I'd Give Eraserhead

"No. No. Absolutely not. You cannot. You cannot just draw a picture of the sun and write 'it is hot' and act like that's a complete answer. I said explain why we have seasons, Marcus. Seasons. You've experienced them. You own a coat."

A pause. The sound of a pen tapping.

"You know what, fine. Fine. I'll give you credit for the drawing because the sun does look like that. That's a good sun. But Marcus, buddy, 'it is hot' is not science. 'It is hot' is a complaint."

More pen tapping.

"Oh, and now on the back you've drawn a snowman and written 'it is cold.' Marcus. That is the opposite of the same wrong answer."

You lie there in the dark, staring at your ceiling, and think: I'm going to have to move.

—

You don't move.

You do, however, meet him. Not on purpose. In the lift, on a Wednesday morning, because apparently his schedule overlaps with yours in the one way you'd rather it didn't.

He's taller than he sounds through the wall. That's the first stupid thing you notice. The second is the shirt, which is faded grey and reads I MAKE BAD CHEMISTRY JOKES BECAUSE ALL THE GOOD ONES ARGON.

"Hey! You're in 4B, right?" He sticks his hand out. Smiles like this is something he's been looking forward to. "Ryland. Grace. Ryland Grace. That's. One name, not two options."

You give him yours, because you were raised with manners, and then you give him about four seconds of eye contact before looking at the lift buttons.

"So listen, if you ever need anything. Sugar, eggs, someone to explain the hot water schedule because it's honestly deranged, I made a spreadsheet."

"Thanks," you say. The doors open. You leave.

You're not unfriendly. You're just not looking for a friend in this building. Especially not one who grades homework out loud at midnight.

The rants don't stop. They become furniture.

Tuesdays are grading nights. You learn this the way you learn anything about him, which is involuntarily. Tuesdays he argues with Marcus (who never spells anything right), with a girl named Priya (who is "genuinely too smart for this class, which is a me problem"), and occasionally with the textbook itself, which he seems to consider a personal enemy.

Thursdays are cooking. Or what he calls cooking. You hear a pan clang, then a long silence, then: "Okay. Okay okay okay. That's not. That's fine. Smoke doesn't always mean fire. Smoke sometimes means. A learning opportunity."

On a Friday night in your second week, you hear him explain the Drake Equation to absolutely nobody.

Not on a phone call. Not to a guest. To his empty apartment, at conversational volume, with the cadence of someone who is simply thinking out loud and does not know or does not care that the walls are made of wet tissue paper.

"So the thing about the Drake Equation is that it's not really an equation. It's supposed to tell you how many alien civilizations are out there in the galaxy. Like, actually out there, right now, sending signals. And the way it works is you take all these factors. How many stars are born every year, how many of those have planets, how many of those planets can support life, how many actually develop life, and then you multiply them all together and you get a number. Except every single term is a guess! Every single one! It's guesses multiplied by guesses and we treat the output like it means something, which, honestly? Respect. It's basically a prayer with variables. You're saying, 'God, I know you're probably not listening, but here's my estimate for how many of you there aren't.'"

You are lying in bed. It is 10:30pm. You are smiling, and you are annoyed about it.

—

The lift again, two days later.

You're carrying groceries. He's carrying what appears to be a crate of second-hand lab equipment, because of course he is.

"Hey, 4B!" He shifts the crate to one hip. Something glass clinks inside. "Quick question. Totally unrelated to anything. Do you happen to know if there's a rule about. Small controlled experiments. In residential units."

"What kind of experiments."

"Small ones. Very small. Mostly safe."

"Mostly."

"Like ninety percent safe. Ninety-two. I could get it to ninety-five if I had a fume hood, which I don't, hence the question."

"Please don't blow up the building."

He grins. It's the wrong response and he knows it, and the grin says he knows it, and the grin also says he is definitely going to do whatever he was already going to do before he asked. "Noted. Noted! That's. That's not a no, technically, but I hear you."

The lift doors close. You stand in your kitchen putting away groceries and realize you didn't tell him off. You meant to. He just talked past the place where you would have.

—

You hear him sneeze eleven times in a row on a Saturday morning. You count. Not on purpose. But the walls don't give you a choice, and after the sixth one you're committed.

Eleven sneezes. Then silence. Then, very quietly: "Ow."

A pause.

"Okay. No more. We're done. That's. The body is not designed for that. That was structural damage. I think I detached something."

You press your face into your pillow so he doesn't hear you laugh, and something in that gesture. The hiding. The fact that you don't want him to know you're listening.

That's the first time you think: oh no.

Not because of anything he's done. Just because you've started listening on purpose, and you're not sure when that happened.

—

He leaves something at your door on a Sunday afternoon.

A printout. A neatly formatted spreadsheet, actually, with the building's hot water schedule annotated in handwriting that is surprisingly legible for someone this chaotic. There's a post-it note stuck to the top: Made you a copy! The 7-7:30am window is the sweet spot. Also Tuesdays the pressure drops around 6pm, I think there's a valve thing, I'm investigating. — R

He signed it with his initial. Like you might not know which neighbour was conducting an investigation into the building's plumbing.

You run into him at the mailboxes the next morning and he looks up, hopeful. "Did you get the. The hot water thing? I slid it under your door, I wasn't sure if you."

"I got it. Thanks."

The thanks is a full stop. You hear yourself do it. The bright, closed, conversation-over thanks that leaves no room for a follow-up. You grab your mail and turn toward the stairs.

Behind you, a small pause. "Oh. Okay. Cool. Well, if you ever want to know about the valve thing, it's actually pretty interesting, there's this."

"I'm good. Thanks."

You don't look back. You take the stairs instead of the lift because the lift is a box and you can't be in a box with him right now, and you can feel him standing at the mailboxes behind you, still holding his own mail, still mid-sentence about a valve.

