Page 57 of All Our Almosts

About thirty minutes after Andy’s abrupt departure, there’s a knock on the apartment door.

My eyes snap up. Reruns of Law & Order have been playing on the TV in front of me, but I’ve been too lost in my thoughts to follow the plot. The knock jolts me out of the labyrinth of my brain and back to reality.

I take a deep breath, then stand and walk to the door. With each step, I thank God that Andy is both courteous and prescient enough to give me a warning knock, instead of just using his key to barge in on me freaking out. As the door inches closer, I remind myself of the plan: play it down, laugh it off, don’t make it weird and get kicked out of this apartment.

Thirty minutes has been plenty of time to imagine what Andy would say when he gets back. Something along the lines of, I don’t know what came over me. I’ve told you before that I just want to be friends.

Or maybe, It was one kiss—we don’t have to make it a big deal.

Or worse, Yes, that kiss was amazing and soul-shattering and I can’t deny it was the best kiss of my life but that doesn’t change anything. You shouldn’t have gotten your hopes up, silly girl.

Okay, maybe he won’t put it that way exactly, but the underlying message likely stands.

Mid-spiral, I’m absolutely shocked when I open the door to find Nolan’s sunny grin beaming back at me.

“Hey, Soph! I brought the goods.” He’s carrying a four-pack of iced coffees in one hand and a paper Market Basket bag in the other. “How’s it going, babes?”

He kisses the top of my head and walks in like he owns the place. Which, to be fair, is normal for NASA—what’s mine is yours and all that. But today it feels like an avalanche.

“You have to tell me everything that happened last night. I can’t believe Elliot was there.” His burly man arms grab a large plastic bowl out of the kitchen cabinet, tear open a family sized bag of chips, and dump them out to share. “I didn’t even see him. Not that I wanted to. I’m mostly just curious if he’s figured out what Lia did to his pants while we were there getting your stuff.”

Nolan has this way of occupying all the space in a room. I usually love it. It’s sweet—like innocent himbo Hercules barreling into the town square full-steam ahead. But today, right now, his cheer is just disorienting. I spent the last half hour burrowing into a sullen self-doubt hole that felt like a perfectly suitable permanent residence. Then in comes my own personal Kronk, pulling levers at random and shaking me awake.

He doesn’t even notice that I haven’t responded until the snacks are all laid out and he’s taken the first sip of his coffee. He holds a second bottle out towards me, asking, “You want one?” but all I can do is weakly shake my head.

“Hey, are you alright?” His thick eyebrows furrow as he urges me into a kitchen chair, then takes the seat next to me. “Where’s Andy anyway?”

My face feels like an open flame and I’m stammering, not quite sure how to say what I’m about to say. “Uh… Nolan, right before you got here… Andy and I… we… kissed.”

I watch the gears turn in his head. His eyes slowly widen, then a grin bursts across his face and he rockets up from the chair. “WOO! YES!” His arms are raised, punching the air like he’s just won some sportsball world championship.

“Well, I’m glad you’re so happy about it,” I yell, “but I’m freaking out!”

That sobers him quickly. He sits back down. “Wait, so you’re not together now?”

“No, we’re not together now! Nolan, it was a kiss. He—I—we just...” I pinch the bridge of my nose and try to unearth something that resembles a sentence. “We kissed. We kissed just now.” I gesture helplessly toward the spot where it happened. “And I don’t know why or what to do about it.”

I explain everything. The fight with Elliot last night, Andy taking care of me, then this morning when he was in such an awful mood until all of a sudden…

By the time my story ends, Nolan is up and pacing. He looks about as stressed out as I feel.

“And he just bolted?” Nolan asks. “No explanation, no… declaration?”

“No. What? Nolan, I swear I told you literally every word we said to each other, and then he was gone.”

He sits back down, elbows on the table as he cradles his head in his hands. I can’t help but roll my eyes at the dramatics. When he finally looks up at me again, he asks, “If he had stayed, what would you have done?”

I feel the blush that scorches across my cheeks. The memory of his lips on mine, his grip on the side of my neck, his hardness pressing against me. I shake my head to clear the fog of it all. “I don’t know,” I lie. If we hadn’t been interrupted, I know exactly what I would’ve done. “I just wish I knew what he was thinking. I’m so nervous he’s going to come back any second and tell me he needs space, and that I have to move out because things are irrevocably weird between us.”

“Well, he’s never going to do that, so you can let that one go right now. Even if he wasn’t in—” Nolan cuts himself off, a look on his face like his brain short circuited.

“Even if he wasn’t in what?”

“Nothing,” he says quickly. “I just… he’s a really good guy, Sophie.”

“Why are you being weird right now? I know that. He’s my best friend, you think I don’t know he’s one of the best people on Earth?”

“Maybe you should give him a chance.” Nolan’s expression is painfully sweet, and it’s so like him to assume things are that simple.