The Biker's Regret: The Enemy I Became.

I need to be ready

(Reese)

I heard the elevator before I saw him.

I had just come through the lobby after a long day, the kind that left you quiet on the inside, not empty, just used up in all the right places. The presentation follow up had gone well. Simone had locked in two of the press dates and my marketing director had come back with numbers that made sense. Things were moving the way they were supposed to move and I had driven home feeling like myself again for the first time in days.

That lasted until the elevator doors opened on four.

Ethan was standing in the hallway.

He had his jacket over one arm and his phone in his hand and he turned when he heard the elevator and smiled the way he always did, easy and warm.

"I was about to call you," he said.

"I didn't know you were coming," I said.

"I was in the area. Thought I'd check on you." He fell into step beside me as I walked toward my door. "Marcus wants to do dinner this week with his sister. He thinks it would help if his sister sees us together before the family thing next month."

I pulled my keys out. "His sister?"

"She's been asking questions," Ethan said. "Nothing serious. Just the kind that become serious if we don't get ahead of them."

"Fine. Set it up and send me the details."

"Thursday works if you're free."

"I'll make it work."

I put the key in the door and that was when I heard the click of the latch across the hallway.

Noah's door opened.

He came out with his jacket in one hand and his keys in the other, already moving, already headed somewhere. He did not see us immediately. He was pulling the door closed behind him and then he looked up and stopped.

The three of us stood in that hallway and nobody said anything for a moment.

Noah looked at Ethan. Then at me. His face stayed where it was.

"Evening," Ethan said. Comfortable, easy, the way he always was.

"Evening," Noah said.

Ethan extended his hand. "Ethan. We met briefly when Reese was moving in."

Noah shook it. "I remember."

Two words. Flat and carrying something underneath that only I could hear.

I kept my face where it needed to be.

"Good to see you again," Ethan said, already turning back toward me the way a man did when he was comfortable and had nothing to prove to anyone in the hallway.

Noah did not move toward the elevator. He stood where he was with his jacket in his hand and looked at me. Not at Ethan. At me. The same way he had looked at me this morning in the elevator and in the hallway on moving day and every moment in between. Patient and certain and not bothering to hide either of those things.

Ethan was standing right beside me and Noah was looking at me like he was not there at all.

I felt it move through me before I could stop it.

"We should go in," I said to Ethan. My voice came out even. I was grateful for that.

Ethan nodded and I pushed the door open and he went in ahead of me. I followed and closed the door and stood with my back against it for just a second before I moved into the kitchen.

The apartment was quiet.

Ethan set his jacket on the back of the kitchen chair and leaned against the counter. He did not say anything right away. He just looked at me with that expression he had, calm and reading everything at once. That was the thing about Ethan. He did not need a lot of words to understand a situation. He had understood this one from the moment I told him about it and tonight had only added to what he already knew.

"He was looking at you," he said.

"I know," I said. I moved to the kitchen and filled a glass with water.

"How are you doing with it," he said.

"I'm fine."

"Reese."

"I said I'm fine, Ethan."

He was quiet for a moment. He knew me well enough to know when pushing would get him somewhere and when it would not. This was the second kind and he had the sense to recognise it.

He picked up his jacket and we went through the rest of it, what time Thursday worked, what Marcus needed us to say in front of his sister and what we did not need to say. We kept it practical the way we always did when the situation called for practical. By the time he left everything that needed to be covered had been covered.

I walked him to the door and he said goodnight and took the elevator down.

I stood in the open doorway and looked at the hallway.

Noah was gone. His door was closed and the floor was quiet and there was nothing out here except the low sound of the building settling around me. I stood there for a moment longer than I needed to and then I went back inside and closed my own door.

I put my bag down and went to the window and looked out at the street below.

The day had been good. A genuinely good day where things went the way they were supposed to go and the work felt like it was building toward something real. I had driven home feeling settled and clear and ready for the next thing on the list. That was the life I had built. Purposeful and moving forward and entirely on my own terms.

And then a door opened in the hallway and thirty seconds undid most of it.

That was what I could not work out how to manage. Not the big moments. I had handled those. I had handled the night he came to my door and the morning after and the conversation outside my office and every conversation since. I had held my line through all of it. What I could not seem to hold my line through was the small things. The way he came out of that apartment and looked up and saw Ethan standing beside me and did not change his expression by a single degree. The way he had looked at me across that hallway like the answer to something he had already decided.

Ethan had seen it in thirty seconds.

He was standing right there beside me and Noah had looked straight past him like the only person in that hallway worth looking at was me.

I moved away from the window and went to the kitchen and started making dinner, keeping my hands busy the way I had been keeping them busy for days now. It helped. Not completely but enough to keep me moving forward in the direction I had chosen.

I was not going to let this pull me off course. I had too much ahead of me and too much already built to let one man and one hallway and thirty seconds of eye contact undo any of it.

I believed that.

I just needed the rest of me to catch up.

The hallway outside my door was quiet.

Somewhere on the other side of it, eventually, he would come back.

And I was going to have to be ready for that.