THE MAN I WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO LOVE

CHAPTER 6: OUT

CHAPTER 6: OUT

By Wednesday the apartment had started to feel like a box neither of them had noticed being sealed into. Caroline had reorganised the bookshelf again — this time by colour, which she knew was worse than useless — and Noah had taken three calls in the bathroom because it was the only room without a laptop stand or a stack of client mockups spread across every flat surface.

"I need to leave this apartment," he announced, standing in the kitchen doorway with his tie already off for once. "Before I start alphabetising the spice rack out of boredom."

"You'd be terrible at it. You don't even know what an oregano is."

"I know what an oregano is."

"Name one thing you'd use it for."

"...Spaghetti."

"That's not an answer, that's a hope." She closed her laptop anyway, because he wasn't wrong — she'd sent the same client the same three logo revisions twice now without noticing, which meant her brain had officially checked out an hour ago. "Fine. Where."

"I don't know. Anywhere that isn't here."

They ended up scrolling showtimes standing shoulder to shoulder at the kitchen counter, arguing about whether the horror movie or the terrible-looking action one was the lesser evil, and settled on the action one mostly because Noah refused to sit through ninety minutes of "people making bad decisions in a basement" and Caroline refused to admit the real reason she avoided horror films was that she still slept with a lamp on some nights.

The cinema was half empty on a Wednesday afternoon, which meant they had their pick of seats and took the worst possible ones out of habit — too close to the front, necks craned, popcorn balanced between them because neither had wanted to admit they'd want to share.

"You're going to complain about your neck the whole way home," Caroline said.

"I complain about my neck regardless. This is just a new reason."

The movie was loud and mostly incoherent and exactly the kind of thing that didn't require either of them to think, which was the point. Halfway through, during an explosion that made absolutely no structural sense, Noah leaned over.

"That building would not do that."

"Shh."

"I'm just saying. Physics."

"You're an engineer's son, not an engineer."

"I absorbed things by osmosis."

She elbowed him, quietly, and he went quiet, and their arms stayed pressed together on the shared armrest for the rest of the film, neither of them moving first.

Afterwards they walked because the evening had turned mild and neither of them was ready to go back to the apartment yet, past a strip of shops half of which were already closing for the night, the smell of someone's fryer drifting out of a kebab place that had a queue despite looking like a health violation waiting to happen.

"We should eat something that isn't popcorn," Noah said.

"Bold words from a man who set off a smoke alarm trying to make eggs."

"I've been slandered in this apartment since day one and I've said nothing."

They got food from a place with plastic chairs bolted to the floor and ate outside on the curb because every actual table was taken, paper wrapped around chips going soft with vinegar, streetlights just starting to flicker on above them.

"Justin called earlier," Noah said, not looking at her, focused very intently on a chip. "While you were in the shower."

"How's the exile going?"

"Miserable, allegedly. Says the site's a mess and the hotel smells like carpet cleaner." He glanced at her sideways. "He asked if we were surviving each other."

"What did you say?"

"I said you'd only threatened to alphabetise my belongings once, so, better than expected."

Caroline laughed, and it echoed a little against the shuttered shopfronts, and for a second neither of them said anything, just sat there with their shoulders nearly touching, streetlight buzzing faintly above them, the sound of traffic a few streets over.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She almost didn't check it, sitting right there next to him, but old habit won out.

**Do you ever go to the cinema alone. I did once and cried at a trailer for a movie I had no intention of seeing.**

She smiled before she could stop herself.

"Client?" Noah asked, still not looking over.

"No. Just—" She hesitated, same as always, not quite sure how to categorise it. "Someone."

"Someone from before."

"Yeah."

He nodded slowly, eyes on the street. "You never told me how that started."

"Wrong number. Months ago. Should've stopped after the first message and somehow never did."

"Feels like a movie plot," he said, and there was something in his voice she couldn't quite place — not jealousy exactly, something quieter than that.

"Feels like a waste of a good meet-cute, honestly, since we're never going to actually meet."

"Why not?"

She shrugged, chip halfway to her mouth. "Ruins it, probably. Easier when it's just words on a screen. No expectations."

Noah didn't say anything to that for a moment, just looked out at the street, jaw tight in a way she noticed but didn't ask about.

**only cry at trailers for movies that look emotionally devastating and then never actually watch them because I know I'll fall apart,** she typed back, once he'd looked away. **Efficient crying. Saves two hours.**

**Genius, actually. I should try that.**

They walked home slower than they needed to, the night gone properly dark by the time they reached the apartment, and Caroline noticed, letting herself into the quiet flat, that for the first time in weeks the silence didn't feel like something she had to fill.