Chapter 22
NORA LOOKS OVER THE TOP of the display case at me, the tiny gap in her teeth showing through her sleepy smile. I am here to talk to her about Ryan, but… maybe I should let us both wake up a little first.
“You feeling better?” she asks, leaning casually on the counter.
“What?” I ask, before remembering how we last left things. “Oh, yeah. Much better. Actually my stitches came out this morning in the shower,” I tell her, holding my hair back to show her the now-visible scar.
“Oh, cool. That must feel good.”
“It kinda does. I definitely feel a little more normal… or as normal as I can with amnesia.”
“Well then, come on around, maybe you can set up the display case for me. I’ve got to do some stuff in the back real quick.” She motions me around the counter and shows me all the trays of various meats that need to be put out. As soon as she goes to the back, I get to work.
She didn’t really give me any specific direction, so I decide to have some fun with it and arrange each tray of steaks into the shape of flowers, a burger patty at the center of each.
Pretty. I step back to inspect my handiwork as Nora comes out of the back holding a tray of prewrapped orders labeled with each person’s name.
“Stevie, what the hell am I looking at?” she asks, motioning to my masterpiece.
“What? It looks good!”
“Yeah, but this isn’t a bakery.” She laughs, sliding the case open to make it all boring again, but before she can, a lady walks in through the door.
“Morning,” Nora says cheerily, popping up from behind the display.
“Hi, girls.” She smiles at us both before inspecting the case. “Oh, what a cute display.”
Nora gives me that deadpan look, making me snicker.
“It was all Nora. She’s very creative,” I tell the lady as I wink over my shoulder at Nora, who rolls her eyes at me.
As soon as the lady walks out the door, Nora reaches over and pinches my side, making me giggle and fold in half.
“See? She loved it,” I tell her, stepping out of her reach.
“How about you just let me handle this part and you get on the register.”
“Fine,” I say with a sigh, but she doesn’t touch the way I have the meat displayed.
After a quick tutorial on the cash register, which is a little different from the one at work, we fall into a comfortable rhythm as customers slowly trickle into the shop. Nora takes orders and weighs and packages up the meat while I check people out.
About an hour after open, I pull my phone out of my back pocket, surprised to see eight unread texts from my mom.
Hey did you get there okay?
Stevie?
Are you there?
Text me so I know.
Hello?
Helloooo?
Stevie, answer me.
Stevie???
I roll my eyes as I text back. Relax, Mom. Jeez. Yes, I’m fine.
It’s not like much could’ve happened to me on the ten-minute drive here. I know she’s worried, but I’ve been feeling fine. A little more space might be nice.
I tuck my phone back into my pocket as a customer comes in, asking for some kind of sauce that was on order for them, but when I turn around Nora is nowhere to be found. I start reversing toward the back room.
“I just have to ask about it.” I round the corner. “Hey, Nor—”
Oof.
I run smack into her, and both of us lose our footing. I fall forward while she falls backward, until I have her pinned up against one of the stainless-steel carts. I start to push myself back.
“Shit. S—” I freeze when I see her face so close to mine, her freckled cheeks, her pupils wide in her greenish-brown eyes.
My breath catches in my throat and I swallow hard as that tingly feeling I was searching for so hard all last night shows up without any effort at all.
It runs all the way from my toes to my fingertips, which are gripped onto the cart on either side of her head.
I feel a warmth radiating from my right side, just above my hips, and it takes me a second to realize that it’s her hand.
“Uh, hot sauce…” I blink hard and step backward, putting a couple of feet between us.
“Wh-what?” Nora asks, still glued up against the cart.
“The guy out there, he says he ordered some hot sauce,” I tell her, pointing over my shoulder.
“Right. I’ll just…” She points to the front, walking by me without another word.
When she’s out of sight, I take in a deep breath and let it out, trying to get my head to stop swimming.
What the hell is going on with me? Why does this keep happening?
I lean my elbows on the cold steel table and rub the scar on my head, getting myself together before I have to go back out there. I just need to chill. And remember why I came here.
One more deep breath and then I head back out to run the register.
Neither of us says anything to the other for the next half hour or so, even when no one else is in the shop with us. The silence is deafening. I keep wanting to bring up Ryan, but after that weird moment… I don’t know how to start.
