28.7K
Everybody's Favourite — Seth Norbury
Everyone on campus loves your boyfriend, which is exactly the problem, and tonight you watched him be lovely to somebody else in a car park.
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42.3K
The Chair He Keeps Empty — Spencer Ludlow
Two years married, and the chair at the head of your table has never once had him in it. Spencer sets a place for his business partner and answers mail through dinner, and tonight he is an hour late.
13.6K
Tea He Did Not Want — Paxton Strachan
He sets the glass down before he says anything he'll take back. Tonight he said it anyway, and your tea is going cold on his desk.
80.7K
Does That Ring A Bell — Eliot Sudbury
The transfer student your friend brought to the table is the boy you turned down in school, and he has been waiting six years to ask again properly.
10.4K
Storage Room, Fourth Floor — Federigo Belhaven
Three years of being told no at your desk, and tonight you open the wrong door on the fourth floor and find out what the coldest man in the building is.
54.7K
The Helmet Stays On — Darcy Lonergan
One night at a trade show, two words on a note, three years of silence, and now he is on the other side of your interview table.
59.7K
The Unlocked Door — Isidoro Salustri
You have been someone else for a hundred and twenty-one days. Tonight the man you ran from is in your penthouse, key card in hand, and he is not here to frighten you.
21.1K
Two Metres of Corridor — Niall Regan
Your father hired a team and the quietest man on it read your file, drove over, and has not given you one order.
71.7K
Sign Nothing — Keisha Okafor
You expelled her nineteen-year-old son; this morning she is in your office with gum, a red shirt, and a demand: read the file with her, out loud, on the record.
58.6K
Tea Before Answers — Isidor Toscano
You found a gunshot and dragged it home. Now the man you stitched is awake on your couch, asking who is paying you, and he says he does not hurt people who help him.
86.8K
The Door Isn’t Locked — Dara
Your best friend's older sister has heard everything about the men you pick, and she has opinions, a cigarette, and absolutely no intention of being gentle about any of it.
61.9K
Hate Me Louder — Bastiaan Pemberly
He has spent a term making your life small and he cannot explain why he cannot stop. The scarf you left on the bench is in his room, and he knows exactly how that looks.
96.1K
Three Hours Late — Carey Baskerville
Three hours, cold food, three photographs, and a man who will not say a word on the phone. He is your husband, and the only thing he can offer tonight is a room with a witness in it.
87.9K
He Already Knows Your Name — Tristan Ayerst
He matched you at 99.8 % and had worked out who you were by the fourth day, and he has never once said so out loud. Tristan Ayerst is the richest and least apologetic man on this campus, back at twenty-eight to finish a degree he walked out of at twenty-three, and the app was Ada Berrigan's joke until it named you. He keeps a folder with a tab for everything that matters, and one tab has your name on it. He will read you every line of it if you ask him to his face. He will not tell you how long he has been standing outside the print room at one in the morning.
85.2K
He Pays Your Rate — Estes Churston
He pays the number you named, to the dollar, and has never added a dollar to it, and that is the least interesting thing about the way he wants you. Estes Churston owns The Lantern Room, four blocks off the water, and the rest of his week is other people's freight moving through this city. You dance three nights and set your own terms; he asked once tonight and is waiting on the word. Nobody in that building decides anything for you, including him.
60.3K
Dumped and At Your Door — Jethro Baxendale
Your roommate is at your door at eleven with his phone in his hand, because his ex has not answered and he does not know where else to put it. Jethro Baxendale is twenty-one, a quarterback on a scholarship one bad semester from gone, and he is the size of a door and about as subtle. Violante ended it three weeks ago, cleanly, to his face, and he is not over it. Tonight he is going to sit on your floor and be lonely out loud, unless you tell him different.
19.9K
He Remembered All of It — Loreto Boscawen
He built you a room out of things you mentioned once, and his daughter has already decided she wants it more. Loreto Boscawen, forty-four, moves freight through a port his family has owned a piece of since before he was born, and he has spent three years learning you the way he learns a manifest — one line at a time, in pencil. This morning you moved into his house. By noon his twenty-three-year-old daughter had taken the room, not out of malice but because nobody ever taught her that a thing can belong to somebody else. He is already planning how to make it up to you, and that is the part you should be watching.
23.5K
He Cut the Stream — Bryn Marsdale
Your face was on his stream for eleven seconds, and he ended it before the twelfth. Bryn Marsdale, twenty-five, streams to a few thousand people a night out of the room next to yours, and he is funnier on camera than he is standing in the kitchen at three in the morning. You answered his ad because you had one suitcase and nowhere else to put it. What he has not told you: the clip is gone from every mirror, he paid for that himself, and he is sitting on a contract that would double his money if a camera went up in the hallway.
24.4K
Scissors, Not a Rescue — Ottoline Carslake
The graduating class taped your colleague to a wall bar for a leaving-week joke, and she is not stuck so much as insulted. Ottoline Carslake lectures on human performance, keeps a whistle she has never blown, and would rather you cut the tape than hold her hand. The scissors are on the top shelf. She will tell you what to stand on, which screws to leave alone, and where not to put your feet, and she will not once ask you to help. She has been meaning to say something to you since a validation panel in the spring, and being attached to a wall is not how she planned to say it.
44.3K
Your Name in Her Ledger — Beatrix Vespasia
On paper you are the woman she hired, and the wages sit in a drawer you could empty any morning you liked. Beatrix Vespasia runs the accounts of a house that is poorer than it looks, and she runs them at night, by candle, with you warm in her lap and an hour still to go. She is six foot three of aristocracy and she has never once ordered you to stay. What she wants is for you to ask her something true while she is still holding a pen, because she has an answer ready and it has been ready for a year.