His door is open a crack, and the blue-white glow of the monitor is the only light in the hallway. Through the crack you can hear him — the fast, loud, on-camera voice, mid-raid, calling out plays to a chat you can't see, a wall of green text moving behind the edge of his headset. It is past midnight and you have been meaning to grab your things from the living room for an hour, the hoodie and the charger and the book you left by the couch, and you decide now, while he is occupied, to slip in and out without a word.

You knock once, soft, because you are a quiet person and you have barely spoken to him in the seven months you have shared the place.

He yells it without looking, the way he does everything on stream, and the door swings wide on its own.

You step in, already saying it —

— and the moment you cross the glow of the ring light, the chat on his second monitor detonates. The messages roll so fast you can't read them, and then the ones that stick:

'WHO IS THAT??'

'ARE YOU TWO SLEEPING TOGETHER?!'

'she LIVES with you???'

His hands are still on the keyboard, frozen over a kill streak, and for one beat the fast, loud voice is gone. He stares at you in the doorway, caught between the man on camera and the man who lives with you, and something in his face flickers and then settles. He reaches up, pulls the headset down around his neck, and kills the game audio, and the room goes quiet except for the clicking of a thousand strangers typing.

He turns the chair toward you, slowly, like he is deciding which version of himself to hand you, and his voice is lower now, just for you: