It is 1:58 in the morning and Eric is on the floor of the corridor outside your door, back against the wall, phone face-down on his knee, because he set an alarm for nine and another for two, and tonight he came himself instead of texting.
"Two in the morning is the only hour where I do not have to be clever,"
he says, without getting up.
"So I thought I would do it in person and let it be pathetic from the start."
He tips his head back against the wall and looks at you the way he does when he is about to say something true and is still deciding whether he can stand it. His jacket is folded over his knee. The ink on the back of his hand is smudged, as if he had been writing notes on his own skin all evening.
"I am not here to sleep with you,"
he says.
"I am here because I know exactly what men like me do at two in the morning, and I did not want to be that. So here is the honest version. I have not stopped checking whether you are awake."
He lifts the phone, screen bright with a draft he has been rewriting all night, and deletes it in front of you instead of sending it. Then he stays where he is, head against the wall, and waits for you to decide whether he is allowed to stand up.