Page 6 of Ten Years and Then…
And now he had to do something about it.
Nora, an hour later
Nora hadn’t been paying attention to the time at lunch with Kim, and she’d run all the way from the Green Lantern Café back to campus and Addison Hall to try to make it to her two-thirty class on time. Well, jogged. Mostly jogged.
Half jogged, half walked—either way, it hadn’t mattered, because when she got to Addison Hall and dragged herself up the stairs to the third floor, there was a sign taped to the door of Room 307. Professor Madison was sick, and class was cancelled today.
That left her afternoon free. Really free, since Kim hadn’t found anything in her Gatsby paper that she needed to edit, and she had no other assignments that were due this week, or even next week.
She didn’t know what to do with herself. There wasn’t much to do on a Thursday afternoon, really. She wasn’t hungry. She didn’t feel like going shopping anywhere—not that she had a lot of extra money to spend anyway. And she definitely didn’t want to go back to her room.
Indecision, and a perfect October afternoon, made the choice for her. She sat herself down on the steps in front of Addison Hall, enjoying the cool-but-not-cold breeze and doodling in a notebook.
She was engrossed, filling several pages, not paying the slightest attention to her fellow students walking past her, chattering about this or that. Not until she heard a gasp, followed by her name.
“Nora?”
She looked up from the notebook to see a dark-haired boy wearing a Yankees T-shirt standing at the bottom of the steps. He had the prettiest blue-gray eyes, and a voice that she recognized. His voice
“Hi,” she said, her breath catching. “Daniel?”
His jaw dropped. Nora didn’t think that actually happened in real life.
“You know who I am?” He was almost smiling, almost laughing. And it only hit her now that he somehow knew who she was, too.
“I think we both know who each other is. I’m not sure how, but there it is.” It was obvious, wasn’t it? Just like she’d been overhearing him in different places the past few weeks, he’d been overhearing her. “God, we’re both so dense, huh? You’ve been in all the same rooms I have, of course you know me. If I could hear you, obviously you could hear me, too.”
He looked—she couldn’t describe it. She saw embarrassment, frustration, relief and joy all together on his face, as though there was an argument going on inside his head about how he should be reacting right now.
“Would you believe that never occurred to me?”
Yes, she would. “Well, I didn’t think of it until right now, either, and we’ve been just missing each other for more than a month, so, yeah.”
Daniel, a moment later
When he saw her sitting on the steps—all by herself, there couldn’t possibly be a better time to introduce himself and actually talk to her—he hadn’t managed anything beyond blurting out her name.
Maybe the positive thinking really did work. Maybe it had even convinced the dating gods to look kindly on him. How else to explain that she knew his name, knew who he was, and that she seemed genuinely glad to see him in person?
“It is kind of wild,” he said. And then he went on, not sure where the words were coming from. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but a couple of weeks ago, I was one shelf over at Turn the Page and I heard you and your friend, and you were doing all the voices from that terrible book.” He shouldn’t have said that. It made him sound like a weirdo. Or maybe even a stalker.
But all she focused on was one word. “It was not terrible!”
“I heard you,” Daniel said. “You yourself said it was trash. But I’d listen to you read it out loud anyway. You’re funny—no. You’re the funniest girl I’ve ever met.” He shouldn’t have said that, either. But, again, she wasn’t reacting as though he’d just made an idiot of himself.
“You’re just saying that. That’s a cheesy pick-up line, you don’t mean that.” Except her tone didn’t match her words. Like she believed him, but she was having to convince herself of it. Bianca did that sometimes. On the very rare occasions she let her guard down, his sister Lisa did, too.
“It’s true. And not just because you do great character voices. I was in the next room when you were talking with that brown haired girl, I guess she’s in one of your classes, when you were playing around on CompuServe. You were hilarious. And sometimes when you were by yourself—you know you talk to yourself, right?”
She was staring at him now, hard. He still couldn’t say for sure whether her eyes were greenish-blue or blueish-green. Either way, she was looking for something from him, and then—whatever it was, she found it.
“I guess I do, don’t I? I—like I said, I didn’t think about you hearing me. I was concentrating on you. The way you’re always helping people out in the computer lab, and how you always know what you’re doing. Or how you rendered Professor Steinberg speechless when you showed PageMaker to him. Everybody was talking about it. And on top of that, you’re pretty funny too.”
Now he was staring into her eyes, looking for proof that she meant what she was saying. He couldn’t define what he saw, or explain it, but he believed her. She really did mean it, all of it.
“Wow. That’s … I … okay, I’m just going to say it, before I lose my nerve.” Yet another thing he shouldn’t have said. But maybe she was the one girl in a thousand, or a million, who could hear what he meant instead of the awkward words that came out. She hadn’t laughed at him, or gotten up and run away yet. “Would you—would you want to go out? Dinner, maybe? Tomorrow night?”
She smiled. It was the sweetest, most open and welcoming smile he’d ever seen. “Yeah. I’d love that.”
