HE ONLY EXISTS WHEN I'M ALONE

TOO CLOSE

The phone finally stopped ringing.

Lina let out a slow breath and set it face-down on the counter. Her fingers stayed on it for a moment — feeling the faint warmth of the screen through the case, grounding herself in something solid and ordinary while the rest of the room felt anything but.

When she looked up, Kai was still there.

Watching her with that steady, unhurried attention that had a way of making her feel simultaneously seen and completely off-balance. Like he was reading something she hadn't meant to leave visible.

"You didn't answer it," he said. Low. Quiet. Not quite approval — something more careful than that.

Lina rubbed her arms slowly, suddenly conscious of how cold the room had gotten. Or maybe it was just him — that particular chill he carried, sourceless and constant, that she'd stopped being able to separate from the feeling of him being nearby. "You didn't tell me not to this time."

"I shouldn't have to." He stepped closer. The distance between them shortened by one deliberate degree. "I thought you understood."

The mild rebuke should have annoyed her. She was generally excellent at being annoyed — it was one of her more reliable defenses. But something about the way he said it, the quiet certainty underneath it rather than any edge of frustration, sent warmth moving through her chest before she could stop it.

She turned away. Walked toward the window, putting a few feet of space between them, telling herself it was because she wanted to look outside and not because she needed to think clearly and couldn't do that when he was standing that close.

The street below looked normal. Ordinary. Indifferent to everything happening four floors up.

"Who was calling me?" she asked.

Silence behind her. She could feel him watching — the particular weight of his attention, which she was learning to recognize the way you learn to recognize a specific quality of light.

"You keep saying I'm not safe," she continued, turning back to face him. Crossing her arms loosely. "You keep warning me, showing up, disappearing. But you never actually explain anything." She held his gaze. "I deserve that much."

He looked at her for a long moment. That unhurried, considering silence she was beginning to understand wasn't avoidance — it was the way he decided things. What to give. How much.

"Things that have noticed how alone you are," he said finally.

Lina went still. "Noticed me?"

"You were alone for too long." He stepped closer — slow and even, giving her time she wasn't sure she wanted. "It made you visible. To things that look for exactly that."

The chill that moved through her had nothing to do with the room temperature. "Visible how?"

"Like a light in a dark place." His voice was quiet. "Something that stands out. Something worth moving toward."

She absorbed that. The specific horror of it — not that she'd done something wrong, but that simply existing quietly alone had been enough to make her a target. That loneliness itself had consequences she hadn't consented to.

"I've been alone for years," she said softly. "Why now?"

His eyes held hers. "Why me, you mean."

It wasn't quite a question. She answered it anyway. "Yes."

Something shifted in his expression — not quite the careful blankness he usually wore, not quite something else. Like the controlled surface of him had developed a small, specific crack and light was getting through.

"Because you let me in," he said quietly.

The memory arrived before she could stop it — her own voice, speaking to an empty room. Come back. Said twice, without thinking, before she'd understood what she was asking for. The hollow feeling in her chest when he'd been gone, which she'd recognized with the particular discomfort of recognizing something inconvenient.

She wanted to deny it. The denial was right there, ready.

But he was looking at her with those dark eyes that had stopped pretending not to see things, and the denial dissolved somewhere between her chest and her mouth.

"So I'm responsible for this," she said instead, aiming for dry and landing somewhere softer.

"No." Immediate. Certain. "You're the reason I stayed."

The distinction landed quietly and with considerable weight, and Lina decided she needed something to do with her hands. She moved to the kitchen counter, reached for nothing in particular, stopped when she realized what she was doing and turned back around.

He was closer than she'd expected.

She hadn't heard him move — she never heard him move — and now there were only a few feet between them and she'd run out of counter to lean against.

"Okay," she said, keeping her voice steady through an act of will. "Let's say I believe you. Prove it. You say you're here to keep me safe — from what exactly? What does that actually mean?"

He reached out.

Slowly — the way he always did, that deliberate unhurried extension that gave her every opportunity to step back from it. His hand found hers before she'd decided what to do, his fingers wrapping around it with careful precision, turning her palm upward like he was checking for something.

His skin was cool against hers.

The touch sent something racing up her arm that had nothing to do with temperature.