The spreadsheet is on your kitchen counter. It is helpful. It is accurate. The 7am window is, in fact, the sweet spot.

You use it every day and you never mention it.

—

The next time you see him in the hallway, there's a scorch mark on his door frame.

"It's cosmetic," he says, before you've said anything.

"I wasn't going to ask."

"You were looking at it."

"Because it's a scorch mark. On your door."

"Cosmetic scorch mark. Important distinction. The experiment went great, actually. The experiment itself was flawless. The experiment's proximity to a kitchen towel was the issue."

You should be angry. You should say something about lease agreements and fire safety and the fact that you live right there, eight inches of drywall away from whatever he just did to a kitchen towel.

Instead you say, "You're a disaster," and it comes out wrong. It comes out warm. Like you've said it before. Like you say it to people you like.

His face does something complicated. Surprise, maybe. Like he expected the version of you from the lift and got someone else for a second.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, that's. That's been noted. Extensively."

You go inside and close the door and stand there for a second with your keys still in your hand.

The thing about the wall is that it lets you know him without any of the risk of knowing him. You get the unperformed version. The late-night, talking-to-himself, arguing-with-homework, burning-things, sneezing-eleven-times version. And that version is.

A problem.

Because in person, you can handle him. In person, he's your annoying neighbour who does small controlled experiments and doesn't respect noise ordinances, and you can be cold to that guy. You have been. That version of you works fine.

It's the other version that's the problem. The one lying in the dark, pressing your face into a pillow so he won't hear you laugh. That version likes him. That version has been listening on purpose for days and hasn't told the daytime you, and if those two versions of you ever have to exist in the same room as him at the same time, you are in serious trouble.

—

The first time, you don't know what you're hearing.

It's late. Past midnight. You're half asleep, that loose dissolving place where sounds don't fully register as real, and through the wall there's. Something. A rhythm that doesn't belong to anything you can file. Not talking, not the TV, not him pacing the way he does sometimes when he's working through a problem.

Breathing. Uneven. A little ragged.

Then a sound. Low, caught, bitten off. Like he started to say something and stopped himself. And then a rhythm beneath it, steady, unmistakable. The soft, slick sound of a hand moving.

Your eyes open.

You lie very still. The way you'd lie still if a noise woke you up and you weren't sure if it was inside your apartment or out, except you know exactly where it's coming from. You know which room. You know which wall. You know that the headboard of his bed is probably eighteen inches from yours because you've thought about the floor plan and you wish you hadn't.

He's quiet. Controlled. Nothing like the daytime version, the one who narrates at full volume, who can't keep a thought inside his head for longer than it takes to form. This version is trying not to be heard, and that effort. The restraint of it. The idea of him biting down on every sound while his hand works himself over, steady and deliberate, because he knows the walls are thin, because he's always known the walls are thin.

Your heart is pounding and you are not moving.

It doesn't last long. A shift. The rhythm speeds up, just slightly, and then a breath that's sharper than the ones before it. A groan he almost catches in time. Then quiet. Real quiet. The kind that settles.

You stare at the ceiling. Your body is warm in a way that has nothing to do with the blankets and everything to do with the fact that you just lay there and listened and you didn't stop listening and you could have put headphones in, you could have gone to the kitchen, you could have done anything, and you didn't.

You don't sleep well.

—

In the morning he's in the hallway. Jacket, backpack, bike helmet dangling from one hand, travel mug in the other. Normal. Completely normal. He gives you the same slightly-too-friendly smile he always gives you, the one you usually return with as little warmth as possible.

"Morning, 4B."

"Morning."

He holds the stairwell door for you. You walk through it without looking at him because if you look at him you will think about the sound he made, the caught one, the one he bit off, and you are not going to do that in the stairwell at 7:45am.

You do it on the bus instead.

—

Three days later, his bike is blocking your door.

Not entirely. Not maliciously. It's leaning against the wall between your doors at an angle that means you have to step around it, and it's not the first time, and you've been pretending it doesn't bother you because picking a fight with him about a bike felt petty before and now it feels impossible, because how are you supposed to stand in front of him and be annoyed about a bicycle wheel when you know what he sounds like when he comes.

But the bike is there. And you've had a long day. And you step around it and your bag catches the handlebar and the whole thing clatters sideways into your door with a sound that probably reaches the third floor.

His door opens. Of course it does.

"Oh. Hey. Sorry, was that. Did that fall? I was going to bring it inside, I just. I got distracted by this thing about axial tilt, which. Not relevant. Sorry. I'll move it."

He's in socks. No shoes, just socks, sliding across the hallway floor to grab the bike, and his hair is doing something unsupervised and he's wearing a shirt that says GEOLOGY ROCKS and you want to be irritated. You are irritated. You are also looking at his hands on the handlebars and thinking about his hands in the dark and you need to stop that immediately.

"It's the third time this week," you say, and it comes out sharper than you planned.

His face changes. The easy smile dims by a fraction. "Right. Yeah. No, you're right, I'll. I'll keep it inside. Sorry."

He wheels it into his apartment. You go into yours. The door closes and you stand there and feel like a terrible person, because he looked sorry, genuinely sorry, the way a golden retriever looks sorry, and you were cold to him because you can't figure out how to be anything else to his face.

Through the wall, you hear him lean the bike against something. A pause. Then, quietly: "Okay. Inside bike. Inside bike from now on. We can do that. That's fine."

He's talking to himself. He doesn't know you can hear.

You press your forehead against your door and close your eyes.

—

The third time. The fourth.

You stop keeping count because counting means admitting there's something to count, and you're not ready for that arithmetic.

