CHAPTER 4 NORA
No starter condo in Toronto can reasonably be called spacious and mine is no exception, but the floor-to-ceiling windows along the two exterior walls of my living/dining room and kitchen that extend into my bedroom certainly give the illusion of square footage, which helps it feel a little less crowded in here.
Plus, we’ll have an amazing view of the fireworks tonight.
Josh sent me a playlist in November and despite my initial resistance to his foray into acid house, it honestly wasn’t horrible, so I’ve integrated some of his songs with my own for the party.
The songs are a mix of millennial classics and actual classics, the result creating a nostalgia for a time I remember and a time I wish I knew.
The mirror balls Finn helped me hang yesterday spin and glitter with the reflection of the warm tea lights and tapered candles set on every available surface.
He also helped me bake the birthday cake in my fridge, an activity I assumed he’d participated in before until he pointed at the bag of icing sugar on my counter and asked if our friends knew we’d be drugging them with cocaine or if that would be a birthday surprise.
Even twenty-four hours later, I still feel a little high from all the icing taste tests Finn asked me to do off the tips of his fingers.
The kitchen island is overflowing with the proof of all the work I did over the last seventy-two hours.
A picked-over charcuterie board—which Bea keeps referring to as a shark coochie board—with four different types of cheese, red pepper jelly, pickled olives, pickled carrots, pickled pickles, and fruit salami cover one side of the island.
The rest of the marble is covered with the dinner: chicken rillettes and crusty baguette slices in one corner, leek and potato crème soup with fried scallops and parsley oil sitting in a pot on a warming plate.
Miniature broccoli potpies cool on a tray next to mustard gratin with potatoes and parsnips.
And in the oven, guinea fowl with prosecco green grape sauce, complete with those little paper cap booties that I’d only ever seen in cartoons.
The cornucopia is set around the antique brass candelabra Finn gave me for a housewarming gift earlier this year, new bayberry candles he presented to me yesterday—“For your birthday,” he said—burning in the holders.
This night is perfect. Not too loud, not too sweaty, just the people I love the most. I don’t have the space for a table big enough to fit us all, so everyone sits on the couches and floor, but they don’t mind.
I’m so grateful to them for letting me do this.
This is not their ideal New Year’s Eve party, but they’re here.
Because they love me. And that means everything.
They’re here. All of them.
Except Finn.
I check my phone again before setting it back down on the counter a bit harder than necessary. I’m mad at myself for checking at all. I will not be the girl who spends the whole night checking her phone for a man.
A man!
Ugh.
I know he couldn’t have forgotten. He was here until ten last night helping me set up. He said work was giving him a half-day for the holiday, but maybe there’s a difference between a lawyer’s half-day and the rest of us.
It shouldn’t matter anyway. Because I am a serious woman. I own my own condo. I’m hosting a dinner party for all my friends. I have a job I’m good at. I make my parents proud.
I don’t need to kiss Finn at midnight, nor do I need to do anything else with him…after midnight. Because we’re friends. Good friends, now.
“What’s up, buttercup?” Bea asks. Meriah is not far behind her, chatting with Judith while they pile their plates with more food.
“Nothing.” I smile to prove my point.
I’ve held off bringing out the guinea fowl long enough; I can’t let it sit in the oven any longer. I pull on the oven mitts Bea got me for my birthday, pink with red chili peppers and a designer label that made me squeak at the thought of the price.
“Can you move those—” I gesture to the trivets with the broccoli and gratin with a sharp jerk of my chin. “—over there?”
Bea makes space and Judith puts down pot holders for the roasting pan and Meriah oohs and aahs at the main course, the skin crispy and golden and still sizzling.
I fuss with the paper cap booties because it’s easier to do that than to keep getting worked up about Finn. No one else is frustrated by his absence. In fact, it’s only always been me who lets his chronic lateness get to me.
I turn back to Bea, my oven-mitted hands clasped under my chin. “Do you think everyone’s having fun?” I ask before she can return to our previous conversation about what exactly is up with this buttercup.
“Yes,” she assures me, not for the first time. “I can’t believe you made all this yourself.”
“Well,” I say quietly. “I had some help.”
Finn didn’t just help with the mirror balls or the cake. We went grocery shopping together the day after he got back from a two-day trip to Berlin on the 28th. He carried the bags up and helped me unpack. He followed instructions for marination and julienning while I cleaned.
