Somewhere Between Us

Chapter 5: Learning to Cohabitate

The penthouse was, Zoey decided within the first ten minutes, entirely too large for two people who weren't actually living together.

"There are four bathrooms," she said, standing in the doorway of what she'd been told was "the east wing," as though the apartment had wings, as though it were a museum rather than a home. "Four. I have used one bathroom my entire life, sometimes shared with three other people, and you have four bathrooms for yourself."

"Five, technically. There's one in the gym."

"I hate you."

"You signed a contract," Dylan said, unbothered, leaning against the doorframe with the particular ease of a man who had never once in his life questioned whether he deserved this much square footage. "Buyer's remorse isn't covered under the terms."

She dropped her single duffel bag, embarrassingly small against the marble floor, onto the bed in the guest room she'd claimed as hers, and tried not to think about how many months of rent this one room alone probably cost. The mattress alone was probably worth more than her mother's car.

"This is going to take some adjusting," she admitted.

"Take your time. The apartment isn't going anywhere." He lingered in the doorway a beat longer than necessary, glancing around the room like he was seeing it fresh through her eyes. "Let me know if you need anything moved. Or removed. I have art here I don't actually like. My decorator insisted on it. Feel free to have opinions."

"I have opinions about everything. You're going to regret offering."

"I regret most things eventually. This will just be sooner than usual."

The first week established, with brutal efficiency, exactly how differently two people could occupy the same six thousand square feet.

Dylan left dishes in the sink like a man who had never once considered that dishes required a second step after being used. Zoey labeled the refrigerator shelves, which he found so genuinely, helplessly funny that he took a photo of it and, she later learned, showed it to his assistant. He kept the thermostat at a temperature better suited to a meat locker; she kept sneaking it back up when he wasn't looking, a quiet war neither of them acknowledged out loud but both of them were absolutely fighting.

"You've moved the thermostat again," he said one evening, not looking up from his laptop.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"It's sixty-eight degrees. I set it to sixty-four."

"Maybe the apartment has opinions too."

"The apartment does not have opinions. You have opinions, and you're smuggling them into my climate control." But he was smiling when he said it, the particular smile that meant he found her more entertaining than annoying, which she was beginning to recognize as his default setting where she was concerned.

The hardest adjustment wasn't the bathrooms or the thermostat, though. It was the quiet, deliberate work of keeping two entirely separate lives running under one roof, the calls to her mother taken in the stairwell instead of the apartment, the transfers to her family's account done late at night when she was reasonably sure Dylan was asleep, the careful way she never let her phone screen face up on the counter when he walked past.

She caught him noticing, once. She'd been on the phone with Micah about his cleats, murmuring reassurances in the hallway with her back half-turned, and when she came back into the kitchen, Dylan was watching her with an expression that wasn't quite a question, though it wanted to be one.

"Everything okay?" he asked.

"Fine. Work call."

"At nine at night."

"Lawyers keep strange hours." It came out smoother than she expected, and she watched him decide, visibly, not to push. He had a way of doing that, circling a question, weighing whether it was his to ask, and then, more often than not, letting it go. She wasn't sure yet whether that was respect or simple disinterest, and some small, unhelpful part of her hoped it was the former.

"Fair enough," he said instead, and went back to his laptop, though she caught him glancing at her twice more before the night was through, like he was filing something away for later.

It was the framed photo that nearly gave her away completely.

She'd unpacked it without thinking, her father, younger than she remembered him being, laughing at something off-camera, one arm slung around a much smaller version of herself. It had sat on her nightstand every night for over a decade, through two apartments and one particularly bad flood, and she'd set it on the shelf in the guest room out of habit rather than intention.

Dylan found it while helping her rearrange furniture, which had started as a joke about the room's terrible feng shui and turned, somehow, into an actual project.

"Who's this?" he asked, holding the frame carefully, like he understood instinctively that it mattered.

"My father." She took it back, gentler than she meant to, and set it on the shelf herself, angled just so. "He passed away. A while ago now."

"I'm sorry," he said plainly, without the performative softness people usually reached for, which she found she appreciated more than she expected to. "You don't talk about him."

"Neither do you, about yours."

Something flickered across his face, recognition, maybe, of being handed his own words back, and for a moment neither of them said anything, the silence stretching comfortable rather than awkward, two people who'd each learned, separately, the particular art of grieving quietly.

"Fair trade," he said finally. "We'll both keep not talking about it, then."

"Deal."

He didn't ask more, and she didn't offer more, and something about the exchange settled a small, wary part of her chest she hadn't realized was braced for a different reaction. It was, she thought later, the first entirely honest moment they'd had since the coffee shop, no performance in it, no audience, nothing either of them stood to gain by being kind.

By the second week, something had shifted into a rhythm neither of them commented on directly. She started leaving his coffee exactly the way he liked it, without being asked, because she'd noticed the way he made it himself, and it seemed easier than watching him fumble with the machine every morning. He started knocking before entering the rooms she was in, which she suspected wasn't a habit he'd had before, and stopped leaving quite as many dishes in the sink, though he'd never admit that was deliberate.

"You're doing the thing," he said one night, catching her at the kitchen counter with her laptop, brow furrowed over a spreadsheet she quickly minimized.

"What thing?"

"The math thing. I've seen it before." He said it lightly, but there was real attention behind it, the same watchfulness she'd caught twice before and let go both times. "You do it when you think no one's looking."

"I'm always doing math. It's a personality flaw."

"Or a personality trait you'd rather I not notice." He didn't push further, though the observation sat between them a moment too long to be entirely casual. "For what it's worth, whatever it is, if it's something the marriage should be covering, tell me. That's what the contract's for."

"It's fine," she said, closing the laptop fully. "Just old habits."

He let it go, the way he always did, though she caught the small crease of concern that lingered a second longer than the conversation warranted.

The invitation came three days later, delivered by way of a text from Dylan while she was on her lunch break at the café, four words that made her stomach drop before she'd even finished reading them.

Dinner Friday. My stepmother's. You're coming.

She stared at the message for a long moment, thinking of Marguerite's too-warm smile, Julian's thin one, the strange held note underneath all of it she still couldn't name.

Do I have a choice? She typed back.

No, came the reply, almost instantly. But I'll owe you one.

She put her phone away, finished her shift, and spent the rest of the day quietly dreading Friday in a way that had very little to do with the marriage being fake and a great deal to do with the family it was about to introduce her to more thoroughly than the wedding ever had.