Hate me harder

Proximity

Living with Ethan Black was nothing like she'd expected.

She'd braced for coldness — for the kind of pointed politeness that made a person feel like a guest who had overstayed. She'd expected him to be in every room before her, to make her feel the imbalance of the arrangement with every interaction, to remind her without saying it directly that she was here because he'd allowed it.

He did none of those things.

He was simply there. Present in the way that people who were comfortable in their own spaces were present — unhurried, undisruptive, existing alongside her without making it a statement. He left for work at eight and returned between seven and eight in the evening and in between those hours the house was hers in a way that felt almost generous.

Almost.

Because the hours when he was home were a different matter entirely.

The first few days she stayed out of his way deliberately. Took her meals early or late, worked in the guest room with the door closed, used the kitchen quickly and efficiently and left no trace. She was a house guest. She behaved like one. She told herself she preferred it.

By the fourth day it started to feel exhausting.

The problem was the house itself. It was too comfortable for avoidance. The living room had a sofa that was genuinely the most unreasonable piece of furniture she'd ever encountered — deep and soft in a way that made her laptop feel lighter and her shoulders drop without deciding to — and on the fourth evening she made the mistake of working from it and didn't move for three hours.

Ethan came home at seven-thirty to find her there, surrounded by documents, takeaway container on the coffee table, completely absorbed in something on her screen.

She heard him come in and looked up.

He took in the scene — the documents, the takeaway, her bare feet tucked under her — and said nothing. Went to the kitchen, came back with a glass of water he set on the coffee table beside her takeaway without comment, and settled into the armchair across the room with his own laptop.

She looked at the water. Then at him.

He was already reading something, jacket off, tie loosened — the end of day version of him that she was beginning to know the shape of.

"You didn't have to —" she started.

"You looked like you'd forgotten," he said, not looking up.

She looked at the water again.

She picked it up and drank and said nothing and they worked in the same room in silence for two hours and it was the most unsettling two hours of her week because it wasn't unsettling at all.

She went back to the flat on Thursday.

The building management let her in with a key and a list of liability disclaimers she signed without reading properly because her eyes had already found the hallway and the part of her brain that processed damage was already working.

It was worse in daylight.

The smoke had gotten into everything — the walls, the curtains, the books on her shelf, the fabric of the sofa. The kitchen ceiling had a watermark from where the fire suppressant had come through from above. Her wardrobe was salvageable but everything inside it smelled of it, that deep acrid ghost that didn't wash out easily.

She moved through the flat methodically. Clothes into bags. Documents from her desk drawer. The small things that mattered — her grandmother's blanket, smoke-scented but intact. Her notebooks, three of them, slightly warped from the moisture but readable.

She saved the bedroom for last.

The photograph was still on the bedside table exactly where she'd left it. The frame had a fine layer of ash on it. She picked it up and wiped it clean with her sleeve and looked at her mother's face — mid-laugh, eyes bright, completely unaware of the camera — and let herself feel it for exactly thirty seconds.

Then she put the photograph carefully in her bag and finished packing.

Ethan was home when she got back.

She came through the front door with two bags and the particular flatness that came after a task that cost more emotionally than it looked like it should. He appeared from the kitchen doorway and looked at her the way he'd looked at her on the pavement outside her burning building — taking inventory, quiet, giving her a moment before saying anything.

"How bad?" he asked.

"Manageable," she said. "Most things are salvageable."

He nodded. "Leave the bags. Mrs. Adeyemi comes tomorrow, she'll help sort through the clothes."

She almost argued. She was so tired that she didn't.

She set the bags down and kept her handbag on her shoulder and pulled out the photograph and stood in his hallway holding it.

"Can I —" She stopped. Started again. "Is there somewhere I can put this? Somewhere I'll see it."

He looked at the photograph — at her mother's face, mid-laugh, unaware — and something moved quietly through his expression.

"Come with me," he said.

He led her to the living room and to the small shelf beside the window — the one with the read books and the creased spines — and moved two things aside to make a space and looked at her.

She set the photograph there.

Stepped back and looked at it. Her mother laughing on Ethan Black's bookshelf, city light coming through the window behind her, looking almost at home.

Her throat felt tight in a way she wasn't going to acknowledge.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

He was standing close — closer than their usual careful distance, both of them looking at the photograph. She could feel the warmth of him beside her, that solid unhurried presence that she'd been navigating around for days and was suddenly very aware of now.

He didn't move away.

Neither did she.

"She looks like you," he said. Very quietly.

She turned her head slightly to look at him. He was looking at the photograph, jaw set, expression doing that thing where it carried something briefly before closing again.

"People always said that," she said. Her voice came out softer than she intended.

He turned then and looked at her and they were closer than she'd registered and the moment had a quality to it — weighted, held, the specific stillness of something balancing on an edge — and she felt her breath adjust without deciding to.

His eyes moved across her face.

She thought: don't.

She thought: we are not doing this.

She took a small step back. Enough. Just enough to let air back into the space between them and break whatever that was before it became something she'd have to account for.

She looked back at the photograph.

"I'm going to make tea," she said. Her voice was even. She was proud of that.

She walked to the kitchen without looking back and filled the kettle and stood at the counter and waited for her pulse to find its normal rhythm.

It took longer than she would have liked.

From the living room she heard him move — the quiet sound of him picking up his laptop, settling back into the routine of the evening, the house resuming its normal pace around them as though nothing had almost happened in front of her mother's photograph.

She made two cups of tea.

She carried both back to the living room and set one on the table beside his chair without saying anything and took her usual spot on the unreasonable sofa and opened her laptop.

He looked at the cup. Then at her.

She was already looking at her screen.

After a moment she heard the small sound of him picking it up.

Neither of them said anything about it.

Neither of them had to.