and see it for myself, then,” he said.
And when he turned to walk away, to weave his way into the crowd, she had the strangest feeling.
She had the feeling that Nonna’s plans for this night weren’t so simple after all.
Chapter 6
Maybe she thought he wouldn’t be good in a crowd.
But he was great in a crowd.
Under the lights of colorful paper lanterns he kept having to duck beneath, Will stood with his poem tucked into his back pocket and a beer in his hand, nodding along to a story one of Marian Goodnight’s former students (he knew she was a teacher; no one could fake a voice like that) was telling him about the time he’d gotten caught sticking gum underneath his desk in her classroom. Will laughed at all the funny parts, asked all the right follow-up questions, same as he had through what by now felt like dozens of similar stories—not only about Marian, but about everyone at this party. Who they knew, where they worked, what neighborhood they grew up in, why they were at a backyard poetry reading on a Saturday night.
This was how Will worked a crowd—be pleasant, interested, self-effacing. Shake hands, laugh easily, stay curious. In life, this kept him where he was comfortable: a place where he was unlikely to have to answer questions about himself, a place where he could keep people at a safe distance. And in his profession, in the hospitals and clinics where he’d trained and worked, it had always served him well as a bedside style, too. As best as he could, he tried to help people feel better about being in a place that had the word emergency in the title, even when he was talking to them about their chest pains or the bone sticking out of their shin. Tonight, he put his mind in the manner of work. This building was the bay, and to Nora and her neighbors, his plan for Donny’s apartment might as well be a heart attack or a compound fracture.
But out here at this backyard party, with his calm, ready smile and his willingness to listen—nobody, for the moment, seemed to feel all that bad about it.
Not even Nora.
Even from all the way across the yard, it was like he could feel her—like his body knew where hers was at all times. When gum-beneath-the-desk guy stopped talking, shaking Will’s hand a final time and telling him he was going to take a seat, Will only had to raise his eyes to find her, his gaze tracking automatically to