Here I’d been so nervous to host a man currently getting tag-teamed by four specks of fur in argyle. I smile to myself and enjoy the show.
Until my buzzer rings.
Then I scramble to the phone in the hallway, pick it up, and jam my finger on the pound sign to unlock the downstairs door. After that comes the hardest part: the wait for him to walk up five flights of stairs.
I use the time to take a final look around my apartment. At the last moment, my gaze falls on the framed photograph of Ryan and me at the Nationals game on the night we got engaged. We’re grinning, cheek to cheek, and he’s holding up my hand to show the ring, which was too small to get over my knuckle so it sits jammed midway down my finger. I hate how I look in the picture: deer-in-the-headlights with mascara all the way down to my chin from crying. But Ryan had the photo enlarged, matted, and framed, so it hangs on the wall near the window. The look on my face is so intimate that suddenly I know I can’t bear for Noah Ross to see it. I snatch it off the wall just as my doorbell rings.
“Be right there!” I shout, frantically looking for a place to stash the frame. The lower shelf of my coffee table is an understated mausoleum of old magazines. I wedge the frame between some old Cosmos and New Yorkers then steel myself to let Noah in.
You can do this. BD believes in you.
“Hello!” I say, forcing brightness into my voice as I swing open my door.
And there he is. His hair is damp from a shower, and he’s dressed up in a linen collared shirt, dark blue slacks, and stylish brown leather brogues. His pea coat is draped over his arm—no one can do a five-floor walk-up wearing that much wool.
I just saw him downstairs through my window, but it’s startling to face him at close range. I still have trouble believing that he is Noa Callaway. I’m still, to be honest, pretty mad about it. He looks flushed, a little off, and I remind myself he’s just climbed seventy-eight stairs and been accosted by shih tzus, so I give him a moment’s grace.
“What can I get you to drink?” I say.
He steps through my doorway as if into an active volcano. “This is . . . your apartment?”
“Home sweet home,” I say.
We both survey the scene of my one-bedroom pre-war walk-up. Lovingly furnished with estate-sale finds and BD’s hand-me-downs and lived in for six years by yours truly.
“I didn’t realize the address Terry gave me was your home,” Noah says, determined to harp on this.
“Where did you assume I had invited you?”
“I don’t make assumptions,” he says.
“How benevolent,” I say and let him stew in whatever he’s trying to insinuate about my apartment. I refuse to apologize for the state of my living quarters, even as I can’t help wishing I’d made room for War and Peace on the bookshelf.
I become aware of an acute discomfort in Noah. He’s stuck in the doorway and doesn’t seem to know what to do.
“There’s a hook behind you for your coat,” I say, and then we fumble over who will hang it up.
“Espresso?” I say. I’m eager to leave the hallway and make it to my slightly more spacious kitchen. “I’m fresh out of two-percent milk, but I have whole, or almond, or . . . oatmeal, I think.” I glance at him. “That was a joke? Terry mentioned some issue with two-percent, oh never mind . . .”
He’s looking at me blankly.
“I can just make the espresso and—”
“No, thanks,” Noah says. He walks past my kitchen and into the living room. He sinks down on the couch and looks, for a moment, almost normal there. Then he ruins it with a snarky, “It’s not like this is going to take long, is it?”
“You’re in a charming mood,” I call from the kitchen, making myself a stupid espresso because I paid eleven dollars for it at Blue Bottle. Then I hear my words on playback and I wince. “What I mean is, no, I won’t waste your time.”
Espresso in hand, I meet him in the living room. As I reach for my notes, there comes a rustling from underneath the coffee table. Noah jumps about a foot off the couch.
“What was that?” he says.
“I have a tortoise. Alice. It was probably her,” I explain. “Do pets bother you?”
“No. It’s fine. I just ran into some aggressive dogs outside your apartment. Made me jumpy.”
I bite back a laugh. “That must have been scary.”
Noah’s peering under the coffee table as Alice pokes her head out. She appraises him discerningly, in the form of her trademark slow blink. An actual smile lights up his face.
“Hello, Alice,” he says, his voice exuding a friendliness apparently reserved for reptiles.
“It can take her a couple decades to warm up to new people,” I say, but then Alice blows my mind by taking one step and then another in Noah’s direction.
Unfortunately, her advance disrupts the equilibrium of all the crap I’ve shoved under the coffee table. And out slides the framed picture of newly engaged Ryan and me. It clatters to my hardwood floor.
Noah picks up the frame, and I die a slow death watching him study it closely. He glances at me, then at the photo again. At last, he tilts his head to see under the coffee table.
“Is this where you keep all your ex-boyfriends?”
“He is not my ex-boyfriend—”
“Oh, right.” He points at my hand in the photograph. “The ring. Ex-fiancé?”
“Don’t worry about him!” I say and snatch the picture from his hands.
“Sorry,” Noah says. “Occupational hazard.”
I’m angry that he’s seen what I look like when I cry, guilty that I’d shoved Ryan under the coffee table for this asshole. I return the photo to its place on the wall.
Noah watches all of this with great interest, eyebrows annoyingly raised, and by the time I get back to my chair across the couch from him, Alice is sitting in his lap.
“We’ve bonded,” he announces, giving her a pat on the head in the one place she will accept affection.
I rub my temples, trying to focus. “Do you know why I asked you here today?”
“Because I didn’t turn in my homework on Saturday?” he says.
I narrow my eyes at him. “Because I know you don’t have a book.”
“I told you—”
“Yeah, yeah.” I wave him off. “Irons in the fire. Look, what I need is for you to have an actual idea that I can sell to Sue.”
He opens his mouth to argue. I’m not having it.