Just as I’m about to lose my mind, a middle-aged couple comes in and asks for thirty pounds of lean ground beef.
“It’ll just be a moment,” Nora tells them. “Stevie, you want to help me?” she asks me, and I follow her into the back room, avoiding making eye contact with that particular metal cart.
“Here.” She tosses a black pair of gloves at me and then disappears into the cooler. She emerges a minute later pushing a stack of hotel pans on a rolling cart.
“Okay, let’s split it into two bags,” she says, seeming completely normal. Okay. All right. Maybe it was just me.
She lifts up the lid to reveal more raw ground beef in one place than I’ve ever seen before, and I resist the urge to dry-heave as she opens up a large plastic bag over a metal scale.
I feel like I got the short end of the stick here.
“Ewww,” I groan, sinking my gloved hands into the vat of meat and dropping a hunk into the bag.
“Shhhh, they can hear you!” Nora says, nudging me. “It’s just meat.”
“Yeah, but there’s so much of it and it’s all squishy,” I complain, twisting my face up as I go in for seconds.
“Just… talk to me about something, then. Don’t think about it.”
Well, I guess that’s my cue.
“So I hung out with Ryan again last night.”
“Oh. What did you guys do?” she asks, keeping her eyes on the scale as I add the last chunk to make about fifteen pounds. She ties it up and holds the other bag out.
“We went to Truck Night,” I say, embarrassed to admit it.
Nora snorts out a laugh. “You went to Truck Night?”
“Yeah, I know… it was a mistake. It was horrible.”
“Uh, yeah. It’s Truck Night. What did you expect?” she asks as I plop another hunk into her bag.
“It’s a long story. Anyway, we ended up leaving early and just went to the Dinor, where he works, and… well, that was definitely better. We at least got to talk, and—”
“That’s good. Come on,” Nora interrupts, tying up the second bag and swinging it into my chest with a light thud.
I check the couple out at the register and Nora kneels down to restock the T-bones in the display case, balancing the tray on her knee.
I watch the couple leave, the door squeaking shut behind them.
“So, do you like him?” she asks without looking up at me. I let out a sigh, because even now after date number two, the truth is…
“I don’t know.”
I lean on the front counter as I replay my car ride with Ryan last night. The lack of any sort of feelings at all when I slid my hand into his, our uncomfortable hug goodbye.
“I feel like I should like him that way. He’s great, but we just aren’t clicking like…” I turn my head to look at her. “Well, like I think we should be. And I don’t understand why.”
“Are you going to keep going out with him?” she asks, moving on to rearrange some burger patties on the second shelf, still not looking at me. I open up the cash drawer, fixing each stack of bills so they all face the same direction.
“I guess so. I was wondering what you think actually. Sometimes it just takes time, right? I mean, my two friends told me I really liked him before the accident, so—”
“What?” She hops up onto her feet, completely forgoing the display and finally looking at me.
“What?” I repeat back, squinting at her in confusion.
“Which friends?” She takes a step toward me, tossing the empty metal tray onto the counter with a clatter.
“My best friends, Savannah and Rory. They’ve known me for like… ever,” I reply, even though my stomach still turns at the thought of them just standing there last night while everything happened.
“I thought… you told me you weren’t hanging out with them as much, during that gap in your memory…”
“Yeah, but… I guess it was still obvious enough for them to pick up on. So I think it’s got to be on me and my stupid brain, that things aren’t clicking with Ryan.
I’ve just never dated anyone before so I don’t really know how to.
My mom says it wasn’t instant for her and my dad either.
Have you ever dealt with anything like this? How’d it feel for you?
“Stevie.” Nora shakes her head. “You can’t blame yourself for not feeling something.
That’s not really something you can force.
You know? It kinda has to come naturally.
” She picks up the tray and walks it to the back counter next to the old metal scale.
“I mean, when you find the right person, you just… you know.” She grabs onto the butcher-block countertop, her knuckles turning white as they clench around it.
“When you find the right person, it feels so right that it’s impossible to even question if it could be wrong. ”
“You sound like you might be speaking from experience,” I say, leaning my back up against the front counter. This feeling of jealousy tugs at me because that, what she just described, is exactly what I want.
