Morning arrived with the same relentless six a.m. Zumba soundtrack it always did, except this time, for the first time since Arthur had moved into apartment 404, he was already awake to hear it start, having spent most of the night staring at the same water stain on the ceiling without managing more than an hour of actual sleep.
He'd run through the entire previous night on an endless, exhausting loop, replaying every message he'd ever sent on Nexus with fresh, mortifying context attached, cataloging every small confession he'd made to a woman he now knew, with absolute certainty, slept less than fifteen feet away from him on the other side of a single wall. The specific admission about unlearning weakness. The comment about reaching for magic that no longer existed. The strange, unguarded honesty he'd allowed himself only because he'd believed, wrongly, that none of it would ever have to survive daylight, or a face, or the ordinary, mundane friction of actually sharing a kitchen with the person who now possessed all of it.
He heard Diana's bedroom door open at exactly 5:58, two minutes earlier than her usual routine, and something in the rhythm of her footsteps across the living room floor told him she hadn't slept much better than he had. Neither of them said anything. She moved directly to the small clear space beside the window where she usually stretched, and he remained motionless on the sofa, eyes closed, doing an unconvincing impression of a man still asleep.
The music started. Neither of them commented on it. Diana went through her routine in almost total silence, none of her usual muttered commentary about his posture or his sleep schedule, and Arthur lay there listening to the absence of her voice with an unease considerably worse than anything her actual complaining had ever produced. He had, somewhere over the past several weeks, grown so accustomed to her running commentary that its sudden absence felt almost like a physical thing missing from the room, a silence with weight and texture rather than simple quiet.
By the time he finally sat up, coffee suddenly feeling urgently necessary, she was already in the kitchen, back to him, pouring water into the kettle with the kind of exaggerated focus a person brought to a task specifically to avoid looking at someone else in the room.
"Morning," he said, testing the word carefully, watching for any reaction.
"Morning." She didn't turn around. The kettle clicked on. Neither of them said anything further for what felt like an unreasonably long stretch of silence, filled only by the low hum of water beginning to heat.
He stood in the doorway of the living room, hoodie rumpled from a night spent on the sofa, watching the back of her head with an intensity he immediately tried to disguise the moment she showed any sign of turning around, and failed to disguise quickly enough when she did glance briefly over her shoulder, catching him mid-stare before he could arrange his expression into something more neutral.
"Sleep well?" he asked, immediately regretting the question the moment it left his mouth, aware of exactly how loaded it had become in the past twelve hours.
"Fine." A beat. "You?"
"Fine."
Another silence. Diana busied herself finding a mug she didn't actually need, since her usual one was sitting directly in front of her, and Arthur found an equally unnecessary reason to check his phone, neither of them acknowledging the absurdity of two grown adults, one formerly a supreme ruler of an entire demonic plane, reduced to stilted small talk about sleep quality because neither could find the courage to say the one thing actually occupying every square inch of both their minds.
"I have an early client today," Diana said abruptly, grabbing her bag with more urgency than the statement warranted. "Should head out."
"Right. Of course." Arthur nodded, watching her move toward the door with the specific, controlled haste of someone fleeing a burning building while trying to appear casual about it.
She paused at the threshold, hand on the doorknob, and for one suspended moment Arthur thought she might turn around and finally say something real. She didn't. "See you tonight," she said instead, and left, the door closing behind her with a soft click that felt, somehow, considerably louder than it should have.
Arthur stood alone in the kitchen, kettle still heating, and exhaled a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding since the moment she'd walked out of her bedroom that morning. He poured his coffee in silence, drank half of it standing at the counter without tasting any of it, grabbed a piece of toast he didn't finish either, and left for work fifteen minutes earlier than necessary, unable to stand the quiet of the apartment a moment longer than required.
---
At CyberCore, he accomplished remarkably little that day, staring at his monitor with the glazed, unproductive intensity of a man whose entire processing capacity had been redirected toward a single unresolved problem that no amount of debugging experience had prepared him to solve. He sat through two meetings without absorbing a single actionable item, nodded along to a sprint planning discussion with the hollow, automatic responses of someone whose body had shown up for work while the rest of him remained fixed firmly in the small, silent kitchen he'd left that morning.