But it's in your head now. Daytime, nighttime, all the time. He rants about a documentary he watched ("they got the scale of the solar system completely wrong, it's like they've never even seen the solar system, and I know nobody's seen the solar system but you could at least try") and your brain serves up the memory of his breathing, unbidden, laid right over his voice like a transparency. He talks, and you hear the other thing he sounds like. You can't unhear it. The information is in you now, permanent, and every time he opens his mouth in the hallway you feel it flicker behind your sternum like a pilot light.

He holds the door for you again on a Thursday. You say thanks and he says "yeah, of course" and his voice is just his voice, normal, unremarkable, and your whole body responds to it like a tuning fork and you hate this. You specifically hate this.

—

It's a Wednesday night when you hear your name.

He's been quiet today. No rants. No cooking disasters. You almost wondered if he was out, and then you heard the door close around ten, heard him move through his apartment in the dark, heard the bed.

You're lying on your side, facing the wall. You should roll over. You should put on a podcast. You should do literally anything other than lie here in the dark and wait for it, because that's what you're doing now, you're waiting for it, and if you had any self-respect at all you would.

He starts. And tonight he's not quiet about it.

Not loud, not the way he is during the day. But less careful. Like something in him has loosened or he's stopped trying to hold it, and you can hear more than breathing, you can hear him, the sounds he makes when he's not monitoring them, rough and open and. God.

Your hand is on your stomach. Then lower. Just resting. Not yet.

He says something. Muffled. Into the pillow, maybe, or against his arm. You can't make it out and your whole body goes tight trying to, which is insane, you are straining to hear your neighbour masturbate and this is not the person you thought you were but apparently it's the person you are now.

Then he says it again. Clearer this time. Like he moved his head, like he turned toward the wall.

Your name.

Not moaned. Not gasped. Said. Like a sentence he's been thinking and finally let out. Like he's been turning it over in his mouth and decided, just this once, to stop swallowing it.

And that's it. That's the thing you were holding out against and it's gone.

Your hand moves. No more resting, no more hovering. You touch yourself with his voice still in the wall, still in your bloodstream, and it's not careful, it's not slow. It's weeks of pretending you weren't listening and you are done pretending. You're wet, you've been wet since before he said your name, probably since you heard him start, and your fingers find a rhythm and it's his rhythm, the one you can hear through the wall, the one your body has apparently memorized without your permission.

On your back like this, staring up at the dark ceiling, you can hear everything. Every breath. Every shift of his weight. And you can hear yourself too, and that's the problem. Your breathing is too loud. The small sounds you're making are too loud. Everything in this apartment is a betrayal and the ceiling is right there not absorbing any of it.

You flip over.

Face down, pillow pulled tight under your head, your hand trapped beneath you now. This is a containment strategy. This is you being sensible about the acoustics of the situation.

Except.

The angle changes everything. Your weight settles onto your hand, onto your fingers, and gravity does something that your wrist alone wasn't doing. You grind down and the pressure is different here, fuller, your whole body behind it, and the first slow roll of your hips pulls a breath out of you that you bury in the pillow. You do it again. Again. Each time the weight of you pushes your fingers harder where you need them, and the pillow is in your teeth and the wall is right there, right beside you, and every sound he makes travels through it and into the mattress and into your chest.

He's still going. You can hear his breathing shift, rougher now, less measured, and you think about what that breath would feel like. Against your hair. Against the back of your neck. What that low, caught sound would do to you if it wasn't filtered through drywall and distance but pressed directly into your skin, his mouth on your throat, the vibration of it in your pulse point. If you were the one pulling those sounds out of him. Your fingers instead of his. Your name in his mouth not said to an empty room but said into the curve of your shoulder, said against your ear, said so close you could feel the shape of it.

Your hips roll down against your hand and you bite the pillowcase and think about his hands, the ones that held the handlebars, the ones that gesture when he talks, and what they would feel like replacing yours. How he'd touch you. Whether he'd be careful at first, the way he's careful about everything else when he thinks someone's watching, or whether he'd be like this. The nighttime version. Unmonitored. Honest.

You think about the sounds he doesn't let himself make during the day. The groan he almost caught in time that first night. What that sound would be if he stopped catching it. If he let it go into your mouth. If you swallowed it.

That's when the sound comes out.

Not when you expect it. Not at the finish. You grind down and your whole body is behind it now, the full weight of you bearing down onto your hand, and the angle is too good, too much, and the moan that comes out of you is the kind that starts in your chest and doesn't care about the pillow. It goes right through the cotton and the stuffing and into the room like the pillow isn't even there. Real. Unmistakable. The kind of sound that only means one thing.

You freeze. Face down, hand still pinned beneath you, every muscle locked.

On the other side of the wall, he has gone very still.

The silence is excruciating. Five seconds. Ten. You don't breathe. He doesn't breathe. Your hand is still between your legs and your heart is in your teeth and the whole building is holding its breath with you and you are going to die, you are going to actually die right here in this bed because he said your name and you moaned and he heard you and there is no version of this that is survivable.

Then. Slowly. He starts again.

And something about the way he starts. The pace of it. Deliberate. Like he heard you and the hearing made him harder. Like the sound you made was not a problem.

You press your forehead into the pillow. Your hand moves again. And this time you don't try to be quiet.

You grind down into your own fingers and match his rhythm and his breathing is rough and yours is rough and you are face down in your pillow thinking about his mouth on your neck and his weight on your back and the wall is nothing, the wall is air, the wall is the only reason you are not in his bed right now with his hand where yours is and his voice in your ear instead of in the plaster.

He's close. You can hear it the way you always can, the catch, the tightening, the way the sounds get shorter and less controlled. You're close too. Closer than you should be this fast, but you've been thinking about this for longer than tonight and your body knows it even if you've been lying to yourself about the timeline.