I don’t look at her because I’m already blushing, but I can feel her grin.
“You look nice tonight, by the way,” she says, teasing.
I flounce the sheer black skirt of my dress with my chili pepper mitts.
“What, this old thing?” I give her a spin, and she giggles and claps like the hype girl she is.
Other than a few well-placed panels, the dress is totally sheer, a gauzy, whimsical piece that makes me feel beautiful and sexy and immediately reminded me of New Year’s Eve when I saw it in the store.
It’s probably the most expensive piece of clothing I’ve ever worn for a one-night event.
Other than these oven mitts, of course.
“Just nice, Bea?” Finn says from behind me.
I turn to him, my throat suddenly home to my heart. He runs the back of his fingers down the sleeve of my dress, the barest of barriers between skin-to-skin contact.
“You look unreal, Nora,” he says quietly.
Finn’s eyes shine, warmly, for me.
I make fists and press them to my hips. “You’re late.”
He grimaces, runs his hand through his hair. “I know. I’m sorry.”
He looks like he wants to say more, but then I remember: We’re friends. And I am not going to let him bother me.
“There’s more food,” I call, still glaring at him.
Everyone greets Finn as they come up to refill their plates and pour punch or open another bottle of champagne.
“Here you go,” Finn says, dropping a small red box in my mittens.
I stare down at it, at the little golden clasp keeping the box closed.
“It’s not an excuse,” he says slowly. “But I had to go my sister’s after work to pick this up.
I had to order it, and I was worried I’d be out of the country when it arrived and there’s a porch bandit in my building right now so I had it sent to her and the traffic out of and into the city was…
” He sighs. “Anyway. It’s not an excuse. I’m sorry. And happy birthday.”
I try to open the box with my mitts still on. Finn takes pity on me and unhooks the clasp so I can lift the top of the box on its hinge.
“Finn.” Even I can hear it, the shock in my voice.
“Finley,” I amend. Like some stupid nickname might calm the butterflies threatening to break out of my stomach.
I shake the mitts off one by one so I can press my finger to the gold hoop earrings, each set with a sparkling ball encrusted with what looks alarmingly like diamonds. Two miniature mirror balls just for me.
“I know you like to wear hoops.” He brushes his thumb along the shell of my ear, stopping to gently tug on the simple gold hoops I always wear. “And I saw these and they made me think of you. Well, they made me think of New Year’s Eve…” He slowly tapers off. “Which makes me think of you.”
I know our friends are around us, near us. They could be surrounding us right now. Josh could have totally taken over the playlist, Bea could be ordering cars to take us to the loudest, busiest party in the city. The guinea fowl could be on fire right now and I’m not sure I’d know.
“Finn…”
New Year’s makes me think of you, too.
“I…”
I love them. They’re perfect. Thank you.
“…didn’t get you anything for your birthday,” I finish.
He sighs. Gentle sigh. Then, “Do you like them?”
I hold the box tighter in my hands to hide the shake. “I love them,” I say when I’m sure my voice won’t match the tremor inside me. “It’s…they’re too much, Finn.”
He shrugs, tucks a piece of hair behind his ear. “Don’t worry about it.”
“But—”
“I got a bonus,” he says, waving my protests away. “For all the travel. Plus.” He lays his big hands, warm hands, on my shoulders. With just the thin tulle material, he could be touching me. “I get to spend my money”—he leans in close, his words low just for me—“however I want, Eleanor.”
I smile, high on the smell of him, his cologne, and something new, too. Maybe shampoo. Maybe some new product he picked up in Germany. A hoard of those travel toiletries some hotels still give, stashed like treasures in his shower.
I’ve been to his apartment before, but I can’t remember what his shower looks like.
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it. I’ve always just used the powder room, with mismatching guest towels and an embroidery hoop hanging above the toilet that says Please don’t do coke in the bathroom in a pleasing cursive script with a pretty floral design.
Do the towels match in his private bathroom? What color are the walls? Does it smell most like him after he’s showered? Does he have a tub for baths? Does he use it?
“Nora?”
“What?”
Finn gestures at the box. “Would you want to try them on?”
Finn takes my simple hoops for me as I remove them and watches me as I put the new ones in. He almost seems fascinated by the process. When I tilt my head to the side to get a better angle, he reaches out and brushes my hair off my neck, away from my ear.