I went.
I was thinking aboutI don't hate youand what that meant coming from Cross, who did not say things he didn't mean, who chose his words with the same precision he chose everything, who had just told me something with that sentence that I didn't have the capacity to look at directly.
He stopped at a door. Dark wood, clean lines, a keypad instead of a key, because of course. He reached past me and entered the code and the light went green.
The door swung open.
I looked into Cross's apartment for the first time and thought, distantly, that I knew absolutely nothing about this man.
5
The first thing I registered was the books.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves on the far wall. Every book was aligned, not just shelved, aligned, spines flush, organized in a way that made my apartment's situation feel like a personal failure. Which it was, but still.
The rest of the room did the same thing the books did. Clean lines, neutral colors, surfaces that had been cleared of everything except what was supposed to be there. A couch that looked like it had never been sat on incorrectly. A kitchen visible through a doorway where the counters caught the light because there was nothing on them to interrupt it.
No chaos.
Negative chaos. Anti-chaos. A place that had made deliberate decisions about chaos and those decisions were final.
It was the apartment of a person who had been alone for a long time and had gotten good at it.
"Oh," I said. "So this is what your place looks like."
Cross moved past me into the apartment and set his keys on a small dish near the door. There was a dish—of course there was a dish. There was a designated location for everything, and Crossturned on a lamp that was low enough not to make my head worse, which I noticed and did not say anything about.
"Water," he said. "Then I need to check you again."
"I'm fine."
"You look like you could throw up any second.”
"That’s the alcohol."
"That could also be a concussion." He was already in the kitchen. I heard the tap. "Sit down."
I didn't sit down. This was stupid. This whole thing was stupid. I was twenty-three years old, and I had been removed from a bar by my team's doctor and brought to his apartment because I couldn't be trusted with my own head, which was a sentence I was never saying out loud to anyone.
I had told myself I wasn't going home with anyone tonight. I'd said that to Jenkins. I'd meant it.
This didn't count. Obviously this didn't count. This was medical. This was —
Cross came back with water, and I took it and drank because arguing required more resources than I currently had available.
The apartment looked the same from this angle. Precise. Intentional. Nothing personal at first glance—no photos, no clutter, none of the accumulated debris of a person who'd been somewhere long enough to stop noticing what they left out. Everything here had been chosen and placed and kept. It looked like a room that had been designed to reveal nothing.
Which was, I thought, extremely on-brand.
My stomach did something I tried to ignore.
"Bathroom?" I asked.
Cross looked at me, doing his assessment thing, and then nodded toward the hallway. "Second door."
I went down the hallway, which was also neutral and clean and had a single piece of framed something on the wall thatI didn't look at closely because I was concentrating on the walking. The second door. Second door was fine.
I opened the first door.