You come with your teeth in the pillow and your hips stuttering against your hand and a sound in your throat that you don't fully stop. It escapes. And it happens at almost the same moment he finishes on his side, and the symmetry of that is either coincidence or something worse than coincidence, and you don't want to think about which one.

The silence afterward is different from the other silences.

It has a shape. A weight. Like something has been set down in the room that wasn't there before and neither of you are going to acknowledge it but neither of you can pretend it isn't there.

You lie in the dark with your heart hammering and your hand still between your legs and you think: he heard that. He definitely heard that.

And the thing that should terrify you, the thing that keeps you awake for another hour staring at the wall that is not a wall, is that some part of you. The part you're not speaking to right now. Is glad.

—

In the morning, you decide it didn't happen.

Not the touching. That happened. You're not delusional. But the sound. The sound was not as loud as you think it was. You were face down in a pillow. Pillows are specifically designed to absorb sound, that's basically their whole job, and the wall is thin but it's still a wall, and he was. Busy. Distracted. Focused on other things. There is absolutely no reason to believe he heard anything.

You shower. You make coffee. You eat breakfast like a person who did not, twelve hours ago, grind herself into her own hand while listening to her neighbour say her name through a shared wall. That person does not exist. You are a different person. You are the person who eats cereal and checks email and has never thought about anyone's mouth on the back of her neck.

In the hallway, his door is closed. No bike. No scorch marks. No signs of life.

You go to work. You come home. The wall is silent. He's out, maybe, or grading quietly for once, and the silence should be a relief but instead it sits in your apartment like a held breath, and you keep catching yourself listening for him, and that makes you angry at yourself, which is at least a familiar feeling.

You go to bed. Nothing happens. You sleep.

See? Fine. You're fine.

—

The next evening, he starts ranting.

Something about a planet. Not a real planet, a hypothetical one, something to do with tidal locking and how one side would be permanently frozen and the other side would be permanently on fire and how that's "not even the interesting part, the interesting part is the terminator line, which. Okay, not the movie. Although also a great movie. But the line between the hot side and the cold side, this narrow strip where the temperature is juuust right, and that's where everything lives. Everything. All of life, all of civilisation, just this thin little ribbon of habitable space between too much and not enough."

He pauses. You hear him open the fridge.

"I mean, can you imagine? Your whole world is a margin. A border. You exist in the in-between and if you go too far in either direction you just. Burn up or freeze. You stay in the narrow part or you don't stay at all."

He's talking to no one. He's talking to his fridge. He's talking to his empty apartment at 9pm on a weeknight about the habitable zone of a hypothetical tidally locked planet and he doesn't know you're listening and his voice is the same voice that said your name two nights ago and you cannot do this anymore.

You just. Can't.

You're standing up before you've decided to stand up. You're at your front door before you've decided to leave. You're in the hallway in bare feet and a t-shirt and shorts and your hair is not ready for this and you are not ready for this but your body has apparently filed a motion to override your brain and the motion carried.

You knock.

The ranting stops. Footsteps. The click of a lock, and then his door opens and he's right there, closer than the wall has ever let him be, and he's wearing a faded t-shirt that says TRUST ME, I'M A SCIENTIST and his glasses are slightly crooked and he looks exactly like himself, which is the worst possible thing he could look like right now.

"Oh. Hey." Surprise. Not unwelcome surprise, just the regular kind. "Is everything. Did the bike. No, the bike's inside now, I moved the bike. Is it the noise? I know I was talking, I do that, I just. It's this thing about tidal locking that I. Sorry. I'll keep it down."

"You're always talking," you say, and it comes out wrong. Too flat. Too honest.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, I know. I'm sorry." The apologetic face. The one you've seen in the lift, in the hallway, every time he's done something that requires a sorry. Easy. Practised. "I do that. I know I do that. I'll keep it down."

"Thank you."

That should be the end of it. That's a complete interaction. You have lodged your complaint and he has accepted it and now you can go home and never think about the habitable zone of a tidally locked planet or the sound of your own name in his mouth ever again.

But he doesn't close the door. He leans against the frame, arms folded, and looks at you with an expression you can't quite read.

"Out of curiosity," he says. "What can you hear, specifically. Like is it just. Volume? Or is it. Content."

"What?"

"I'm just trying to calibrate. For future reference. So I know what I need to keep down." Reasonable. Helpful. The considerate neighbour, adjusting his behaviour based on feedback. Nothing wrong with the question at all.

"I mean. Everything," you say. "The grading. The cooking. The. Monologues."

"The monologues." He smiles. Not the hallway smile. Something a shade closer to private. "Right. And that bothers you."

"It's. Loud."

"It's loud," he repeats. Nodding. Still leaning. Still watching. "So it's a volume issue."

"Yes."

"Just volume."

Something about the way he says just makes your stomach tighten. Like he's leaving a space in the sentence for you to fill and you are not going to fill it.

"Because the thing about thin walls," he says, "is that they go both ways."

The hallway gets very quiet.

"I can hear you too," he says. Simply. Like he's giving you a weather report. Like this is information he has been sitting on for a while and has made his peace with. "I can hear you come home. I can hear you laugh at things on your phone. I can hear you sing in the kitchen when you think no one's listening, and you always sing the same song wrong and it's." He pauses. "That's not the point."

You are going to die in this hallway. You are going to die in bare feet in front of a man in a novelty science shirt and they will find your body and the cause of death will be this exact moment.

"The point is that if you can hear everything," he says, and the word is careful now, weighted, placed, "then I think we both know this isn't really about the volume."

The floor drops.

He's not embarrassed. He's not fumbling. He's standing in his doorway with his arms folded and he is looking at you the way he looks at a problem he has already solved and is waiting for you to catch up to.

"The other night," he says. And his voice doesn't go soft or nervous. It stays steady. He is looking directly at you and he is not flinching. "I said your name. And you heard me."