“Yeah,” she says, her voice so quiet and small that it makes me feel sad. I stand there, watching her from behind for a long moment. It feels like she wants to say more, but I don’t want to press her if she doesn’t want to tell me about him.
Finally, after letting out a heavy breath, she continues, “I felt like that with my um… ex. We met in line for the porta-potties at a Friday-night football game when our high schools were facing off.”
I try to imagine what type of guy she would date, tall or short, muscular or lanky, what color hair, but I can’t see it.
“We both had to pee really bad and the line was like twenty people long, so…” Nora hesitates, then turns around to face me, but doesn’t quite meet my eyes. “She snuck me into her school through this window that she said never really locked.”
She.
My insides turn cold as I hold my breath in.
I can feel her eyes shift to mine, but now it’s me that can’t look at her. Instead, I focus on her hands, still wrenched around the counter behind her.
Nora’s… gay? I can’t believe she just told me that. I mean… I never thought… Not in Wyatt. I never even considered… Not that I could ever be…
I force myself to look back at her face again as my thoughts keep colliding, but she looks down at her shoes, her eyes shining with tears.
“After we left the bathroom, we didn’t go back to the game.
We just started walking around the empty hallways talking about…
everything. It was so weird, I’d never clicked so easily with someone before and we had just met.
When we ended up in the gym, standing at half-court, it was pitch-black and…
I held her hand. I know that sounds so innocent, but…
it didn’t feel like it.” Another pang of jealousy strikes me as I think of the hand meltdown last night.
“It happened so organically. We didn’t talk about it.
I didn’t ask her. It just happened and it was…
I mean, I just…” She smiles as she stutters around her words, a tear rolling down her cheek as her voice grows shakier.
“We spent so much time after that talking about getting out of this town, but honestly… I could’ve spent the rest of my life stuck in that school with her.
” She shakes her head, her eyes locked on the floor, and it doesn’t even feel like she’s talking to me anymore. “Now I wish we had.”
And with that she stops fighting it and finally cries.
She buries her face in her hands and slides down the back counter all at once.
I reach out, trying to catch her by the arms, but instead, I end up on the floor right in front of her.
On pure instinct, I pull her into me and she wraps both of her arms around me, burying her face in my neck.
“I just want to go back,” she says, digging her nails practically through my T-shirt as she pulls me even closer. Listening to her cry makes my whole body ache. How could anyone do this to her? How did they even end up breaking up if Nora still feels so strongly about her?
“Nora,” I whisper. “Maybe you shouldn’t give up if she means so much to you.” I’m trying to be helpful, but that only seems to make her cry harder.
“I haven’t given up,” she says over a shuddering breath. She pulls back slightly and I release my grip, but her hands slide up my back, over my shoulders, and down my arms until we’re both looking at her hands enclosing mine. “That would be impossible,” she says as we finally lock eyes.
“Stevie?” she says, her mouth trying to form words. I’ve never been looked at the way she’s looking at me, and I’m so confused again.
“Yeah?” I whisper, my heartbeat pulsing in my ears.
“I have to tell—” She jumps, her attention jerking to the door as the bells jingle at the top, pulling both of us out of our trance. “Shit.”
“I got it,” I say quickly, pulling my hands out of Nora’s grip before she shuffles across the small space to clean herself up.
“Can I help you?” I ask, standing up to greet a man and woman who are waiting expectantly.
“Jensen. Here to pick up an order. You must be new,” the man says, approaching the counter.
“Yes, sir, uh… just helping out for the day.” I open the display cooler and reach into the bottom shelf, trying to get him out the door as quickly as possible so Nora can finish telling me whatever she was going to say. I don’t know what it is, but it feels really important.
I quickly bag up his order as he dips his card into the reader, then the two of them are out the door.
“Thanks,” Nora says, popping out of the back, her face dry. She comes in to grab the tray off the back counter like the last ten minutes never happened.
“Nora, was there something you were going to tell me?” I ask, but she shakes her head.
“Sorry about”—she motions to the spot on the floor where we both were—“that.” And then she disappears into the back. It feels… familiar.
Like for the first time she’s treating me the same way everyone else in my life is.
Like she’s hiding something.