Distance Made Him Mine

I wasn't waiting for his text. That's the story I kept telling myself, anyway — right up until my phone buzzed on the table and I looked down way faster than someone who "wasn't waiting" has any business doing. Four days. That's how long since he'd gotten my number, through a mutual friend, at that gallery thing neither of us actually wanted to be at. Four days and nothing. Not a hey, not a like on a story, nothing. I'd run through every excuse by that point. Lost the number. Not that into it, actually. One of those guys who collects numbers and never uses them, like baseball cards he doesn't even like. Wednesday I stopped checking every twenty minutes. Thursday I almost believed I didn't care. By Friday the lie had started to feel less like a lie and more like something I'd just decided was true. Guys like him don't usually go quiet for four days by accident. I knew that. Didn't stop it from working on me anyway. The club was doing its usual Friday thing — bass loud enough to feel in your ribs, lights sliding red and violet over our table, somebody ordering a round of shots nobody asked for. My best friend slapped the marble edge laughing at something the bartender said. I smiled along, doing a pretty solid impression of a girl who wasn't thinking about her phone at all. Then the screen lit up out of the corner of my eye and my body reacted before my brain got the memo. Not a group chat. Not a work email. An unknown number, no name attached, an area code from somewhere thousands of miles and several time zones away. **Unknown:** Are you always this hard to get a hold of, or are you just playing hard to get? My thumb stopped over the glass. My chest did this stupid little stutter thing I chose to ignore. I leaned back into the booth and for a second the whole club — glasses clinking, everyone talking over each other, the bass — dropped down to background noise, like someone turned the volume knob without asking. The nerve. Four days of nothing and this is how he opens. **Me:** Takes four days to process a new contact, huh? Was starting to think you lost the number. Or forgot how to type. He answered before I'd even locked the screen. Bubble popped up instantly, which bugged me on principle — meant he'd been sitting there with the phone in hand, waiting for exactly this. **Him:** Never lost it. Never forgot. Wanted to make sure that when I did reach out, I'd have your full attention. Looks like it worked. I breathed out through my nose, sharp. Arrogant. And annoyingly, correct — he had my attention, all of it, in a way that felt a little embarrassing given how little he'd actually done to earn it. **Me:** Don't flatter yourself, sweetheart. I'm out right now. Busy. **Him:** Out where? And more importantly — who with? There it was. That little edge of possessive that had no business existing between two people who'd never even stood in the same room. Should've annoyed me more than it did. Instead it did this small electric thing under my skin that I'd never admit to out loud. **Me:** Wouldn't you like to know. Fair warning though, I have standards. I go for guys who actually hit the gym, lift heavy. You look more like the type who's chained to a desk sixteen hours a day. Cheap shot. Knew it the second I hit send. From what I'd seen scrolling his socials the night we met — and I scrolled longer than I'd ever admit — he was lean, sharp-jawed, always in something tailored. More boardroom than barbell. Felt like safe territory to needle him about. The bubble disappeared. A minute went by. Then two. Almost three. Long enough I started thinking I'd finally said the thing that made him lose interest, the thing I'd half expected from the start anyway. My friend nudged my elbow, handed me a shot without a word, eyebrows up. I shook my head, eyes still on the phone. Then the screen lit up again. **Him:** Is that a challenge? I smirked, chin in my hand. **Me:** Maybe it is. What are you gonna do about it, desk boy? Came back fast this time. A few seconds. Somehow the short answer felt more dangerous than a long one would have. **Him:** Watch me. Didn't have anything for that. Just sat there staring at two words like they meant more than they should've, until my friend hauled me onto the dance floor and the phone went back in my bag. --- The days after that just kind of blurred together. We texted constantly — quick stuff during my lunch break, longer conversations that went past midnight because neither of us wanted to be the one to say goodnight first. He was sharp, always a step ahead, never quite letting me win a round outright. But the second I tried to ask what he actually did with his evenings, where he worked, what his life looked like off-screen, he'd get vague. Not evasive exactly. Deliberate. "Work stuff," he'd say. Or, "Boring. Tell me about your day instead." And somehow I always let him get away with the redirect, too caught up in whatever came next to push back. By the following Thursday — a full week after that first text — I was on my couch in an oversized sweater, half-answering a work email while some low playlist ran in the background. My phone buzzed on the cushion. **Him:** Free for a minute? Before I could type anything the screen switched over to a video call, his name lighting up where a photo