Rachel Ellis knocked on Noah Bennett’s door like it was a normal thing to do.

  She knew it wasn't—she wasn't delusional—but she also knew that if she hesitated long enough to let her brain get involved, she would turn around and go home to eat peanut butter with a spoon while texting her mother a smiley face and pretending that counted as adulthood.

  So she knocked twice, lightly, and stood very still, as if sudden movement might trigger an alarm.

  The door didn’t open immediately.

  From inside, she heard the faint sound of movement—footsteps, but not the hurried kind. Just the rhythmic thud of someone walking across an apartment.

  In those few seconds, Rachel had the vivid, irrational impulse to bolt. She could do it. She could just walk away. She could be back inside her own apartment before he turned the lock, and if he opened the door to an empty hallway, maybe he would assume he’d imagined it. She could live the rest of her life in a fugue state of denial.

  Then the lock clicked, and her option to vanish into the ether evaporated.

  The door opened.

  Noah stood there. He looked normal. Occupied. His sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, and he was holding a dishtowel in one hand as if he’d been interrupted while washing something. His expression hovered somewhere between surprise and expectation, settling on a simple, readable calm.

  “Hi,” Noah said.

  “Hi,” Rachel replied, and immediately hated how breathy it sounded, as if she’d sprinted here instead of walking six steps across a hallway.

  Noah stepped back, making space. “Come in.”

  Rachel crossed the threshold with the cautious alertness of someone entering a museum after closing. Her mind flicked in three directions at once—shock at the fact that she was doing this, shame that she was doing this because she couldn’t feed herself properly, and a third feeling she refused to label because labeling feelings made them real.

  Anticipation, she told herself briskly. Like she was waiting for a package. Very normal. Very adult.

  Noah’s apartment was spare, but controlled. Everything had a designated place, and that place had been obeyed. Shoes by the door. A coat hung neatly. Keys in a bowl. It was a space where objects were never abandoned temporarily by a distracted owner.

  Rachel’s eyes catalogued anyway. They always did. Her anxiety loved inventories.

  “You can take your shoes off if you want,” Noah said, casual, already turning toward the kitchen.

  Rachel glanced down at her sneakers and then at his spotless floor. “Thank you,” she said, and carefully removed them, placing them side by side like she’d been taught this in a class called How Not to Be a Menace in Someone Else’s Home.

  The gesture felt oddly intimate, and she resented that, too.

  Noah’s kitchen opened off the living room—compact, functional, set up like it expected to be used. He washed his hands, rolled his sleeves up without thinking, and reached for a pan with the calm competence of someone who did this simply because it was Tuesday.

  Rachel had no idea what to do with her body in the meantime. She hovered near the edge of the living room, too far to help and too close to be invisible.

  Noah glanced up, took in her hesitation, and didn’t make her explain it.

  “Sit,” he said lightly—an instruction offered the way you offered someone a chair at a meeting. “You can use the table. I’ll be a minute.”

  Rachel nodded and sat down carefully at the small dining table near the window, as if the chair might reject her on principle.

  From here, she could see more of the apartment. A couch, a lamp, a bookshelf with actual books and a few things chosen for function rather than charm. There were no framed photos, no decorative throws, and nothing to suggest anyone else had ever come in and insisted he needed “warmth.”

  Notably, there was no sign anyone else lived here at all.

  Rachel looked away before her brain could start drafting conclusions.

  Noah spoke from the kitchen, voice carrying easily over the quiet sizzle beginning in the pan. “So,” he said, “how’s the apartment settling in?”

  Rachel almost said fine out of reflex. Instead—because she was already here, because she’d already crossed the hall, because there was no way to do any of this without being at least slightly ridiculous—she tried for something truer.

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  “It’s… clean,” she said.

  Noah made a sound that might have been a laugh. “High praise.”

  “And quiet,” Rachel added. “Which I like.”

  “That’s one of the perks,” Noah said, faintly pleased. “The pipes don’t scream.”

  Rachel blinked. “Pipes can scream?”

  “They can,” Noah said solemnly. “Sometimes they do it out of spite.”

  Rachel smiled before she could stop it, then tried to fold the smile back into something neutral, because smiling too much in someone else’s kitchen felt like intimacy. Noah’s gaze flicked to her face and away again, like he’d noticed and filed it without comment. It was… considerate, and Rachel hated how much she liked it.

  “What are you making?” she asked, partly because she needed a topic and partly because the smells rising—garlic, something warm and sharp, something that made her stomach wake up—were already doing unpleasant things to her composure.

  “Something safe,” Noah said. “Nothing too adventurous.”

  Rachel raised an eyebrow. “Safe.”

  He looked over his shoulder briefly, expression unbothered. “I don’t know what you like,” he said, as if this was simply a variable. “So I’m aiming for a high-probability outcome.”

  Rachel stared at him. “You talk about dinner like a science project,” she said before she could stop herself.

  Noah’s mouth twitched. “It’s more like… assembly. Much lower stakes. I just follow the steps until there’s food.”

  Rachel’s laugh came out quiet and surprised. “Lower stakes,” she repeated.