You can't speak. You are physically present in this hallway but your voice has left the building.

"And I heard you."

"You." Your voice comes out airless. "You heard."

"I heard you start. After I said your name." He unfolds his arms. Lets them drop. And the steadiness in his voice flickers, just once, just enough for you to see what's underneath it. "And I heard the sound you made when you. Yeah."

"On purpose," you manage. "You said it on purpose."

"Yes."

The single syllable lands like a detonation. No fumbling. No apology. Just yes. He said your name while he touched himself and he meant to and he's not pretending otherwise and you have never in your life been less prepared for a conversation.

"I was testing something," he says, and a ghost of a smile surfaces. "Which sounds clinical and I promise it wasn't. It was. I wanted to know if you were listening. I thought you might be. I hoped you might be."

You are standing in a hallway in bare feet and this man has known, this whole time, every single thing you thought you were hiding, and he has been on the other side of the wall listening to you the way you were listening to him and neither of you said anything and he's just been. Waiting.

"Do you want to come in," he says, and it's not a question. The grammar is a question but his voice has dropped the question mark somewhere on the floor and what's left is just the sentence. An opening. A door that is already open, has been open, that you've been standing on either side of for weeks.

You step through it.

He closes the door behind you, and the click of the lock is the loudest thing in the world, and then his apartment is around you and it smells like him and looks like him and there's a bike leaning against the bookshelf and papers on the kitchen table and a coffee mug with a dinosaur on it and this is the other side of the wall. This is where the sounds come from.

"So," he says, behind you.

You turn.

He's closer than he was. Not touching. Just closer. Close enough that you can see the way his breathing has changed, the way his eyes are darker than they were in the hallway, the way his hands are at his sides and very deliberately not reaching for you, not yet, like he's giving you one more second to leave, one more exit, and he will let you take it if you want it.

You don't want it.

"So," you say back.

"You're not exactly friendly to me," he says, and the way he says it is not an accusation. It's an observation. The way a scientist notes a data point. "In person. You're friendly through the wall when you don't think I know you're there. But to my face you're."

"I know."

"Is that. Was that because of the bike, or because of."

"The bike. At first."

"And then?"

"And then I didn't know how to stop."

"Being unfriendly."

"Being unfriendly when I knew what you sounded like at night. Yeah."

The sound he makes. Low, involuntary, like you've said something that landed somewhere physical. The steady composure he's been holding cracks, just for a second, and what's underneath it is not calm. His hand comes up, and this time it doesn't go to his glasses. It goes to the side of your face, and his fingers are warm, and he's shaking slightly, and there it is. Under the patience, under the confidence, under the man who opened the door already knowing why you were there. He's shaking.

"Can I," he says.

"Yes."

He kisses you.

And it's nothing like the wall. The wall was distance and imagination and the shape of a sound you couldn't see. This is his mouth, warm and real and slightly off-center because he came in too fast, and his hand on your jaw tilting you into it, and the small desperate sound he makes against your lips is the one you've been hearing through plaster for weeks except now it's yours, it's happening because of you, and it sounds completely different when there's nothing between you and the source.

He pulls back just far enough to breathe. His forehead is against yours. His thumb is tracing your cheekbone and his eyes are closed and he says, very quietly, "I've been going out of my mind."

"Yeah," you say. "Me too."

"I talk to myself," he says. "I know I talk to myself. I've always done it, it's a whole thing, and I knew the walls were thin and I just. I never thought about it until you moved in and then I couldn't stop thinking about it. About what you could hear. About whether you were listening. And then I started talking louder on purpose. Which I realize makes me sound. But I wanted. I liked knowing you were there."

"I was always listening."

His breath catches. His hand slides from your jaw to the back of your neck and the touch lands exactly where you imagined it, exactly where you pictured it when you were face down in your pillow with your hand between your legs, and the reality is so close to the fantasy that your knees actually soften.

He feels it. Of course he does.

"That," he says. "When did that start. When did you start."

"Listening?"

"Wanting."

You close your eyes. "The Drake Equation."

He makes a sound that is almost a laugh and almost a groan. "That was. That was like the second week."

"I know."

"I was talking about aliens."

"I know."

"And you were on the other side of the wall."

"Getting into bed."

"Getting into." He doesn't finish. His hand tightens on the back of your neck and he pulls you in again, and this kiss is not off-center. This kiss knows exactly where it's going. His other hand finds your hip and pulls you against him and you can feel him, all of him, hard against your stomach, and the sound you make into his mouth is the same one from the other night, the one that went through the pillow and through the wall, except now he swallows it the way you imagined him swallowing it and the reality is better, it's so much better, because his hands are real and his mouth is real and the sound he makes back is one you've never heard through the wall before. This one is new. This one is what he sounds like when he's touching someone instead of himself.

He walks you backward. Not far. His apartment is the mirror of yours, you know the layout, you've imagined the layout, and when the back of your legs hit the edge of his bed the shock of it runs up your spine because this is the bed. This is where the sounds came from. This is where he lay in the dark and said your name and meant it.

"I should have just knocked on your door," he says. His hands are on your hips and his breathing is wrecked and his glasses are fully crooked now and he's looking at you like you're a problem he wants to solve slowly. "Like a normal person. But the wall was easier. The wall was safe. I could talk and pretend I wasn't talking to you and you could listen and pretend you weren't listening and neither of us had to be brave about it."

His thumb is drawing circles on your hip bone through the fabric of your shorts and you are losing the ability to process full sentences.

"I'm trying to be brave about it now," he says.

—

You sit back onto the bed and pull him with you.

He comes down over you and the weight of him is the first thing. The first real thing. You imagined this through the wall, his body pressing yours into the mattress, and your imagination was wrong. Your imagination didn't know about the heat of him, the solid fact of him, the way his hips settle between yours like they were always supposed to be there and the sound you make when they do is not quiet and you don't care.

