“Sorry about that, Janine,” he said to the familiar barista. “I was . . .” He trailed off, waving a hand. Wouldn’t do any good to lie to her, and telling her the truth—that he was waiting for a text message from a woman whose bed he’d left only a few hours ago—didn’t make any sort of sense, either.
When his phone chimed with a notification a second later, though, he had to force himself not to reach for it again. He stared up at the menu, but basically only saw a big stretch of gray text bubbles in his brain.
“How about I keep it simple today?” he said, smiling across the counter at Janine. “Large black coffee, no sugar.”
This time he at least remembered to hand over his mug before he stepped to the side to wait for his order. Once he was out of the way, he gave up resisting, pulling out his phone again.
Paint makes total sense, it read, and he smiled, relieved.
That was settled, then—another occasion to see her, and soon, too.
Last week, on the night they’d both bypassed the light fixture project, Will wondered whether they’d simply go forward and drop the pretense—if he wasn’t only coming over for these increasingly simple household projects, why bother continuing to come up with them? Even after they’d finally gotten that light fixture installed, though, Nora had stuck to their script: the next afternoon, she’d sent him a link to a massaging shower head, and obviously he was not going to argue with that as an idea.
It had been a good night, when that shower head got installed. And tested. Twice.
Still, there was a border to his relief—a hard line that felt like it kept him from breathing easy about seeing her again under these conditions they’d both decided were safe. Painting, after all, felt like a final frontier: the last real effort they could make without doing things that involved contractors, or at least more time, equipment, and know-how. And for Nora, he knew, that bathroom was a border of its own—the only place in that apartment, other than her bedroom, that she seemed willing to really change.
Not for the first time since that night, he thought of coming to find her in that cramped, sad excuse for an office she sat in every day. Dark, heavy furniture surrounding her. Curtains that very nearly shared a pattern with that awful wallpaper in the common hallways. Her computer equipment pressed up against her, looming and claustrophobic. That chair that made her look huddled, stressed.
He didn’t like that at all.
He also didn’t like that the home office clearly wasn’t the only problem: that Nora’s voice changed when she talked about this trip she was going to have to take, that lately she chewed on the inside of her lip when she checked email on her phone, that she’d gotten at least one more of those late-night calls from her boss, this one coming when Will had one hand beneath Nora’s shirt and she had one hand inside his unbuttoned pants. Nora had ignored it at first, keeping her determined lips against his, but when it quieted and rang again almost immediately, she’d huffed in apologetic frustration and pulled away.
Frankly, Nora’s boss seemed pretty—
“Dr. Sterling.”
Will cursed inwardly.
“I see you’re rather absorbed in your telephone,” Abraham said, coming to stand beside him.
No one calls it a telephone, Will thought, but he still tucked it away as though he’d been caught out at something. Besides, he figured he knew why Abraham was here. Two hours ago Will had taken over for him in dealing with the very anxious mother of a patient who’d been in the bay, an eleven-year-old who was probably right now up on the general surgery floor, getting his appendix taken out. Will knew his boss well enough to know that he wouldn’t get a thank-you, but he would get a request to debrief the entire situation.
“Have you spoken to Sally recently?” Abraham said instead, and Will’s eyes—pointed straight ahead—widened. There had been no talk of Sally since Abraham’s ill-conceived cat-gifting scheme, and since that was a few weeks ago, Will figured that things had stalled in the reconciliation department.
He cleared his throat, in preparation for Vader voice. “I—uh.” His eyes went pleadingly to Janine and her coworker, who were clearly a bit backed up today. Nothing for it, then. He’d have to answer.
“I believe I spoke to her yesterday,” he said, which was a