Chapter 13
I didn’t say anything right away.
She looked back down at her bowl, which was what she did whenever she said something that cost her something.
“I wasn’t expecting to like living here,” she said. “I thought this would be temporary. Practical. Just something to get through until I found something better.”
She paused.
“I stopped looking for something better around week four.”
Then she lifted her bowl again.
“Don’t make it weird.”
“I won’t.”
She glanced sideways at me. “You have a face.”
“You literally always have a face too.”
She huffed out a laugh.
“I have something to say,” I told her.
She went still.
Not tense. Just still. The kind of stillness that comes from waiting for a moment you’ve imagined but never trusted to arrive.
“Okay,” she said.
“I like living here too,” I said. “Not the apartment. The apartment is objectively terrible.”
That got the quiet nose-exhale laugh.
“I like that it’s you in this apartment,” I said. “Specifically you.”
Silence.
Outside, rain had started. I hadn’t even noticed.
The window was cracked open the way she always left it, and the new sound of rain moving across the street filled the gaps between us.
“Dana told you I didn’t want to go on Tuesday,” Chloe said.
“Yes.”
“And you bought the good coffee.”
“Yes.”
“Because you—”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s why.”
She stared at the window for a long moment.
“I’m not good at this,” she said.
“I know.”
“I don’t mean emotionally unavailable in a dramatic, tragic way. I mean practically. I forget to reply to texts. I’m bad at saying things when I should say them. I cleaned your room without asking.”
“You bought me an external hard drive as an apology.”
“I know it counted.”
“It counted.”
She turned and looked at me directly. Really looked at me.
That alone felt like something changing.
“I looked up your blog,” she said.
That stopped me cold.
“When?”
“Week three.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“I was processing for eight weeks. I told you I’m bad at this.”
She almost smiled.
“You’re a good writer,” she said. “The piece about the hospital in Kyoto. The one about the ship. The way you write about things that can’t be explained… you make it feel like not understanding something is okay. Like not knowing doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.”
I didn’t say a word.
“I found that helpful,” she said quietly. “For other things.”
The rain got heavier. The bathroom drip joined in like a second rhythm.
She was close enough that I could see the exact moment she stopped managing the distance between us.
The exact moment the thing between us finally ran out of room to avoid itself.
“You can make it weird now,” she said.
I set my bowl on the coffee table.
She did the same.
“I’ve been thinking about this for weeks,” I said. “I kept putting it into documents and deleting it.”
That made her laugh again—the real laugh.
Then she leaned in.
And I did too.