By early afternoon, he'd rewritten the same function four separate times, each version worse than the last, before finally giving up and closing the file entirely, staring instead at the blank space of his desktop with the particular despair of a man who had once commanded armies and could not currently manage to fix a null pointer exception because his mind kept drifting back to the exact sound of a bedroom door closing two minutes early.
"You look terrible," Malphas observed, appearing at his desk with the now-familiar mixture of concern and self-preservation that characterized most of his interactions. "Worse than the usual terrible. Did something happen?"
"Something happened," Arthur admitted, more honestly than he'd intended, too exhausted to maintain his usual deflection. "I'm not prepared to discuss it."
"Understandable. I too have several things I'm not prepared to discuss, going on three months now." Malphas hovered a moment longer, then added, with unexpected gentleness, "For what it's worth, whatever it is — the things we're most afraid to say out loud are usually less catastrophic once they're actually said. I've found the opposite far more often to be true. The silence does more damage than the truth ever manages."
Arthur looked up at him properly for the first time that conversation, something in the sincerity of the statement landing with more weight than he expected from a man who spent most days nervously avoiding direct eye contact. "That's uncharacteristically wise for someone who introduced himself to me by nearly calling me 'Sire' in front of the entire floor."
Malphas went slightly pale. "That was an unfortunate lapse. Unrelated to any wisdom I may or may not currently possess. I've been working very hard to overcome that particular tendency, actually, through a combination of deep breathing and strict avoidance of eye contact during moments of high stress."
"Understood." Arthur returned to his monitor, though the conversation lingered, uninvited, at the edges of his focus for the rest of the afternoon, Malphas's small, accidental piece of advice looping quietly beneath every line of code he failed to properly review. He found himself, somewhere around three in the afternoon, drafting an entire imaginary conversation with Diana in his head, rehearsing what he might actually say if he found the nerve — a rehearsal that grew more elaborate and more useless with each mental revision, since none of it accounted for how she might actually respond, only for the version of the exchange where he came across as composed and unafraid, a version he suspected bore little resemblance to how the real thing would likely unfold.
He left the office nearly an hour later than usual, not because there was any pressing work to finish, but because some part of him remained reluctant to go home and face the continuation of a silence he had no idea how to break, dragging his feet through the crowded evening commute with all the enthusiasm of a man walking toward a verdict rather than an apartment, watching the familiar stops pass by the train window with a growing, low-grade dread that had nothing to do with the actual journey and everything to do with what waited for him at the end of it.
---
Diana's day followed a similarly distracted shape, though she buried it, as always, in physical exertion rather than open acknowledgment. She ran an extra client session longer than scheduled, corrected form with more intensity than usual, and avoided, with visible effort, checking her phone every time it buzzed, though by early afternoon she'd stopped resisting entirely and simply kept it in her pocket, glancing down every few minutes despite there being nothing new to see.
She'd woken that morning with the specific, hollow dread of someone who had spent the entire night rehearsing conversations she had no intention of actually having, and had gone through her stretching routine with an unusual, mechanical precision that had nothing to do with proper form and everything to do with needing somewhere safe to direct her attention that wasn't the closed door fifteen feet away, behind which she knew, with total certainty now, exactly who was lying awake listening to her morning routine with an entirely new understanding of everything he'd heard.
Between clients, she found herself replaying specific fragments of the previous night's non-conversation — the strange, charged silence after the call disconnected, the way neither of them had managed more than a single word in reply. She thought about the two weeks of honesty that had preceded it, wondering, with mounting unease, whether Arthur was currently regretting every vulnerable thing he'd told a stranger who had turned out to be, of all possible people, the exact roommate he spent every morning arguing with over refrigerator space.
"You've checked your phone eleven times in the past hour," Priya observed, appearing beside her during a rare lull between clients. "I counted. There was a system involved."
"I'm expecting something."