He looked down at her hand for a moment — studying it the way he studied everything, like it was worth the full weight of his attention. His thumb moved across her knuckles. Slow. Barely-there. Like he'd done it without deciding to and hadn't stopped himself in time.

"Don't leave your room tomorrow," he said quietly.

Lina blinked. "That's your answer? Stay locked in my room?"

"Yes."

"Because you said so."

"Because I need you safe." His eyes came up to hers, and the word landed differently when paired with that look — need rather than want, which was a specific distinction she felt in the center of her chest. "There's a difference between the two."

She looked up at him.

She didn't want to find that comforting. She found it comforting anyway.

"And if I don't?" she asked. Her voice had gone softer than she'd intended. She blamed the kitchen.

He stepped closer. Close enough now that she had to tilt her chin up slightly to hold his gaze.

"Then I'll have to keep you safe myself," he said.

Heat moved into her cheeks before she finished the thought.

She looked away first. Out the window again, at the ordinary street below, giving herself three seconds to get her face under control. "You're not going to try to stop me? If I decide to go out anyway?"

"No."

She looked back at him, surprised.

Something in his expression had shifted — less controlled now, the careful assembly of it slightly undone. Like this particular topic had gotten past whatever he usually kept between himself and honesty.

"Because some things only stick when you learn them yourself." He lifted his free hand — the one not still holding hers, she noticed, because he hadn't let go of it — and found the strand of hair that had fallen across her face. Tucked it back slowly, his fingers trailing against her cheekbone with a touch so light it was barely there at all.

Barely there, and yet she felt it everywhere.

His hand didn't move immediately. It settled at the edge of her jaw, just resting — that particular gesture she was beginning to recognize, the one that wasn't holding and wasn't pressing and somehow said more than either of those things would have.

"But know this," he said quietly. His eyes on hers. Steady and dark and giving her the full weight of his attention in a way that made thinking clearly feel like a project. "If anything tries to hurt you tomorrow—" His jaw tightened, just slightly. "I won't be gentle about stopping it."

Lina's breath left her in a slow, unsteady exhale.

She was aware of everything at once — the cool weight of his hand against her jaw, the warmth of her own pulse running too fast beneath it, the exact distance between them which had become small enough that closing it would have required almost no effort at all. The way he smelled faintly like rain and cold air and something underneath both that she didn't have a name for.

The way he was looking at her like she was the only fixed point in a room that was otherwise moving.

"Then I'm definitely not staying in my room tomorrow," she said. Her voice came out quieter than she'd planned. Lacked the conviction she'd aimed for.

He didn't argue. Didn't warn her again or step back or put the careful distance between them that he usually erected when things got close to something neither of them had named yet.

Instead, he leaned in slightly — just a fraction, just enough — and she felt his breath warm against her ear as he said, soft and certain:

"We'll see."

Two words. That was all. Quiet and unhurried and carrying underneath them the absolute, settled confidence of someone who had already decided how things were going to go and was simply giving her time to arrive at the same conclusion.

The shiver moved through her before she could stop it. Starting at her ear and traveling all the way down.

He stepped back slowly.

The distance returned. The cool air moved back into the space between them. And Lina stood in her kitchen with her heart running entirely too fast and the ghost of his hand still warm — or cool, she couldn't decide — against her jaw, watching him settle back into that composed, careful stillness like none of the last five minutes had touched him at all.

Except his eyes.

His eyes were doing something they hadn't been doing before — something quieter and less guarded and more honest, and she was starting to learn that his eyes were where the things he didn't say went to exist.

Lina looked at him for a long moment. At the controlled surface and the things moving underneath it and the eyes that were still doing that honest, unguarded thing they'd been doing since he leaned in and she'd forgotten entirely what she'd been about to say.

She turned toward the kitchen. Reached for a glass. Filled it with water from the tap and stood there drinking it slowly, looking out the window at the ordinary, indifferent street.

Behind her, she felt him settle — that particular quality of stillness that meant he was still there. Still present. Occupying the room the way he always did, like he'd always belonged in it and had simply been elsewhere for a while before finding his way back.

She'd been alone in this apartment for two years.

It had never felt like this.

She wasn't sure yet what to do with that. But standing at her kitchen window with the city lights blurring soft and gold outside and the quiet certainty of him behind her, Lina thought that not staying in her room tomorrow had somehow become the least frightening decision she'd made all night.

She told herself she wasn't afraid of what was coming tomorrow.