The Biker's Regret: The Enemy I Became.

(Reese) Moving day was supposed to be simple. I'd hired movers, packed light, and chosen the new apartment for one reason only. It was twelve minutes from my office without traffic, and I needed those twelve minutes back in my life. No more sitting in the back of a car watching the city crawl past the window while a meeting I should already be in started without me. The building was clean and modern without trying too hard. The lobby had marble floors and good lighting and a doorman who nodded when I walked in. The elevator was fast. All the things that mattered. The fourth floor hallway was quiet when I arrived, just the sound of the elevator closing behind me and the roll of my suitcase wheel against the floor. The movers had already brought up the first round of boxes and stacked them neatly beside the door to 4B. I stopped in front of it, set down my bag, and reached into my pocket for the key. That was when the door across the hall opened. I looked up the way you do when you sense movement nearby. And then I went completely still. Noah Prescott stepped out into the hallway. Everything in me stopped at once. Not just my feet. Everything. The part of me that had spent five years being careful and controlled and completely fine went silent in the space of one second and I stood there with my key in my hand and my heart doing something I had no interest in naming. Five years. It had been five years since I last saw him and he looked exactly like I did not want him to look. Taller than I remembered, broader across the chest, the kind of man who took up space without trying. His dark hair was a little longer now. He had on a plain black t shirt and dark jeans and there was that scent, tobacco and leather, that reached me even from across the hallway and did something to my chest that I told it firmly to stop doing. He saw me the same moment I saw him. Neither of us moved. I don't know how many seconds passed. All I know is that everything I had spent five years pressing down came back in one long awful wave and I was not ready for it the way I thought I would be if this day ever came. My body remembered him before my head could stop it. The way he looked at me. The way he always looked at me, like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at. He was doing it right now and I needed him to stop. "I don't love you anymore." That was all he had said. No fight before it, no long conversation, no real explanation. Just those four words said so firmly that I had not known what to do with my hands or my face or any part of myself. I had stood in front of him, seventeen years old and completely blindsided, and I had waited for him to take it back. He never did. I had cried for weeks. Then I stopped crying and I started working and that decision changed everything. Every feeling I did not know what to do with went into building something and over the years that something became far more than I had planned for. A company with my name on the door. A reputation I had earned without anyone handing me a single thing. A life that looked exactly the way I had decided it would look. I was not the girl he had walked away from. I needed to hold onto that right now. The memories did not care what I needed. Standing in that hallway I could feel seventeen trying to climb back out of me. I remembered the first time I had seen him. A group of girls had made it their particular business to make high school difficult for me and that afternoon they had cornered me near the back stairwell. Noah had appeared from nowhere. He had stepped between us, looked at them in that calm certain way he had and they had left without a word. He had turned to me after and said, "You good?" I had nodded. He had walked me to class. And that had been the beginning of everything. I had loved him the way you only love someone the first time, with no protection and no backup plan. I had been certain he felt exactly the same way. The way he used to look at me had made me certain. The same way he was looking at me right now, steady and direct, like he was seeing something the rest of the world walked past. I was wrong about that. I pulled myself back to the present. My face felt composed and composure was the only thing I could control right now. I looked at him the way I would look at any stranger in any hallway, with basic politeness and nothing behind it. "Hi," I said. He blinked. Something moved across his face and I did not try to read it. "Reese." My name in his mouth, in that voice that was lower than I remembered, landed in my chest like it had always lived there. I told it to leave. "Are you moving in?" He nodded toward my suitcase and the stack of boxes beside the door. "I am," I said. "4B." He looked at the door behind me then back at me. His eyes moved over my face the way they used to, like he was checking that everything was still where he remembered it. His expression gave nothing away which I remembered was one of his particular talents. But his eyes were doing something his face was not and I was very aware of it. "I'm in 4A," he said. Of course he was. I kept my face exactly where it was. "Good to know," I said and turned back to my door. The elevator opened behind me and I heard Ethan's voice before I saw him. "Reese, you left this downstairs." I turned. Ethan Cross was walking toward me with my handbag in his hand, his expression easy and relaxed the way it always was. He had on a grey jacket, his hair neat, and he looked exactly like what he was. Polished, put together, the kind of man who moved through any room without needing to announce himself. He reached me and held out the bag. I took it and he smiled, then reached over and moved a strand of hair away from my face and tucked it back. It was the kind of thing you did without thinking when you were comfortable with someone. I felt Noah's eyes on us before I even looked over. When I did look, his face was still composed. But his fingers had curled inward at his sides and his jaw had gone tight in a way I recognized. That was the one thing about Noah Prescott I had always been able to read. He was not as calm as he wanted to appear. Not even close. Good. The thought arrived faster than I expected. I did not push it away. In fact I reached for it and held onto it because if he was going to stand across the hall and look at me like I still belonged to him then the least I could do was remind him of exactly what he gave up. I turned back to Ethan and made sure my voice carried clearly across the hallway. "Thank you," I said. Then I touched his arm and turned just enough toward Noah. "Noah, this is Ethan. My fiancé." The word sat in the air between all three of us. I watched Noah's face. He did not flinch. He did not move. But something behind his eyes shifted in a way that told me the word had landed exactly where I intended it to. Ethan caught on immediately, which was one of the many reasons I valued him. He extended his hand toward Noah with a comfortable smile, the kind that held no apology in it at all. "Good to meet you," Ethan said. Noah looked at the extended hand for a moment then shook it. "You too," he said. His voice came out even. His eyes moved to me once, just once, and what I saw in them in that one second was something I was not prepared for. It was not anger. It was not indifference. It was something older and quieter and far more dangerous than either. I said nothing else. I unlocked 4B, let Ethan go in ahead of me and followed without looking back at the door across the hall. Inside the apartment was bright and mostly empty. The furniture I had ordered was already placed exactly where I had specified and the movers had stacked the boxes in the rooms where they belonged. It looked like the beginning of something organised. I set my bag on the kitchen counter and looked at Ethan. His eyebrows were raised. "Fiancé?" he said. "I'll explain later," I said. He studied my face the way he did when he was deciding whether to push. Then he nodded and let it go. He stayed for an hour and helped me sort through the first round of boxes. Then he said goodbye and I walked him to the door and watched him head to the elevator. The hallway was quiet. The door to 4A was closed. I went back inside and sat down on the couch in the middle of my new living room. The city outside the window was loud and moving and entirely indifferent to anything I was feeling. I hadn't planned for this. Out of every building in this city I had chosen this one. Out of every floor I had been put on this one. And out of every door in this hallway he had walked out of the one directly in front of mine. Twelve minutes from the office. Also Noah Prescott's building. I looked at my hands in my lap and made myself a promise right there on that couch. Whatever had broken in me five years ago I had already put it back together. He did not get to walk back in through a coincidence and take any of it apart again. I wasn't seventeen anymore. I was Reese Calloway. And I hadn't come this far to fall apart over a man who had once told me he didn't love me anymore.