"From the mystery roommate you complain about with suspicious frequency?"
"From nobody in particular." Diana pocketed the phone with more force than necessary, and Priya, wisely, chose not to push further, though the knowing look she gave before walking away suggested she wasn't remotely convinced by the deflection.
Diana spent her lunch break sitting alone in the staff room, sandwich untouched, running through the same four possible opening lines she'd already discarded a dozen times the night before, none of them improving with repetition. She thought about simply asking him directly that evening, over dinner, the words rehearsed and ready, only to immediately imagine every possible way that conversation could go badly — him denying it despite the evidence, him confirming it and then retreating entirely into the same cold distance he'd used before Nexus had ever entered either of their lives, or worse, some entirely new, unbearable awkwardness neither of them had a script for navigating. She thought, too, about the specific way he'd looked at her that morning over coffee, something careful and searching in his expression that she'd never once seen directed at her before, not in all the weeks of arguing over refrigerator space, and wondered whether that look had been recognition, or simply exhaustion dressed up to resemble it.
By the time she finally opened Nexus that evening, alone in her room with the door locked out of habit rather than necessity, she found no new messages waiting, the conversation exactly where they'd left it the night before — two brief, insufficient exchanges about how "strange" everything had been, followed by silence stretching now across an entire day.
She stared at the empty message field for a long time, drafting several openings in her head without committing any of them to the actual screen. *So, that happened.* Too casual. *I know it's you.* Too direct, too final, closing a door she wasn't entirely sure she wanted closed yet, whatever that even meant now that the anonymity had already, technically, collapsed. *Are you okay?* Closer to honest, but still somehow insufficient for the size of what neither of them had said yet.
She closed the app without sending anything, telling herself she'd try again tomorrow, a promise she suspected, even as she made it, she'd likely break through sheer accumulated cowardice rather than any genuine plan to follow through. She set the phone down on her nightstand and lay back against her pillows, staring at the same ceiling she'd been staring at every night for the past two weeks, except now the ceiling felt different somehow, heavier, carrying the full weight of everything that had changed on the other side of that thin, unremarkable wall.
---
That evening, back in apartment 404, dinner passed in the same careful, over-polite silence that had characterized the entire day, both of them making unusually generous small talk about entirely neutral topics — the weather, a minor plumbing issue in the building, a documentary neither of them had actually watched but both pretended enough familiarity with to sustain several minutes of conversation.
"The building manager says the pipes on the third floor are original to the construction," Arthur offered, apropos of nothing, pushing a piece of chicken around his plate without any real intention of eating it. "Apparently that explains the water pressure issue."
"Fascinating," Diana said, in a tone that suggested the opposite, equally uninterested in her own food. "Very illuminating information about infrastructure."
"I thought so."
They sat like that for several more minutes, the scrape of forks against plates filling silences that would normally have been occupied by her running commentary on his eating habits or his dry observations about her volume levels, neither of them quite able to summon the energy for their usual dynamic, both too aware of the enormous, unspoken thing now sitting at the table with them like an uninvited third guest.
"This is ridiculous," Arthur finally said, halfway through a meal neither of them was actually eating with any real appetite, setting his fork down with more force than the statement required.
Diana looked up, something cautious and alert flickering across her face. "What is?"
"This. Whatever this is. We're discussing municipal plumbing regulations like it's the most fascinating subject either of us has encountered in months."
"I found the plumbing update genuinely informative."
"You did not." He held her gaze for a long moment, something unspoken passing between them heavier than anything either had managed to say directly all day. "Diana."
She set her own fork down, bracing, though for what exactly, she couldn't have said. "Yes?"
He opened his mouth, then closed it again, the sentence he'd been building all day collapsing under its own weight the moment he actually needed to say it out loud. He'd rehearsed a dozen different versions of this exact moment throughout the day, entire imagined conversations complete with her responses scripted out in his head with a confidence that had absolutely nothing to do with reality, and every single one of them evaporated now, faced with her actual, present, waiting expression, the reality of her considerably more disarming than any imagined version had prepared him for.
