one of her neighbors coming to call; in fact, more than once, Mrs. Salas hadn’t bothered knocking at all, though fortunately, Nora had always been dressed and decent on those occasions. And anyway, knocking wasn’t often the way of it around here, not when everyone knew each other’s routines so well, when it was easy enough to know when your neighbor checked the mail, or went for a weekly grocery shop. So a sharp knock? That was even more—
It sounded again before she’d made it halfway down the hall, and she called out an agitated “I’m coming!” in response.
A brief look through her peephole confirmed her quickly-forming suspicion, and she took a deep breath before finally pulling open her door to the man she did not need to be seeing, who was standing there with his loosely-fisted hand already raised, ready to knock again. His hair was a typically delightful mess and his mouth was set in a firm line, and no, she did not need to see him again, but damn if it didn’t make her heart beat a little faster when she did. She crossed her arms over her chest and prepared to pretend like she was entirely unaffected.
“Can I hel—”
“Did you do something to my unit?”
Once again, Nora’s brain went directly to the most adolescent possible thing for a good two and a half seconds before she was able to blink herself back to sanity. To decency!
“Pardon me?” she said, because sounding stuffy seemed like good insurance against further thoughts regarding Will’s unit. Do not look down, Nora thought, with the determination of a person standing on a very narrow ledge of a very tall building.
“Did you put something in there? Something that would smell?”
Her eyes widened, and his narrowed.
“You did,” he said flatly.
“No!” she said, but it was a too-quick no. A guilty no. The no of a person who definitely had discussed the dead-fish idea at least once. But she hadn’t actually done it.
“I promise I didn’t,” she added, which was also probably a hit man’s first line of defense. It sounded unconvincing even to her own ears.
“Your face got all red. As soon as I said it.”
She resisted the urge to uncross her arms, to press her palms to her hot cheeks. “It’s probably a stress rash. From your aggressive knocking.”
“Just tell me where you put it, and quick. I don’t get the sense that it’s the kind of smell that stays local, if you know what I mean.”
Yikes, that didn’t sound great. She hoped to God it wasn’t something with the building’s septic system. She had a sudden and unpleasant memory of the details Nonna had provided—during one of their regular Sunday night phone calls—about a street-wide issue involving sewers about five years ago.
“I didn’t put it anywhere, because I didn’t do it.” But already she was shoving her feet into the sneakers she had by the door, because if there was a smell seeping its way through this building, it was her responsibility, even if she hadn’t made it happen. “What’s it smell like?”
“Like hell’s toilet bowl.”
Yikes yikes. That did sound septic in nature. She straightened, grabbing for her phone and shoving it in her back pocket. There was a whole corner in her contact list related to building maintenance, and also a whole corner in her brain that was well aware of how much it cost to get repair people to come on short notice.
“A poetry reading is one thing,” he said.
“Will,” she snapped, pushing past him and closing the door behind her. “I did not put anything in your apartment. I wouldn’t do that.” She could feel the heat of his body beside her, and the reaction of her own—a gut-deep desire to lean into him—was so sharp, so acute, that she practically flung herself down the hall to get away from it.
“Would anyone else?”
She stopped at the staircase railing, turned back to face him. It was one thing to suspect her of something like this, but she’d bet her life no one else in this building had ever done a dead-fish teleconference. She was ready to scold him with a passionate defense of her neighbors’ upright standards of conduct, but when she saw his face, she realized that his mask of tight, impatient frustration had temporarily slipped. He looked almost . . . chastened.
“No,” she said, more gently than she’d originally intended. She was helpless against that look. “They wouldn’t.”
He cleared his throat, dropped his eyes briefly, then nodded