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Nick must have caught sight of her in his peripheral vision, because he suddenly did a double take and put down his knife. He tried to recover, but she saw his eyes widen.
“That bad, huh?” she said.
“Huh? Oh no,” he said. “You look great.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s the robe,” he said sheepishly.
“Then give me my clothes, and I’ll give this back.”
“They’re in the dryer.” It sounded like an apology. “They were … I figured you’d want them clean, and I was going to leave them outside the door, but I overslept.”
Hayley spotted her purse on the nearby table and walked over to find her phone. She had no new messages, no voicemails, no missed calls.
If Kevin didn’t care that she was gone, she didn’t care about calling him back.
“You want some coffee?” Nick asked her. “Or I can make some tea.”
“Water’s fine.” She sat at the table, angling her chair to face him.
He reached into a cabinet and brought out a glass. “How about breakfast? Bacon and eggs.”
She really wanted to see how he was going to make that happen, but the thought of bacon and eggs was nauseating at the moment. “Do you have chocolate?”
He blinked. “Chocolate?”
“Chocolate,” she said, irritated. “Candy bars. M&Ms. Chocolate.”
“No.”
“How can you not have chocolate?”
“It’s not good for you.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Chocolate would honestly make you feel better right now?”
“Chocolate always makes me feel better.”
They stared at each other, Nick leaning forward on the counter, Hayley looking stonily back at him.
“What would be your second choice?” he said evenly.
Hayley took her time. “Toast would be okay.”
He nodded once. “You want grape jelly on that?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Hayley watched as Nick silently filled her order. There was only a space of a few feet between the stove behind him and the sink in front of him, wide enough for the walker but narrow enough for his arms to easily span the distance between the two counters he was using. Sometimes he’d hold on to the walker, but more often he used the surfaces around him for support. One hand gripped the counter as he opened the fridge with the other hand and grabbed the jelly; he used the same technique as he opened a drawer for a knife or filled her glass of water. Sometimes he could use both hands, like when he was opening a bag of bread, so long as he could lean slightly on the walker for balance.
Hayley was fascinated by the efficiency of it; Nick looked like an ordinary guy making breakfast until she made a point of watching for the small allowances he made to keep his balance, or the way he transferred one item at a time from counter to counter because he couldn’t pick both up at once. She wouldn’t call him graceful, but his movements had a certain fluidity to them, the result of an obviously practiced routine. It remindedher a little of choreography, and as she glanced over at a stereo on a shelf filled with rows and rows of CDs, she wondered if he ever danced his way through making those eggs.
After putting bread in the toaster, Nick placed Hayley’s glass of water on a stainless steel cart next to the counter, the sort of thing she’d seen in the Icarus kitchen. She started to stand up, but he wheeled the cart over to her, one hand on the cart and one hand on the walker.
“Figured you might want the water first,” he said.