"Nothing," he said instead, the courage that had carried him this far abruptly deserting him at the final threshold. "Never mind."
Diana studied him for a long moment, disappointment and relief mixing in equal, confusing measure, before nodding and returning to her plate, both of them retreating, by unspoken mutual agreement, back into the safety of unfinished sentences and careful, deliberate avoidance — a truce neither particularly wanted, but neither, it seemed, quite ready yet to break.
They finished the rest of dinner in near-total silence, the earlier attempt at neutral small talk abandoned entirely now that both of them understood, without needing to say so, that neither had the nerve tonight to push past the invisible line they'd both approached and both, in the end, retreated from. Diana cleared the plates before he could offer to help, and Arthur retreated to the sofa with his laptop, neither of them opening Nexus that night, both instead lying awake in their separate rooms once again, listening to the same quiet, ordinary sounds of the apartment settling around them, wondering how many more nights exactly like this one they could manage before something, somehow, finally gave way.
Somewhere around midnight, Arthur heard the faint, distinct sound of Diana's phone screen lighting up through the thin wall, the small mechanical click of the Nexus app opening, followed almost immediately by the same sound closing again, no message sent, the silence resuming exactly where it had left off. He wondered, staring at the ceiling in the dark, whether she'd drafted something and lost her nerve, the same way he had a dozen times that day, or whether she'd simply been checking, the way he kept checking himself, for a message that neither of them had yet found the courage to actually send, both of them apparently trapped in the exact same loop of almost-reaching and pulling back, close enough now to hear it happening through a single thin wall. He thought about reaching for his own phone, breaking the pattern first, being the one who finally said something real instead of retreating into silence for a second consecutive night. He didn't. He closed his eyes instead, and eventually, sometime past two in the morning, exhaustion finally won out over everything else, dragging him down into a sleep considerably less restful than it should have been, filled with half-formed dreams about thin walls and unfinished sentences that dissolved the moment he tried to hold onto them, leaving behind only a vague, persistent unease that followed him well past the point of waking.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Morning arrived with the same relentless six a.m. Zumba soundtrack it always did, except this time, for the first time since Arthur had moved into apartment 404, he was already awake to hear it start, having spent most of the night staring at the same water stain on the ceiling without managing more than an hour of actual sleep.
He'd run through the entire previous night on an endless, exhausting loop, replaying every message he'd ever sent on Nexus with fresh, mortifying context attached, cataloging every small confession he'd made to a woman he now knew, with absolute certainty, slept less than fifteen feet away from him on the other side of a single wall. The specific admission about unlearning weakness. The comment about reaching for magic that no longer existed. The strange, unguarded honesty he'd allowed himself only because he'd believed, wrongly, that none of it would ever have to survive daylight, or a face, or the ordinary, mundane friction of actually sharing a kitchen with the person who now possessed all of it.
He heard Diana's bedroom door open at exactly 5:58, two minutes earlier than her usual routine, and something in the rhythm of her footsteps across the living room floor told him she hadn't slept much better than he had. Neither of them said anything. She moved directly to the small clear space beside the window where she usually stretched, and he remained motionless on the sofa, eyes closed, doing an unconvincing impression of a man still asleep.
The music started. Neither of them commented on it. Diana went through her routine in almost total silence, none of her usual muttered commentary about his posture or his sleep schedule, and Arthur lay there listening to the absence of her voice with an unease considerably worse than anything her actual complaining had ever produced. He had, somewhere over the past several weeks, grown so accustomed to her running commentary that its sudden absence felt almost like a physical thing missing from the room, a silence with weight and texture rather than simple quiet.
By the time he finally sat up, coffee suddenly feeling urgently necessary, she was already in the kitchen, back to him, pouring water into the kettle with the kind of exaggerated focus a person brought to a task specifically to avoid looking at someone else in the room.
"Morning," he said, testing the word carefully, watching for any reaction.
"Morning." She didn't turn around. The kettle clicked on. Neither of them said anything further for what felt like an unreasonably long stretch of silence, filled only by the low hum of water beginning to heat.
