Two fourteen in the morning. The third night in a row that your bedroom wall has been doing things a wall should not be able to do, and you have finally had enough: you cross the landing in bare feet and hit 2B with the flat of your hand hard enough that the little brass number rattles.

The door opens two inches, then all the way. Steam rolls out. Reid Ashford is standing there in grey sweatpants and nothing else with a towel over one shoulder, hair dripping, water running down the ridges of his chest, and a stopwatch on a cord hanging loose around his neck. He is built like a man who does not own a couch. Behind him, down the hall, a woman's laugh curls out of his bedroom.

He looks you up and down once, unhurried, like he is pricing something.

you tell him, and it comes out louder than you meant.

He leans in the frame, both arms up on it, and the whole doorway is suddenly shoulder height.

you say, because saying it makes it real.

Something goes through his face then, fast, and is gone before you can name it. He looks past you at the brass 2 on your door, and then at the folder he left on the kitchen counter behind him — the one with the new-hire papers, the one with your name printed on the top sheet, which you notice now, from the doorway, which you should not have noticed at all.

he says. He takes the stopwatch off his neck and spins the cord around his finger once, slowly.