This time, Nora didn’t even bother suppressing her wince. What happened was that she’d made an absolute mess of it, and so she’d been hiding out in her apartment for a day and a half, trying to recover—not only from what she’d pushed him into revealing about himself, but also from what touching him had revealed about herself. This morning, for the first time in months, she’d done 4:00 a.m. from her bed, her covers caught up around her legs and her eyes staring up at the ceiling, trying desperately to blink away the memory of an incredibly vivid, incredibly inappropriate dream she’d had about Will Sterling and what he might be able to do with the palm of his hand.

“Uh,” Nora said.

“Let me guess. Your ‘kill him with kindness’ plan backfired. I told you, hide a whole fish somewhere in there. You’ve got a key. The smell will be unreal.”

Nora shook her head firmly while Dee did something with a highlighter brush that deserved a YouTube tutorial. “No, we’re not doing stuff like that. We’re not criminals.”

She got another eye roll for that, but Nora knew that Deepa wouldn’t really go through with fish-hiding, either. Probably.

“Then you’re not going to stop him, I hate to tell you. You know my building has like twenty Airbnb units now? And I’ll bet at least a few of my other neighbors rent out their places during Comic-Con this year.” She paused mid-highlight. “Wait, should I do that?”

“No,” Nora snapped, annoyed, even though Deepa lived in a twelve-story building with a rooftop pool that bore no meaningful relationship to Nora and her neighbors’ beloved six-flat.

Dee shrugged, rooting around in her bag. “Good money, though.” When Nora didn’t respond, she looked up, a brushed gold tube of lipstick in her hand and her eyes narrowed. “Why are you acting so strange?”

“I’m not!” Shoot, she’d said it too loud. Deepa’s eyes narrowed even more.

“You are. Your face has that look about it. It’s the same face you had the whole time we worked on the—”

“Don’t say it,” Nora interrupted, her face heating automatically. Only a few months before she’d moved to Chicago, she and Deepa had been collaborating on the launch of a sustainable sex toy brand’s digital platform. Nora had never quite recovered from having to say the word dildo during a work presentation.

“Eleanora!” Deepa said, her formerly narrowed eyes now wide as saucers. “Did you do something with this man?!”

“What? No! He’s not even my type.” This was a lie, because Nora didn’t really have a type. If you went solely by her largely disappointing dating history, her type was probably something like “men who talk about themselves too much.” That described the type for a lot of women out here in the twenty-first century, she figured.