He stood in the doorway of the living room, hoodie rumpled from a night spent on the sofa, watching the back of her head with an intensity he immediately tried to disguise the moment she showed any sign of turning around, and failed to disguise quickly enough when she did glance briefly over her shoulder, catching him mid-stare before he could arrange his expression into something more neutral.
"Sleep well?" he asked, immediately regretting the question the moment it left his mouth, aware of exactly how loaded it had become in the past twelve hours.
"Fine." A beat. "You?"
"Fine."
Another silence. Diana busied herself finding a mug she didn't actually need, since her usual one was sitting directly in front of her, and Arthur found an equally unnecessary reason to check his phone, neither of them acknowledging the absurdity of two grown adults, one formerly a supreme ruler of an entire demonic plane, reduced to stilted small talk about sleep quality because neither could find the courage to say the one thing actually occupying every square inch of both their minds.
"I have an early client today," Diana said abruptly, grabbing her bag with more urgency than the statement warranted. "Should head out."
"Right. Of course." Arthur nodded, watching her move toward the door with the specific, controlled haste of someone fleeing a burning building while trying to appear casual about it.
She paused at the threshold, hand on the doorknob, and for one suspended moment Arthur thought she might turn around and finally say something real. She didn't. "See you tonight," she said instead, and left, the door closing behind her with a soft click that felt, somehow, considerably louder than it should have.
Arthur stood alone in the kitchen, kettle still heating, and exhaled a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding since the moment she'd walked out of her bedroom that morning. He poured his coffee in silence, drank half of it standing at the counter without tasting any of it, grabbed a piece of toast he didn't finish either, and left for work fifteen minutes earlier than necessary, unable to stand the quiet of the apartment a moment longer than required.
---
At CyberCore, he accomplished remarkably little that day, staring at his monitor with the glazed, unproductive intensity of a man whose entire processing capacity had been redirected toward a single unresolved problem that no amount of debugging experience had prepared him to solve. He sat through two meetings without absorbing a single actionable item, nodded along to a sprint planning discussion with the hollow, automatic responses of someone whose body had shown up for work while the rest of him remained fixed firmly in the small, silent kitchen he'd left that morning.
By early afternoon, he'd rewritten the same function four separate times, each version worse than the last, before finally giving up and closing the file entirely, staring instead at the blank space of his desktop with the particular despair of a man who had once commanded armies and could not currently manage to fix a null pointer exception because his mind kept drifting back to the exact sound of a bedroom door closing two minutes early.
"You look terrible," Malphas observed, appearing at his desk with the now-familiar mixture of concern and self-preservation that characterized most of his interactions. "Worse than the usual terrible. Did something happen?"
"Something happened," Arthur admitted, more honestly than he'd intended, too exhausted to maintain his usual deflection. "I'm not prepared to discuss it."
"Understandable. I too have several things I'm not prepared to discuss, going on three months now." Malphas hovered a moment longer, then added, with unexpected gentleness, "For what it's worth, whatever it is — the things we're most afraid to say out loud are usually less catastrophic once they're actually said. I've found the opposite far more often to be true. The silence does more damage than the truth ever manages."
Arthur looked up at him properly for the first time that conversation, something in the sincerity of the statement landing with more weight than he expected from a man who spent most days nervously avoiding direct eye contact. "That's uncharacteristically wise for someone who introduced himself to me by nearly calling me 'Sire' in front of the entire floor."
Malphas went slightly pale. "That was an unfortunate lapse. Unrelated to any wisdom I may or may not currently possess. I've been working very hard to overcome that particular tendency, actually, through a combination of deep breathing and strict avoidance of eye contact during moments of high stress."
"Understood." Arthur returned to his monitor, though the conversation lingered, uninvited, at the edges of his focus for the rest of the afternoon, Malphas's small, accidental piece of advice looping quietly beneath every line of code he failed to properly review. He found himself, somewhere around three in the afternoon, drafting an entire imaginary conversation with Diana in his head, rehearsing what he might actually say if he found the nerve — a rehearsal that grew more elaborate and more useless with each mental revision, since none of it accounted for how she might actually respond, only for the version of the exchange where he came across as composed and unafraid, a version he suspected bore little resemblance to how the real thing would likely unfold.
