“What?”
She pinched her nose. She tipped her head back. Finally, she relaxed. “I thought I was going to sneeze.”
“Don’t sneeze,” he barely breathed. A closed door to their left led to the small office, where a dingy metal desk and a couple of file cabinets shared space with a mini-fridge and, for some reason, a standee of James Gandolfini.
“This fuckin’ guy,” Laurie muttered. When they got into the office, she spotted in the corner a tall and narrow door. She pointed to it and mouthed “Closet.” They crept across the office and opened the door. Fortunately, there wasn’t much inside; unfortunately, there couldn’t have been. It wasn’t more than a cubby for brooms, a tiny box that might hold a stepladder, and a mop bucket. But at the moment, it was empty except for what looked like furnace filters standing against the wall. “After you,” she whispered, and Nick stepped in. She followed behind him and closed the door. There was a square vent in the door near the bottom, but it still felt like the same air molecules had been in this closet for, conservatively, thirty years.
“It smells like wet cardboard,” Nick whispered. He was so close that she could feel his breath on her ear. If the light went on, she’d be able to see the texture of his cheek, the mole she’d forgotten about until the library, and the crinkles by his eyes that were just like the ones she had started to see in the mirror herself.
Total darkness was an unfamiliar sensation, and she instinctively reached out and felt for his arm, so she could rest her hand there. “It smells like several generations of spiders lived and died in here.”
“No no no,” he whispered back in the blackness. “Don’t say ‘spiders.’ You’ll make them come out.”
She felt him moving, then his hand was resting on her waist. She flexed her hand against his arm. One of his fingers sneaked under the bottom of her shirt and gave a reassuring scratch to the skin above her hip. It was quick. Scratch-scratch-scratch. I’m-right-here. Then they didn’t move. She could hear herself breathing. Was she breathing too loud? Did it sound like she was panting? Why did it seem like the air was whooshing in and out of her lungs? Could he hear it too? Then she twitched with surprise when his voice, more like a shaped exhale, came from just beside her ear: “It’s going to be fine.”
It got so quiet that she could hear voices coming from the store. One of them, unmistakably, was Ginger. The other was Matt. Ginger’s tone was patient, curious, friendly, unrelenting. His was practiced, polite, and under that, just a little tense. Just a little. “Okay, ready?” she whispered to Nick. He answered with a pat on her arm. She took out her phone and briefly flooded the closet with light long enough to text Daisy: We’re ready. Then she put it on Do Not Disturb.
While they waited, Nick’s hand stayed on her waist, and eventually he hooked his thumb through the belt loop of her jeans. He had done this when they were younger, when they were dancing or leaning against his car, or when they were kissing in front of her house while her mother pretended not to peek out the window. She slid her hand up until it was resting on his elbow. He leaned over until his face brushed the hair by her ear, and she jumped again, and he said, maybe as quietly as anyone has ever said anything, “I’m hanging on to you because I’m afraid to touch anything else.”
If someone had flipped the light on right then, she knew exactly what they would see. She and Nick would both be grinning, both looking at the ground, leaning toward each other like they were slow-dancing, their eyes closed because it somehow felt like you could hear better that way.
Then there were voices, much closer. Matt. Someone else. Some guy. The first words Laurie could make out were “thought she was never going to shut up.” Then the door opened, and Laurie tried to breathe even more quietly, to barely breathe at all. It was really happening: She was in a closet, with her high school boyfriend, listening to a man talk to another man about an ill-gotten duck.
“So, tell me,” the other voice, which had to be Rocky, said. “Why am I here?”
“Like I told you on the phone,” Nick said, “it’s a Kittery, I’m positive. And I know you know guys in that market. I need a collector.” This Matt voice was mostly the same as the one Laurie knew, but a little more relaxed. A little more naked.
“Why don’t you find a buyer yourself? Or just take it to an auction? What’s this all about?” Rocky asked.
“I’m trying to keep this low profile,” Matt said, “and ideally I’m trying to keep myself out of it, you know, publicly.”