should've been but wasn't. My stomach did this small dumb flip. We hadn't done this yet. Everything up to now had been text, maybe an occasional voice note when one of us was too lazy to type. A video call felt like an entirely different thing. I smoothed my hair down out of pure reflex, caught my reflection in the dark laptop screen, and swiped to answer before I could talk myself out of it. Picture took a second to load. I'd braced for a dim apartment, him at a desk, sleeves rolled up — the moody backdrop that matched the version of him I'd built in my head. Instead: fluorescent lighting, mirrored walls, rubber flooring, the clang of weights somewhere behind him, a treadmill humming under it all. And there he was, dead center, clearly having angled the phone himself. Not an accident. Grey compression shirt, soaked through at the collar and down the middle of his chest, clinging to a build I hadn't fully clocked under the button-downs in his photos. Hair damp, stuck to his forehead a little. Phone in one hand, a set of heavy locker keys hanging off two fingers of the other. "Where are you?" I said, sitting up, suddenly aware of the sweater and the fact that I looked like someone who'd done nothing all evening. Which, fair, I had. He leaned his shoulder into a weight rack, catching his breath, a slow half-smile pulling at one side of his mouth. "Where do you think?" "You're at a gym." "Not just a gym." Voice low, a little rough from exertion, doing something unfair to my ability to focus. "Got a membership three days ago. Found a trainer. I'm here every morning before my shift, and most nights after." I sat up straighter, pulling my knees in. "Because of what I said last week?" "I told you to watch me." Quieter now. "You think I was joking?" "You rebuilt your whole routine over one thing I said in a group chat with myself, basically." "Nothing you say to me is random," he said, no hesitation, like it was just a fact he'd already accepted. "You said you liked guys who train, who lift, who take care of themselves. So now I train. Giving you exactly what you asked for." Didn't have a comeback for that one. Annoyed me more than almost anything he'd said so far. Something warm spread low in my stomach and I hated how obvious I probably looked on my end of the call. "You're out of your mind," I managed, going for unimpressed, landing somewhere closer to affected. "Maybe." He stepped toward a quieter corner, away from the machines. "Or maybe I just know what I want and I'm done pretending otherwise. You think the distance keeps you safe. Thousands of miles, different time zone, screen in the way. Like none of this counts because it's not in person yet." He leaned in a little, and even through the screen his voice dropped into something more deliberate. "I'm going to build the kind of consistency you can't ignore," he said. "Answer when you call, every time. Be in your head whether you want me there or not. And once I've done all that—" "What happens then?" I asked, hating how much I wanted the answer. "Then I get on a plane," he said, simple as that. "And come get what's mine." Silence after that, heavier than it had any right to be for two people who barely knew each other. I sat in it a beat too long before I found my voice. "Pretty sure of yourself," I said, aiming for casual, landing somewhere closer to unsteady. "What makes you think I'll still be around by then?" He laughed, low, mostly breath. "Because your hands are shaking right now and you haven't looked away from the screen once since I picked up." He wasn't wrong. Most irritating part of the whole conversation. "I have to go," I said, too abrupt, panic creeping in at how fast this whole thing was moving, how little control I had over my own reactions. "Need to sleep." "Don't hang up yet. Stay on while I walk to the car, at least." "No. Goodnight." "Wait—" I hit the red icon before he could talk me out of it. Almost on instinct. The apartment dropped back into a silence that felt too big for the space, nothing but the low hum of the playlist still going. I sat there a long moment, phone against my chest, trying to get my breathing back to something normal. He was a lot. Probably an unreasonable amount, honestly, in a way that should've set off more alarm bells than it did. And none of that had stopped my whole body from reacting to him like it had already made up its mind without asking me first. Eventually I set the phone down on the cushion, pulled my knees up, reached for the remote, tried to physically shake off the last twenty minutes. *CLACK.* The sound cut through so sharp I flinched, whole body going rigid before my brain caught up with what it even was. Metallic. Sharp. Not random. Not the TV. Not the phone. The front door. *Click. Shift.* I froze on the couch, every muscle locking up, cold sliding down my spine as the deadbolt turned — slow, unmistakable — from the outside. I live alone. Nobody has a key to this apartment. Nobody. I watched, unable to move, as the brass handle started to dip down, the door easing open an inch, a thin slice of hallway light cutting across the floor. My phone buzzed hard against the cushion. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Hands shaking, I looked down. One text. Unknown number. **Unknown:** I told you I was coming.