them, and in those silent seconds, it seemed like they were agreeing to something. For as long as she was like this, they weren’t going to be feuding neighbors. Nora wasn’t going to cheerfully smile, and Will wasn’t going to charm. She was going to admit that she felt bad, and Will was going to call her baby when she did.
It wasn’t going to be normal at all.
She slumped against the back of the couch. “I’m probably gonna fall asleep,” she murmured, already sounding halfway there.
“Good.” He grabbed at a faded, crocheted throw that hung over one end of the couch, waited for her to put her feet up before he draped it over her legs.
“Only for a little bit. I only sleep for a little bit at a time, since this started.”
“Sure,” Will said, but he hoped she would sleep good and long; he could tell she needed it. And while she did he’d go pick up a scrip for her, and then he’d sanitize every cat-dandered surface in this building, even if it took him all night. He’d barely slept the last four; what was one more?
“I’ll go pick you up some meds, okay?”
Her swollen eyes flickered open, and her brow furrowed. “You’ll come back?”
He nodded. “Yeah, of course. I’ll leave it on the—”
“And then you’ll stay?” she said.
He stared down at her. Everything he saw when he looked at Nora, it was still a problem: his weaknesses, his past, his fear for how he figured he was destined to turn out, if he let himself get too close to her.
But he knew she didn’t mean stay forever. He knew she meant for now, for while she felt like this, for the term of that silent deal they’d made only a moment ago. And he figured that was safe enough. He figured he was strong enough for that.
One night, and then he’d go back to normal.
“Yeah,” he said, bending down and tucking the blanket around her, barely stopping himself from setting his lips against her brow. Not that, he warned himself, before straightening again. “I’ll stay.”
Chapter 9
The first time Nora woke up, he was in her kitchen.
He’d been to the pharmacy, a small white paper bag tipped on its side on the counter, but he’d also stopped by the grocery, picking up a small crate of clementines and a loaf of bread and three different kinds of ready-made soup, one of which she found him heating on the stovetop. When she shuffled into the kitchen, she could tell by the notch between his eyebrows and the tense set of his jaw that she looked about as good as she felt (which was to say: hideous!), and so when he set the bottle of Tylenol in front of her and uncapped her new prescription decongestant, she took it with the full glass of water he said she had to drink and she didn’t complain at all. She ate a bowl of soup, and they talked about her work and his, anything that wouldn’t get them talking about the building. When she’d finished eating, Will had pointed her back to the couch and told her to put something entertaining on TV for them to watch, but she’d fallen asleep again before he’d finished clearing plates.
The second time, he was out in the hallway.
It was mostly dark in the living room, a soft glow from the light left on above the oven, and when Nora first sat up, sweaty from her obviously broken fever, she thought at first—with no small sense of wholly unjustified disappointment—that he’d gone. But when she’d rubbed at her eyes and brought more of her senses back online, she’d heard the familiar sound of Jonah’s absurdly loud TV and noticed that the soft glow wasn’t only from the oven light; it was also coming through the narrow crack of Nora’s partially open front door. She’d hauled herself up from the couch, leaving behind the now too-warm blanket, and tiptoed toward it, peeking out to see Will’s broad back as he leaned against Jonah’s open doorway, the light from that huge TV flashing as Jonah shouted at him about the guy on first base. She could’ve stood and watched like that for a long time—Will watching baseball with one of Nora’s favorite people in the world, a member of this family she’d been trying so hard to get him to recognize—but when she reached up to scratch her head she made contact with the sweaty, sticking-up side of