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Not just clean—transformed. The counters are wiped. The dishes are done and put away. The books that have been stacked in random piles on every surface are now organized on the bookshelf in what appears to be some kind of system. The throw blanket is folded into a perfect rectangle on the couch. The takeout menus are fanned on the counter like a display. The sticky notes on the fridge—which I know for a fact were a chaotic mess this morning—have been rearranged into columns.
The kitchen faucet is not dripping.
The kitchen faucet that has been dripping since October is not dripping.
Aiden is standing in the middle of the living room, hands at his sides, watching me.
“I cleaned your apartment,” he says.
“I see that.”
“You told me not to touch anything.”
“I did.”
“But the faucet was leaking, and it had been leaking for a long time. The washer was corroded. I fixed it. And then I noticed the surfaces and the organizational issues and the books—”
“Aiden.”
“—and the dust accumulation behind the refrigerator was significant, and the stovetop burner on the far left has a loose connection, and the bathroom—”
“Aiden.”
He stops.
I look around. At the gleaming counters and the organized bookshelf and the silent faucet and the folded blanket. At the sticky notes on the fridge, rearranged into what I’m now realizing is a priority matrix—urgent on the left, low priority on the right. He moved BREATHE to the center.
“Thank you,” I say, and my voice comes out smaller than I expected.
“You’re welcome.” He pauses. “Are you upset?”
“No.” I set my bag down. “No, I’m not upset. I’m just—nobody’s ever cleaned my apartment before.”
He tilts his head, that thing he does when he’s processing. “That seems like an oversight.”
I almost laugh, but my phone buzzes with a text from Liv—she’s five minutes away—and reality floods back.
“Okay, we have a problem.” I look at him, at the too-small sweats and the painted-on T-shirt. “My friends are coming over, and you can’t meet them looking like…that.”
He looks down at himself. “What’s wrong with this?”
“You look like you broke into a gym locker and stole someone’s middle school PE clothes.” I’m already heading to my closet, digging through the top shelf. There’s a box back here somewhere—Ben may have left something here at one point. And there’s a bag of Josh’s things I never got around to returning because returning them would require seeing him, and I kept finding reasons not to.
I pull out dark jeans, a charcoal henley, a gray flannel. I hold them up, eyeballing them against Aiden’s frame.
“Try these.”
He takes them and starts pulling his shirt off right there in the living room, and I spin around so fast I nearly fall over.
“Bathroom! Change in the bathroom!”
He tilts his head. “Why?”
“Because—” I press my hands over my eyes. “Just go.”
He goes. I hear the bathroom door close, and I stand in my living room with my face on fire, trying to unsee what I just saw, which is impossible because it’s seared into my retinas. The chest. The shoulders. The panel along his ribs catching the light, a thin line of engineered precision running through skin that looks so real it makes my brain…
The bathroom door opens.
