“You ready?” Ashley calls.
“Yeah,” I call back.
“Coming.”
I look at myself one last time.
I am not thinking about anything except the dress.
I’m not thinking about his eyes or the jacket or the way the hall, for one second, when he passed, smelled faintly like—
Fucking forest.
Chapter 4
Erik
I know her door is open before I’m even in the hall.
Ashley’s laugh first. Then Elara talking over her — the rhythm of two people who’ve been arguing long enough that it’s just how they talk now. I know the difference between Elara’s real laugh and the one she does when she wants people to stop asking questions. Took me about a year to learn it. I didn’t set out to. You live across from someone long enough, you pick up things you were never trying to learn.
That one’s real.
The elevator fully opens. Ashley’s struggling with her arms full of something, already grinning about it. Elara stands there holding the door for her, leaning into it with her hip, talking with the hand that’s free.
She’s in the leggings.
Three years and I still haven’t worked out what to do with the leggings. She has absolutely no idea. That’s the part that gets me—she isn’t trying. She just wears what’s comfortable.
It steals my breath every damn time.
A man can’t live like this.
She’s mid-sentence, something about a dress, making the case with her hands the way she usually does. She’s committing to whatever she’s saying before she’s sure she believes it. Then somewhere in the middle she decides. She’ll talk herself all the way to the wrong end of an argument with total confidence. I’ve watched her do it enough to know.
Then she sees me.
“Hey, Ella.” I nod at Ashley too. Can’t leave her out. “Ladies.”
“Hey.” She says it like she wasn’t braced for people yet. Caught between one thing and the next.
“Big night?”
She gestures with the free hand. It explains nothing. “Out. Going. It’s a Friday.”
“It is.”
There’s a list of things I could do here. I could take whatever Ashley’s about to drop. I could ask which bar, and whether it’s the kind of place where men are stupid, which is all of them. I could stand here and let her keep talking, because she will, she’ll narrate the whole night if you give her thirty seconds and a reason.
Every version of it ends with me in this hall longer than a neighbor has any business being.
So I shift the bags, find my key, and let myself in.
I don’t look back at her door.
That’s a lie. I don’t look back while she can see me. Different thing.
I drop the groceries inside and leave them where they land. Pull my jacket back on. I have somewhere to be.