"Hi," he says, looking down at you. Slightly breathless. Glasses crooked. Smiling like he can't believe he's here.

"Hi."

"This is. This is better than the wall."

You laugh. You actually laugh, and he grins at the sound, and then he dips his head and puts his mouth on your neck and the laugh dies in your throat because. Oh. Oh.

You imagined this. You imagined it face down in your pillow with your hand between your legs and you thought you knew what it would feel like. You didn't know anything. His lips are warm and his breath is hot against your skin and when he opens his mouth and drags his teeth lightly across the tendon in your neck, the sound you make is not the sound from the other night. That sound was muffled and buried and ashamed. This sound is in his ear, against his hair, and you feel him shudder when he hears it.

"God," he says into your throat. "You sound. You have no idea what you sound like."

"You've heard me before."

"Through a wall. This is." He presses his mouth to your pulse point. Stays there. You can feel him breathing you in like you're data he needs to collect. "This is different. This is. I can feel it when you."

You arch into him and he loses the sentence.

His hands find the hem of your shirt and he looks at you, a question, and you pull it off yourself because you don't have the patience for chivalry right now. His eyes drop and his expression does something that makes your stomach flip, because it's not smooth, it's not practised. It's wonder. The same wonder he has when he's explaining the Drake Equation to his empty apartment, except it's pointed at you.

"You are," he starts, and doesn't finish, and puts his mouth on your collarbone instead.

He works his way down. Slow. Tasting. His mouth on your sternum, between your breasts, along the curve of one, and when his lips close around your nipple and his tongue does something clever and unhurried, your hips jerk up against his and you feel how hard he is and the noise that comes out of both of you is graceless and perfect.

"Okay," he breathes against your skin. "Okay, that's. I need. Can I."

He's pulling at your shorts. You lift your hips and he drags them down and his fingers trail along the inside of your thigh on the way and the touch is so light it makes you shake. But he stops. Your underwear is still on and he is looking at you and his hand has gone still on your thigh and something about his expression has. Changed. Gone quiet. Focused in a way that isn't about your face anymore.

You don't understand for a second. And then you look down.

The cotton is soaked. Dark with it. The damp patch spreading through the fabric, obvious, undeniable, the evidence of what his voice and his hands and his mouth on your neck have done to you, and it's right there and he's right there and your knees start to close on instinct, some useless reflex to cover it, to take it back.

His hand catches your thigh. Gentle. But firm. He doesn't push your legs apart, he just. Holds them where they are. Doesn't let you hide it.

"Don't," he says. Low. Almost not a word.

The sound of it goes through you like a current. One syllable and your whole body decides it will do whatever he says for the rest of time. Which is a problem for future you. Present you just stops moving.

Your knees stay where they are. He looks at you, at the soaked cotton, at the shape of you through it, and his thumb traces the edge of the fabric along your inner thigh and his breathing has changed completely.

"You're. This is all." He exhales. Presses his thumb gently against the wet patch and watches the fabric darken further under the pressure. "This is all from tonight? From. From talking?"

You can't answer that honestly without dying, so you just nod.

"From talking," he repeats, and the wonder in his voice is the Drake Equation wonder, the tidal locking wonder, the same helpless fascination he has for things that exceed his models, except it's aimed at you. At what his voice does to you. At the evidence soaking through cotton.

"Ryland."

His eyes snap to yours. And the sound of his name in your mouth does something visible to him. You've never said it. Not once. Not in the hallway, not in the lift, not through the wall. It's always been hey or you or nothing. And his name in your voice in his bed is a thing he was clearly not prepared for.

"Yeah," he says. Rough. "Yeah, I'm. I'm here. Sorry. You're just. I've thought about this. I've thought about this a lot, and you're right here and I keep expecting the wall to be in the way."

"There's no wall."

"There's no wall," he repeats, and his hand moves up your thigh and between your legs and he doesn't pull the underwear aside. He presses his fingers against you through the cotton and the friction of the wet fabric on your clit makes your whole body jolt.

He feels it. Does it again. Deliberate this time, two fingers pressing flat, dragging slowly up through the soaked cotton, and the texture of it, the slight rough catch of the fabric between his skin and yours, is filthy and perfect and nothing like bare fingers would be. It's indirect. It makes you push your hips up into his hand chasing the pressure because you need more and the barrier is maddening and he knows it's maddening and he's doing it anyway.

He presses his forehead against your hip. His fingers keep moving, slow circles through the fabric, and you can feel the cotton sliding against you, slick and warm, clinging to every contour. "How long," he says. "How long have you been like this."

"Since the hallway. Since you opened the door."

"Since I." He makes a sound against your skin. Disbelief and want and something almost pained. His fingers find your clit again, bare this time, and the difference between cotton and skin makes you cry out. No fabric to blunt it. Just his fingertips, slick and precise, and he already knows where, he already learned that through the underwear, so now he just. Goes there. Directly. Confidently. Like he took notes through the fabric and is now applying them to the final draft.

He watches your face while his fingers work, and this is the teacher in him, the part that pays attention, that meets you where you are and adjusts, and when he finds the exact pressure that makes your thighs shake he doesn't speed up, he just stays there, steady, relentless, reading every sound you make like a language he's already halfway fluent in.

"Talk to me," you say, and you don't know where it comes from but it's the truest thing you've said all night, because his voice is where this started, his voice through the wall, and you need it now. You need it without the plaster in the way.

He understands. Of course he does.

"I could hear you," he says, low, against the skin of your stomach. His fingers don't stop. "Through the wall. I could hear you come home every night and I'd just. Lie there. Knowing you were right there. Knowing you were on the other side and I couldn't."

