Colby
I should have left Norah out there in her car. She was mostly dry, from what I could tell. Why did I care that she was sitting out there? I shouldn’t have. Her problems have never bothered me before. But the thunder and lightning has been horrible all afternoon, and what if something had happened to her? Then, I would have had that on my conscience. I’m becoming soft if I’m spending this much time worrying about someone I can’t stand.
Right as I’m about to start the washing machine with both of our wet clothes inside, a loud clash of thunder rumbles outside, and the electricity goes out. I sigh, standing in my pitch-black laundry room. I wander back out to the living room and see her sitting on my couch in almost complete darkness.
“Well, I don’t think I’ll be washing your clothes just yet,” I say.
“You know what, I’m just gonna go home.” She jumps up and looks out the window. It’s still a torrential downpour out there, and I can tell she’s not comfortable with either of her options: driving home or staying here with me.
“Why don’t you eat dinner with me and see what the weather’s like afterward?”
She bites her bottom lip and stares out the window, contemplating her options. She huffs out a breath and rubs her forehead. “Fine,” she grumbles. “What are we going to eat? We can’t cook with no electricity.”
“It’s an old house. My stove is gas,” I reply.
“Okay, but is it going to be one of your tasteless, healthy meals Hannah was telling me about? I don’t do bland, boring stuff,” Norah says. I roll my eyes as I light a few candles in the kitchen. I pull Italian sausage and bell peppers from the fridge.
“What are your thoughts on stuffed peppers?” I ask, scrolling through my phone to find the recipe so I can show her. She looks at the ingredients list and squints her eyes at me.
“There’s cheese, so it’ll probably be good. But I’m watching you make this, so I’ll know if you try to poison me,” she jokes. At least, I think it was a joke. I’m assuming she knows I’d never poison anyone—not even someone as frustrating as her.
“You’re going to help me make it,” I say as I hand her a cutting board and a knife. She takes them in her hands and stares up at me with big doe eyes. Oh, good grief. Please tell me I’m not about to teach this woman how to cook.
“The only thing I know how to make is frozen pizza,” she squeaks. “How do you think I came by these hips and thighs?” she asks, and my eyes wander to the mentioned thighs of their own volition. Avert your eyes, man. Is she attractive? Dreadfully so. But everything about her drives me crazy, and that’s why I can never allow myself any lingering glances. I refuse to be attracted to Norah Sullivan.
I clear my throat and motion for her to come to the counter. I take a pepper and show her how to cut the tops off and then how to chop up the good parts of the top to add to the stuffing mixture. Next, I quickly demonstrate how to dice an onion. I leave her to finish chopping the vegetables while I throw some rice in my rice cooker and start cooking the sausage.
“Oh my gosh, you do this all the time? This is truly horrible. Colbster, my eyes are on fire. Why does anyone cook if this is what it’s like?” She walks away from the counter, fanning her eyes with her hands. I find myself smiling at a memory of my mom doing the same exact thing. I straighten my face before she can see it. I can’t have her thinking that I’m enjoying her company or something.
“Do we really need onions in there?” she asks.
“If you’d stop talking for five seconds and actually dice that onion, it would be over a lot sooner,” I say through gritted teeth.
“There’s no need to be mean. And you’re so much faster. It’s going to take all night if I do this whole thing, and then my eyes will disintegrate into a puddle of tears,” she says. She gives me a pleading smile with red-rimmed eyes and tears streaming down her face. I groan and nudge her out of the way with my shoulder. I carefully take the knife out of her hand and begin to dice the onion. “Oh, thank you so much. Wait, is that the first time I’ve ever said thank you to you? I mean, why are you being so nice to me tonight? I would’ve thought you would love to see me sitting terrified in my car in the middle of a storm. Were you trying to lure me in here with malicious intent? Are you going to pull a Sweeny Todd and bake me into your stuffed peppers?”
“Woman, if you don’t stop, I’m going to throw you out the front door. Now, finish the sausage, please, or we’ll never get to eat.”
“Sorry, I just feel weird, and I don’t know how to act. We’ve never had a civilized conversation before,” she says, walking to the stove where the meat is sizzling in the skillet. I roll my shoulders back, trying to relax. If she feels weird, I feel ten thousand times weirder. She’s wearing my clothes and invading my space. And I invited her to do all these things of my own free will. My first instinct is usually to go on the offensive with her and say or do something mean before she can, but I’ve completely gone off course today. At this point, I feel like reverting back to that tactic would just make everything more tense than it already is. I don’t know how to act right now either.
She stirs the meat around in the pan, and I go back to dicing the onion. Thankfully, she’s quiet now, other than discussing what she needs to do next. After a few more minutes, we’re stuffing the peppers, and they’re ready to go into the oven.
We move into the living room and sit on my couch, bundled under blankets. The temperature is dropping quickly in the house without the heater running. It’s almost completely dark in the room, so she doesn’t seem to notice as I watch her bite her lips in between her teeth and fidget with her hands. The awkward silence between us grows and grows until I can’t take it anymore. I ask the first question that pops into my head.
“So, why were you out in such bad weather today?”
She looks up at me and swallows deeply before saying, “I had a doctor’s appointment that I didn’t want to have to reschedule.” She sits back on the couch and curls her legs up beneath her. I watch, waiting to see if she’ll elaborate further, but she seems content to leave it at that. This is the quietest I’ve ever seen her. Normally, she says everything that pops into her head, but I guess she only does that with people she likes.
“Everything okay?” I ask. I know it’s none of my business, but I’m curious, nonetheless. Norah’s sudden reappearance in Waverly and her family’s secrecy surrounding it has been troubling. Ridiculous rumors have been circulating for weeks, and they’re only getting wilder and wilder as time goes on. Just yesterday, I heard a group of elderly women outside the grocery store, saying that they heard she got involved in an affair with a politician and had to flee because the man’s family hired an assassin to take her out. Obviously, I don’t believe any of that. But I do wonder if this doctor’s appointment has something to do with her move back home. It must have been important if she couldn’t reschedule it.
“Oh, um, yeah. Everything’s fine. Just a check-up,” she says, but her voice is shaky. She shrugs her shoulders, looking like she might say more. The timer goes off in the kitchen, so I get up to take the bell peppers out of the oven. I place one pepper on each of our plates and carry them into the living room. I hand her a plate and sit down beside her. She holds it up close to her face and inspects it as closely as she can in the dark.
“This looks really good,” she says as she holds it up to her nose this time and smells it. Does she suspect that I actually poisoned it? “Is this healthy?”
“Ehh, not really,” I answer. “I was supposed to have some friends over tonight, but they backed out because of the weather. This was supposed to be for them.” She nods her head as she listens.
I cut my pepper in half to make it easier to eat. Norah watches me and copies each of my movements. I scoop up some of the stuffing and take a huge bite, and she does the same. “Have you never eaten a stuffed pepper before?”
“No, my mom was more of a frozen foods type mom. I mean, she’s a great mom, but she doesn’t do a lot of cooking. She relies heavily on Stouffer’s lasagna and Marie Callender’s chicken pot pie.” Ah, so that’s why she doesn’t know how to cook. Her inability to simply dice an onion is making a lot more sense now. My mom loves cooking, and when I was a kid, she used to let me help her in the kitchen a lot. I don’t mind cooking now, but I don’t love it like she does. Still, it’s a good skill to have when you live alone.