He left the office nearly an hour later than usual, not because there was any pressing work to finish, but because some part of him remained reluctant to go home and face the continuation of a silence he had no idea how to break, dragging his feet through the crowded evening commute with all the enthusiasm of a man walking toward a verdict rather than an apartment, watching the familiar stops pass by the train window with a growing, low-grade dread that had nothing to do with the actual journey and everything to do with what waited for him at the end of it.
---
Diana's day followed a similarly distracted shape, though she buried it, as always, in physical exertion rather than open acknowledgment. She ran an extra client session longer than scheduled, corrected form with more intensity than usual, and avoided, with visible effort, checking her phone every time it buzzed, though by early afternoon she'd stopped resisting entirely and simply kept it in her pocket, glancing down every few minutes despite there being nothing new to see.
She'd woken that morning with the specific, hollow dread of someone who had spent the entire night rehearsing conversations she had no intention of actually having, and had gone through her stretching routine with an unusual, mechanical precision that had nothing to do with proper form and everything to do with needing somewhere safe to direct her attention that wasn't the closed door fifteen feet away, behind which she knew, with total certainty now, exactly who was lying awake listening to her morning routine with an entirely new understanding of everything he'd heard.
Between clients, she found herself replaying specific fragments of the previous night's non-conversation — the strange, charged silence after the call disconnected, the way neither of them had managed more than a single word in reply. She thought about the two weeks of honesty that had preceded it, wondering, with mounting unease, whether Arthur was currently regretting every vulnerable thing he'd told a stranger who had turned out to be, of all possible people, the exact roommate he spent every morning arguing with over refrigerator space.
"You've checked your phone eleven times in the past hour," Priya observed, appearing beside her during a rare lull between clients. "I counted. There was a system involved."
"I'm expecting something."
"From the mystery roommate you complain about with suspicious frequency?"
"From nobody in particular." Diana pocketed the phone with more force than necessary, and Priya, wisely, chose not to push further, though the knowing look she gave before walking away suggested she wasn't remotely convinced by the deflection.
Diana spent her lunch break sitting alone in the staff room, sandwich untouched, running through the same four possible opening lines she'd already discarded a dozen times the night before, none of them improving with repetition. She thought about simply asking him directly that evening, over dinner, the words rehearsed and ready, only to immediately imagine every possible way that conversation could go badly — him denying it despite the evidence, him confirming it and then retreating entirely into the same cold distance he'd used before Nexus had ever entered either of their lives, or worse, some entirely new, unbearable awkwardness neither of them had a script for navigating. She thought, too, about the specific way he'd looked at her that morning over coffee, something careful and searching in his expression that she'd never once seen directed at her before, not in all the weeks of arguing over refrigerator space, and wondered whether that look had been recognition, or simply exhaustion dressed up to resemble it.
By the time she finally opened Nexus that evening, alone in her room with the door locked out of habit rather than necessity, she found no new messages waiting, the conversation exactly where they'd left it the night before — two brief, insufficient exchanges about how "strange" everything had been, followed by silence stretching now across an entire day.
She stared at the empty message field for a long time, drafting several openings in her head without committing any of them to the actual screen. *So, that happened.* Too casual. *I know it's you.* Too direct, too final, closing a door she wasn't entirely sure she wanted closed yet, whatever that even meant now that the anonymity had already, technically, collapsed. *Are you okay?* Closer to honest, but still somehow insufficient for the size of what neither of them had said yet.
She closed the app without sending anything, telling herself she'd try again tomorrow, a promise she suspected, even as she made it, she'd likely break through sheer accumulated cowardice rather than any genuine plan to follow through. She set the phone down on her nightstand and lay back against her pillows, staring at the same ceiling she'd been staring at every night for the past two weeks, except now the ceiling felt different somehow, heavier, carrying the full weight of everything that had changed on the other side of that thin, unremarkable wall.