His thumb stays on your clit and two fingers press inside you and the stretch and the pressure and his voice all at once make your vision go white at the edges.

"I started talking louder," he says. "I know I did. I told myself I wasn't but I was. I wanted you to hear me. I wanted to be in your head the way you were in mine and I didn't know how to just say that so I just. Talked. About planets. About homework. About whatever I could think of because as long as I was talking I was. With you. Sort of."

His fingers curl inside you and your hand flies to his hair and grips.

"And then at night." His voice drops. "At night I'd think about you on the other side of the wall and I'd."

"I know what you'd do."

"You'd listen."

"I'd listen."

"And then you started." His breath catches. "That night. When I said your name. I heard you start and I almost. I almost knocked on the wall. I almost just put my hand on it and."

He's still talking. His fingers are still inside you and his voice is still doing what it always does to you and he is right here, not behind a wall, and you think about the last time you felt this. Face down in your bed, grinding into your own hand, wishing the wall wasn't there. Wishing his mouth was where your pillow was. Wishing you could take instead of just listen.

You can take now. There's no wall.

And the thing is. He made that possible. Not just by opening the door. By the way he looked at the wet cotton and said don't like it was something precious. By the way he said from talking? like your body's response to him was a wonder and not a mess. By the way he has not once made you feel like any part of this is something to be ashamed of.

So you're not going to be.

"Lie back," you say.

He blinks. His fingers still inside you, his brain visibly trying to catch up with the instruction. "What?"

"Lie back."

He does. He pulls his hand from between your legs and lies back on the mattress and looks up at you and you can see the moment he understands what you're doing because his lips part and his breathing changes and his hands come to your thighs as you swing one leg over him and move up his body.

"Oh," he says. "Oh, you're. Yeah. Yes. Please."

You're above him. Knees on either side of his head, your hands braced on the wall. The wall. The one that separates his apartment from yours. Your palms are flat against it and the surface is cool and thin and you can feel the hollow of it under your fingers, this stupid flimsy partition that has been the only thing between you for weeks, and now you're on the other side of it with your thighs framing his face and he's looking up at you like you're the night sky.

You hesitate. Hovering. Because this is a lot and he's looking up at you and you need to know.

"Is this okay?"

His hands tighten on your thighs. He turns his head and presses his mouth to the inside of one, open and warm and deliberate, and says against your skin, "I have wanted this since the second week. Sit down."

You lower yourself onto him and his hands are pulling your hips down and then his mouth is on you and you stop thinking entirely.

The sound you make should be illegal in a building with thin walls. It comes from somewhere deep and it fills the room and you hear it echo off the ceiling and some part of your brain registers that whoever is on the other side of his apartment can hear you right now and you do not care. You do not care even a little bit.

His tongue is slow and precise and devastating. He licks into you like he has all the time in the world, like this is the experiment he's been designing in his head for weeks, and his hands are gripping your thighs, holding you open, holding you exactly where he wants you. He moans against you and the vibration rolls through your clit and up your spine and you gasp and press harder against him and he does it again. On purpose this time. A low, deliberate groan directly into you, and your thighs clamp around his head and he doesn't stop.

This is the thing. He can't talk now. The man who never stops talking has his mouth full of you and all that's left is sound. Every reaction he has comes through vibration instead of words. When you grind down harder he groans and you feel it in your bones. When you ease off he whimpers, actually whimpers, and the frequency of it hums through your clit and makes your hips jerk. He is communicating entirely in resonance and you can feel every single thing he's feeling because it's pressed directly into the most sensitive part of you.

You roll your hips against his mouth and he pulls you tighter and you are grinding onto his face the way you ground into your own hand except his mouth is softer and wetter and smarter than your hand ever was, and every time you press down he meets you, tongue flat and firm, and the sounds he's making vibrate through you, wet and hungry and desperate, and you can feel them building, getting rougher, getting louder, and when you look down his eyes are closed and his hands are gripping your thighs hard enough to bruise and he looks like there is nowhere on earth he would rather be.

You shift your angle slightly, chasing it, and his tongue drags across your clit and he moans at the taste of you and the vibration hits at exactly the right moment and your back arches and your nails scrape against the wall and you hear yourself say his name.

"Ryland." It comes out wrecked.

His eyes open. He looks up at you from between your thighs and pulls back just enough to speak, his lips wet, his chin wet, and he says, "I'm right here. No wall. Right here."

And then he pulls your hips back down onto his mouth and starts again, and you've lost ground, you can feel it, the orgasm that was right there has retreated and he knows it and he doesn't rush. He builds you back. His tongue finds you, slow at first, relearning, and then firmer, more deliberate, settling into a rhythm that is patient and relentless and exactly, exactly right. You can feel it gathering again, tighter this time, closer to the surface, and his hands grip your thighs and pull you harder against his mouth and then he grazes his teeth against your clit, barely there, just the edge of them, and the sharp bright shock of it is the thing that tips it. You grind down hard and your hands press flat against the wall and you come so hard your vision whites out.

It's not like the other night. That was your hand and his sounds and a pillow in your teeth. This is his mouth and your weight and the noise you make is loud, open, a thing you give to him on purpose, and he takes it, takes all of it, works you through it with his tongue until you're shaking and grinding and saying his name like it's the only word you know.

You come down slowly. Your thighs are trembling. Your hands are still on the wall. You lift your weight off him and slide back, settling on his stomach, and he sucks in a breath like a man surfacing from water. His face is flushed and wet and he's grinning up at you, breathing hard, and you can feel him against the back of your thighs, so hard it must hurt.

He reaches up and pushes your hair out of your face. His thumb traces your cheekbone.

"That," he says. "That's the sound. That's what I heard through the wall and I."

"Get your clothes off."

