pretty sure her mouth was hanging open. One of the kittens made a squeaky (celebratory!) mew noise.
“If the, uh, mom”—he said mom like it had a question mark at the end—“comes back, it’ll be to my unit. I might as well keep them there.”
Keep them 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 were renting out. You couldn’t watch for a possibly angry adult cat if you didn’t even live in the place you thought it might show up.
What was he doing?
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.
Then again, he had also spent the last fifteen minutes cleaning up a kitten-shredded roll of toilet paper and he hadn’t seen Nora for days, so.
So it didn’t seem like any of his instincts were all that great.
“Now,” he said sternly, setting the kittens inside the stuffed-shirt hamper they still preferred as a resting spot, “you gotta behave if you want treats.”
Three days ago he might’ve chastised himself for engaging in the absolutely ridiculous process of negotiating with these two tiny terrorists, but by this point he’d abandoned all pretense of normalcy within these walls. This wasn’t even that high on the list of weird shit he’d done over the last few days. Other examples included: borrowing two shallow dishes (decorated with the painted faces of characters from The Wizard of Oz) from Mr. and Mrs. Salas to help the kittens eat more comfortably; accepting a gift of three PVC pipe scraps from Jonah, who’d been right on in assuming that the kittens would like to crawl through and climb over them; drinking craft beer with Benny in the backyard while putting out carefully spaced out “food incentives” for the deadbeat mom cat; and following the directions provided in another note—this one, hand-delivered, with a shy smile—from Emily Goodnight, who had advice on which of his three plants should be kept out of reach with cats in the house.
This didn’t even count all the times he’d thought about going up to Nora’s apartment.
Go up there and knock, the static part of his brain would think. Take the kittens. Make her laugh like that again.
Ask her why she’s stayed away.
Ask her why she’s given up.
Of course that had to be the static talking, because what did he care