THE CONFRONTATION

She was already talking before the door finished opening, which told me everything I needed to know about the kind of night I was about to have.

"Do you have any concept?" she asked, "of walls? Of neighbors? Of the fact that some of us have to be functional human beings in the morning?"

I leaned my shoulder into the frame and let her see exactly how unbothered I was, because unbothered was the entire performance now. Grey hoodie, bare feet, hair I hadn't touched in two days — the costume of a man with nothing better to do at two a.m. than whatever she thought I'd been doing.

"Can I help you," I said, not directly as a question. I don't ask questions I don't want answered.

"You can help me by not doing that. Whatever that was. At this volume. Nightly. I need some peace and quiet."

Behind me, on the counter, three monitors glowed through a cracked door I'd shoved mostly shut before answering — waveforms, a signal I'd been isolating for four hours, the actual reason I hadn't slept since Tuesday. If she took one step past me, she'd see it. She wouldn't understand it, but she'd remember it, and memory was the one thing I couldn't afford anyone in this building to have.

So I smiled instead. Slow. The kind of smile that answers a different question than the one being asked. "Jealous?"

Her mouth actually dropped open. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me."

"I am not — this isn't about — " She pulled the cardigan tighter around herself, which did something unhelpful to my concentration, and I filed that thought away in the part of my brain currently on fire for entirely different reasons. "This is about basic decency. This is about the fact that I have hopefully — hopefully — a job interview in six hours, and I cannot get through it on zero sleep because you apparently run a full production schedule out of a four-hundred-square-foot studio."

"A production schedule."

"You know what I mean."

"I don't, actually. Enlighten me."

Her eyes narrowed, and I watched her do the math I wanted her to do — watched her land, wrongly, safely, on exactly the story I needed her to believe. Trust-fund nobody. Rotating door of women. A man with too much time and not enough shame. It was almost insulting how easy her conclusion was to reach, except that easy was the entire point. Easy was armour. Easy was Desmond Cole's people finding nothing worth reporting in Room 4B except a rich idiot wasting his family's money on a company he paid for.

"You could at least," she said, lower now, like she was trying to sound reasonable and failing, "invest in soundproofing. Or consider that other people exist."

"I'll take it under advisement."

"I mean it. I work — well. I'm trying to work. I have an interview at eight."

"Then I'd stop standing in this hallway if I were you and prepare for my interview."

"I'm not leaving until you agree to keep it down."

"You're not really in a position to negotiate terms," I said. "This is my apartment. My door. My bed. My two a.m."

"And it's my ceiling. My floor. My entire nervous system."

"Then I'd suggest a white noise machine. I hear they work wonders, unless you are actually tempted by what you hear and you want a taste. I can make you drip." He giggled

"What the hell is your problem? That is a rude thing to say. I hear common courtesy works wonders too, but apparently that's not something you stock. That's not — this isn't a joke."

"No," I agreed, and let my eyes hold hers one second longer than a stranger's should, just to watch her breath catch, and hate that it had. "It's not. But it's two a.m., and you're standing outside a door in pajamas with avocados on them, lecturing a man you've never met about his personal life. If your own nights are that quiet, that's your problem."

Her face went through three colours in quick succession. "Excuse me—"

"Buy some earplugs or get someone to make you scream like a slut," I said, and started to close the door.

Her hand shot out and stopped it, flat against the wood, and for one unplanned second we were both just standing there with her palm an inch from mine, both of us furious for completely different reasons, and I felt something I had absolutely no time to feel.

"I do not desire a man to make me scream. Even if I want a man, you won't be the one to tell me to get one. This isn't over, pig" she said.

"I certainly hope not, lizard," I said, and shut the door before she could see that I meant it.

I stood there with my back against it, listening to her stomp away, and I let out a breath I hadn't planned on holding. Behind me, the monitors kept glowing, patient, indifferent, one waveform still climbing toward a signature I'd spent four months hunting.

I had a mole to catch. A rival circling my company like it already belonged to him. A cover that could not, under any circumstance, crack. And somehow the most dangerous thing in that building wasn't Desmond Cole's ghost in my server logs.

It was the woman downstairs who now thought I was a joke, and the fact that some idiot, useless part of me had liked making her furious more than I'd liked.