He laughs. Breathless, startled, delighted. You climb off him, kneel back on the mattress, and he sits up and strips his shirt over his head and you watch from beside him and it's not a performance, it's him fumbling with the hem and getting his glasses caught and tossing them somewhere toward the nightstand and missing entirely, and you love it. You love the gracelessness of it. You love that he's not smooth because smooth would be someone else and you don't want someone else. You want the man who argues with homework and burns kitchen towels and talks about aliens at 10pm and said your name through a wall because he couldn't not.

He stands just long enough to shove his jeans down and his boxers with them and he's hard, flushed, and the sight of him makes your mouth go dry because you heard this, you heard this, the sounds he made while he touched himself, and now you can see what your imagination was building around and the reality is right here, in his bed, within reach.

You reach for him. Your hand wraps around him and his whole body jerks and the sound he makes is the one from that first night, the low caught groan, except with nothing to muffle it. It fills the room. Fills you.

"That sound," you say. "That's the one."

"What?"

"The first night. Through the wall. That's the sound that started this."

He drops his forehead against yours, his breath ragged, his hips pushing into your hand. "You heard that? The. The first time?"

"Every time."

"God." His voice cracks. "Every. You were just lying there and."

"Listening. Every time."

He kisses you like the sentence broke something in him. Deep, messy, his hand in your hair, and you're stroking him and he's leaking against your palm and his breathing is shot and he pulls back and says, "I need. Can I. I want to be inside you, can I."

"Yes."

"Yeah?"

"Yes."

He reaches for the nightstand. The drawer. You hear the click of it and something about that sound, the same sound you've heard through the wall from your own bed, rearranges the room. He rolls the condom on and his hands are shaking slightly and then he's over you and between your legs and the head of him presses against you and you're so wet from his mouth that there's almost no resistance.

He pushes in slow. Watching your face. His jaw is tight and his arms are braced on either side of you and the stretch of him is perfect, thick and full, and when he bottoms out you both go still.

"Oh," he says. Very quiet. Like a realisation landing.

You wrap your legs around him and pull him deeper and he makes a sound you have never heard through the wall. Not once. This one is new. This one only exists here, inside you, and it is low and broken and so good that your walls clench around him and his hips stutter.

"If you do that," he manages, "this is going to be. I've been thinking about this for. A very long time, and I'm not going to."

"Then move."

He moves.

Slow, first. Long, deep strokes that pull almost all the way out and push back in and every one of them drags against exactly the right spot and the sounds you're making are continuous now, not words, not anything, just his name and yes and the wet sound of him inside you and his breathing in your ear.

He drops his head to your neck. His mouth finds the place behind your ear and he talks against your skin, half words, half breathing, and this is it, this is the thing you imagined, his voice in your neck, his sounds pressed directly into your pulse, and the reality makes the fantasy look like a pencil sketch.

"You feel." He rolls his hips and you gasp. "I can't. You feel so."

"More."

He gives you more. His pace picks up and the angle changes and he hooks one hand under your knee and lifts and the depth of the next thrust makes both of you cry out and he does it again, again, finding the spot that makes you clench and then driving into it over and over because this is what he does, this is the problem-solver, the experimenter, the man who tests and adjusts and learns, and he is learning you and he is a very fast learner.

"Right there," you say, and it comes out begging and you don't care.

"Here?" He does it again. Precise. His hips snapping into yours.

"There. There. Don't stop."

"I'm not stopping." Low. Wrecked. Almost a growl. "I'm not. I couldn't stop if I. You're so. The sounds you make, I can feel them, I spent weeks listening through that wall and this is. God, this is so much better. You're so much better than anything I."

His hand slides between your bodies. His thumb finds your clit and presses and the noise that leaves you is feral, unhinged, because you're still sensitive from before and the combination of him inside you and his thumb on you and his voice in your ear is too many inputs, too much data, and your body can't process all of it at once so it just. Gives in.

"That's it," he says, and his voice is barely holding. "That's. I can feel you, I can feel you getting close, you're tightening around me and I."

You're not getting close. You're already there. It hits you like a wave you didn't see coming, sudden and total, and this orgasm is different from the first one. The first one was his mouth and his patience and his precision. This one is his cock buried deep and his thumb circling and his voice cracking apart against your ear and the fact that you are underneath him in the bed where he said your name and there is no wall and no pillow and nothing to bite down on so the sound just comes out of you, raw and open, his name tangled up in it, and you feel yourself clench around him in long, rhythmic pulses that make his whole body go taut.

"Oh. Oh, God. I can feel you. I can." His hips stutter. His rhythm breaks. "I'm. If you keep. I'm going to."

You pull him down and say his name against his mouth and tighten around him again and he breaks. He comes hard, driving into you, his whole body shaking, and the sound he makes is long and open and your name is in it, not said the way he said it through the wall, not careful, not half-swallowed. Your name like he can't hold it back. Your name said into your mouth while he's inside you and the wall is gone and there's nothing between you and that sound and nothing will ever be between you and that sound again.

You hold him through it. Your legs locked around his hips, your hand in his hair, his face in your neck, his breath ragged and hot against your skin. He's still shaking when he comes down. Still inside you. His hand finds yours on the mattress and his fingers thread through yours and he squeezes once, hard, like he's checking you're real.

"Hi," he says into your neck. Same thing he said at the start.

"Hi."

"So that happened."

"That happened."

He pulls back enough to look at you. His hair is destroyed. His eyes are soft and blown and slightly disbelieving, and the smile that arrives is not the hallway smile or the lift smile. This is the one the wall has been hiding.

"I have a question," he says.

"Of course you do."

"On a scale of one to ten, how do you feel about the thin walls now."

You laugh. He catches it with his mouth. And on the other side of the wall, your apartment sits empty, and quiet, and you don't go home for a very long time.