Nothing Less

Chapter Four

BY THE TIME I LEAVE my room, Tessa has already left to go back to work, and I find Nora sitting alone on the couch, her feet propped up in front of her on a stack of my couch pillows. Her back is leaning against the arm of the leather couch, and she’s holding the remote in her hand.

“Tessa left already?” I pretend that I didn’t wait to hear the front door close before I came out of my bedroom.

Nora nods. She presses the arrow on the remote, scrolling through the guide. She doesn’t look at me. I notice that she’s changed her pants, too. Did she bring extra clothes with her, knowing that I was going to make a mess of the ones she was wearing? I hope so.

The thought makes my heart race, and I try not to think too much about what Tessa almost caught us doing.

“Do you think she knows?” I had planned on being a tad subtler when I brought up the subject, but I guess my big mouth has other plans.

Nora’s thumb keeps pressing on the remote, but she glances at where I stand in the doorway of the living room. “I hope not.” She pauses and draws a breath. “Look, Landon—” Nora’s voice is full of the beginning of a goodbye, and I’ve barely heard her say hello.

“Wait.” I cut her off before she can talk herself out of giving me a chance. “I know what you’re going to say. Your tone and the fact that you won’t look at me kind of gives me a pretty big hint.”

Nora’s eyes meet mine, and I walk farther into the living room and sit on the chair next to the couch. She lifts herself up and crosses her legs beneath her body. Her hands grab for a pillow, the pillow that Ken’s mother gave me last fall, and place it on her lap. “Landon,” she says softly, and I love the way my name blends with her breath. “I’m not—”

“Don’t.” I’m rude to cut her off again, but I know what she’s going to say, and I want to change how this is going to go. “This is where you warn me off and tell me that you aren’t good for me and all that. But not today. Today we talk about why you think that and figure out where to go from there.”

I feel high when I finish. I feel good that my thoughts became words, and I think I just grew a chest hair or two.

Nora’s eyes lock onto me with a calm intensity. “There’s nowhere to go from here. I told you that we couldn’t date . . . We could never be together in a real way. I’m not looking to get into another relationship.”

I’m surprised by her boldness. Usually when these types of awkward conversations happen in books or movies, the one doing the rejecting looks away or picks at their fingernails or something.

Not Nora. Bold Nora is staring straight at me, and it’s making me a little nervous. My high is gone, my chest hairs have shriveled up and disappeared, and my mouth is dry.

Nora said another relationship. What was her last relationship? I’m 99.9 percent sure she won’t elaborate on this for me, but I ask anyway. “When was your last relationship?”

Her eyes narrow but she doesn’t look away. “It’s complicated.”

“Everything is.”

She smiles at that.

“Tell me about it. I want to know about you. Let me,” I encourage her.

“I don’t want you to know about me.”

I can feel the conviction in her words. She means them, and that kind of stings. I can’t help but frown. “Why not?”

The pillow is covering her chest now, and her fingers are gripping its top corners intensely. I