  Noah turned back to the pan and stirred with steady focus. “Okay. Medium stakes. I’d still rather not poison you.”

  Heat rose in Rachel’s cheeks. She looked down at her hands on the table, arranged neatly as if they belonged there.

  You’re having dinner at your neighbor’s table, her brain said, accusatory.

  You’re eating actual food, another part replied, defensive.

  Rachel swallowed. She didn’t want to think of it as being fed. That word was too soft, too childlike, too honest. She wanted to be a person who could feed herself. And yet the domestic sounds of cooking—sizzle, a knife against a board, the soft rustle of packaging—made something in her chest loosen in spite of her.

  She watched Noah without meaning to. He didn’t look like he was performing competence. He looked like he trusted the process. Like attention, for him, was soothing instead of punishing.

  Rachel shifted in her chair, as if she could shake the thought off. “So,” she said, because silence left too much room for feelings. “Do you… live alone?”

  The second the words left her mouth, she regretted them. It was a normal question. An ordinary neighbor question. It still felt like stepping onto a tile she hadn’t tested.

  Noah paused for a beat—small, almost imperceptible—then kept moving. “Yeah,” he said. “Just me.”

  Rachel nodded too quickly, as if she’d expected that and was not relieved. And then, because her brain occasionally staged public executions of her dignity, she added, “No girlfriend?”

  The kitchen went quiet for half a second.

  Rachel wanted to crawl under the table and live there permanently.

  Noah turned his head slightly, not all the way. When he looked at her, his expression stayed neutral, but his eyes held that faint hint of amusement again—like he was choosing not to make this worse.

  “No,” he said. “No girlfriend.”

  “Right,” Rachel said, and tried to sound like she hadn’t asked. “I just— I mean. Since—”

  Since you invited me over. Since I’m sitting here. Since—

  Noah made it easy, because that seemed to be his talent.

  “It’s a fair question,” he said mildly, and went back to stirring as if this was not the most humiliating thirty seconds of her life.

  It wasn't quite bachelor pad energy; it was more single person who has never impulse-bought a decorative object, which was different but lived in the same neighborhood.

  Rachel cleared her throat. “Your apartment is… very clean,” she said, because it was safer than admitting anything else.

  Noah looked down at the counter and then at his hands, as if checking for evidence that contradicted her. “Thanks,” he said, and his voice warmed slightly. “It’s mostly habit.”

  Rachel heard the shape of what wasn’t said and didn’t touch it. Touching it would be intimate, and she was already doing enough intimacy for one evening.

  Noah moved faster now, the cooking sliding into a practiced rhythm—vegetables into the pan, a quick stir, a splash of something that hissed as it hit the heat. The scent sharpened, savory and comforting, and Rachel’s mouth watered in a way that felt indecently grateful.

  “You cook a lot?” she asked.

  Noah’s shoulders lifted in a small shrug. “Yeah.”

  “Because you like it?” Rachel tried.

  Noah paused briefly, as if he hadn’t expected that version of the question. Then he said, “Because it’s… reliable.” After a beat, he added, “And yes. I like it.”

  Reliable.

  The word landed in Rachel’s chest with the quiet weight of something familiar.

  She watched him plate the food with care, neatly and with consideration, as if presentation mattered because feeding someone mattered.

  He set the plates down and glanced at her as if checking for permission. “Okay?” he asked.

  Rachel looked at the food. It looked better than it had any right to. Warm, balanced, the kind of meal that made you feel like your life had edges instead of fraying ends.

  Rachel forced herself to breathe. “Yeah,” she said quietly. Then, because she didn’t want him to think she was only impressed by him and not grateful, she added more firmly, “Yeah. It looks… really good.”

  Noah’s mouth nearly formed a smile. “Good,” he said, and sat down across from her.

  Rachel held his gaze for one heartbeat too long and then looked down at her plate, because she was not going to make this Weirder Than It Already Was. She picked up her fork before her thoughts could get traction.

  Noah didn’t fill the space with chatter right away. He didn’t interrogate her. He just ate, calmly, giving her room to exist.

  Rachel took a bite.

  The flavors hit—warm, savory, a little bright, the kind of comfort that slid straight past her defenses. She managed not to make a sound. Barely.

  Her eyes widened a fraction anyway, traitorous.

  Noah watched her reaction with a stillness that might have been casual if she hadn’t already decided he was observant. Then he looked down at his own plate like he hadn’t been waiting.

  “Palatable?” he asked, careful.

  Rachel swallowed. “Very,” she said, and couldn’t keep the surprise out of it.

  Noah nodded once, like that mattered. Like her opinion had weight.

  Rachel stared at her plate, at the steam rising, at the simple fact of a proper dinner in a neighbor’s apartment and the world continuing to spin as if this were a normal thing people did. Her shame slowly quieted—like it had realized it wasn’t going to win tonight.

  And whatever that third feeling was—warm and steady and stubborn—settled in her chest again.

  Rachel took another bite, and for a moment, with Noah focused on his food and the apartment calm around them, it almost felt like she could breathe without performing it.