him when he left. But only seconds after she’d opened the door to him, he’d turned his head toward the kitchen, his eyes going adorably wide.
“Is that your sauce?” he’d said, abandoning the box with the new light fixture right there on the floor of the entryway.
“At this time of night?” Nora teased now, clucking her tongue. “You’ll get indigestion.” That sounded exactly like something Nonna would say, and Nora felt her heart squeeze happily at the memory, the echo. The way she kept Nonna alive.
Will dropped his head back, making a funny, frustrated hmph noise, and Nora admired the line of his throat, the ridge of his Adam’s apple. The desire she felt stir within her was both familiar and different—no less intense, but somehow less insistent. Maybe it was the change to their routine—their project not yet started, their interlude postponed. Maybe it was the glass of wine she’d had, always likely to make her a little sleepy.
Or maybe it was the mood that had descended upon her when she’d closed her laptop screen after signing off with Dee. It wasn’t that the call ended badly—in fact, it’d ended with Nora clamping a hand over her laughing mouth at a particularly vulgar suggestion Dee had made for tonight’s trade-off (not pasta-related!). But almost immediately, Nora had felt the full weight of having had a very bad day at work, followed by having heard the wholly justified, but still upsetting, plans of her friend.
So now, when she looked over at Will, what she wanted most was to crawl closer to him, to put her head on his shoulder or against his thigh, to have him stroke her back or put his hands in her hair. I know, baby, she remembered him saying, that day when she was sick, and it wasn’t that she wanted to be called that, but also . . .
Also, she definitely did.
“I don’t think I ate since breakfast,” Will said, snapping her out of her thoughts. Good job, thinking about infantilizing, problematic pet names when Will had been saving lives and starving himself all day.
She held out her hand. “I’ll get you more.”
He shook his head, which was still tipped back. “You’re right. Probably too late to eat seconds.” His eyelids drooped and he smiled. “Man, these carbs.”
She laughed. “We can skip the light tonight.”
He looked over at her. “I don’t want to,” he said, his voice somehow both serious and playful, and she knew he wasn’t talking about the light. He leaned forward to set his dish on the coffee table, then collapsed back into his former posture, eyes drooping again almost immediately.
“I’ll sit here for five minutes,” he asserted. Practical, responsible Will.
But he didn’t look like he’d be awake in five minutes.
“It was a busy day?” she asked.
He gusted out a sigh. “The usual.” He shifted, locking his fingers together to rest over the flat, firm expanse of his abdomen. Four minutes, she thought. If he fights for it.
“How’s it going downstairs?” he said, his voice low and sleepy. That was a guard-down question, to ask about the rental. For the most part, they avoided it during his visits. But already this visit was like no other one: not exactly light. Not exactly specific.
“Never mind,” he said. “I shouldn’t have asked. It’s not your—”
“It’s okay,” she rushed out, strangely eager to keep the guard-down mood of it all. It was nice, this way. It felt . . . not even like dating, really. It felt like something else, something more. “It’s fine. Everything’s been fine.”
He nodded once, and quieted again. But after a pause, he said, “Emily is okay?”
Nora blinked over at him, surprised, but he kept his eyes low, away from hers. She tried to think of a time when she’d mentioned Emily specifically to Will, but she couldn’t think of a single thing.
“Marian mentioned she had some . . . anxiety. About this,” he said.
“Marian told you that?”
Now he looked over, probably shocked into it by the sharp increase in the volume of her voice. “She might have mentioned,” he said, his lips curving, “That you weren’t the only person in the building who sometimes fought going to see a doctor.”
Nora had a feeling she was gaping.
“I gave Marian a few suggestions. For providers who might be good for Emily. I think they were going to make some calls.”
Now she knew she was gaping. What about her suggestions! She had definitely made a few.