---
That evening, back in apartment 404, dinner passed in the same careful, over-polite silence that had characterized the entire day, both of them making unusually generous small talk about entirely neutral topics — the weather, a minor plumbing issue in the building, a documentary neither of them had actually watched but both pretended enough familiarity with to sustain several minutes of conversation.
"The building manager says the pipes on the third floor are original to the construction," Arthur offered, apropos of nothing, pushing a piece of chicken around his plate without any real intention of eating it. "Apparently that explains the water pressure issue."
"Fascinating," Diana said, in a tone that suggested the opposite, equally uninterested in her own food. "Very illuminating information about infrastructure."
"I thought so."
They sat like that for several more minutes, the scrape of forks against plates filling silences that would normally have been occupied by her running commentary on his eating habits or his dry observations about her volume levels, neither of them quite able to summon the energy for their usual dynamic, both too aware of the enormous, unspoken thing now sitting at the table with them like an uninvited third guest.
"This is ridiculous," Arthur finally said, halfway through a meal neither of them was actually eating with any real appetite, setting his fork down with more force than the statement required.
Diana looked up, something cautious and alert flickering across her face. "What is?"
"This. Whatever this is. We're discussing municipal plumbing regulations like it's the most fascinating subject either of us has encountered in months."
"I found the plumbing update genuinely informative."
"You did not." He held her gaze for a long moment, something unspoken passing between them heavier than anything either had managed to say directly all day. "Diana."
She set her own fork down, bracing, though for what exactly, she couldn't have said. "Yes?"
He opened his mouth, then closed it again, the sentence he'd been building all day collapsing under its own weight the moment he actually needed to say it out loud. He'd rehearsed a dozen different versions of this exact moment throughout the day, entire imagined conversations complete with her responses scripted out in his head with a confidence that had absolutely nothing to do with reality, and every single one of them evaporated now, faced with her actual, present, waiting expression, the reality of her considerably more disarming than any imagined version had prepared him for.
"Nothing," he said instead, the courage that had carried him this far abruptly deserting him at the final threshold. "Never mind."
Diana studied him for a long moment, disappointment and relief mixing in equal, confusing measure, before nodding and returning to her plate, both of them retreating, by unspoken mutual agreement, back into the safety of unfinished sentences and careful, deliberate avoidance — a truce neither particularly wanted, but neither, it seemed, quite ready yet to break.
They finished the rest of dinner in near-total silence, the earlier attempt at neutral small talk abandoned entirely now that both of them understood, without needing to say so, that neither had the nerve tonight to push past the invisible line they'd both approached and both, in the end, retreated from. Diana cleared the plates before he could offer to help, and Arthur retreated to the sofa with his laptop, neither of them opening Nexus that night, both instead lying awake in their separate rooms once again, listening to the same quiet, ordinary sounds of the apartment settling around them, wondering how many more nights exactly like this one they could manage before something, somehow, finally gave way.
Somewhere around midnight, Arthur heard the faint, distinct sound of Diana's phone screen lighting up through the thin wall, the small mechanical click of the Nexus app opening, followed almost immediately by the same sound closing again, no message sent, the silence resuming exactly where it had left off. He wondered, staring at the ceiling in the dark, whether she'd drafted something and lost her nerve, the same way he had a dozen times that day, or whether she'd simply been checking, the way he kept checking himself, for a message that neither of them had yet found the courage to actually send, both of them apparently trapped in the exact same loop of almost-reaching and pulling back, close enough now to hear it happening through a single thin wall. He thought about reaching for his own phone, breaking the pattern first, being the one who finally said something real instead of retreating into silence for a second consecutive night. He didn't. He closed his eyes instead, and eventually, sometime past two in the morning, exhaustion finally won out over everything else, dragging him down into a sleep considerably less restful than it should have been, filled with half-formed dreams about thin walls and unfinished sentences that dissolved the moment he tried to hold onto them, leaving behind only a vague, persistent unease that followed him well past the point of waking.
You've reached the end of this chapter