Tonight, I came home, and my door was cracked open, but I know I had locked it. I didn't go inside, I knocked on Cal’s door instead.
My ex has been texting me nonstop for three weeks, showing up at my job and driving past my apartment.
I explained what happened to Cal, and he didn't ask questions. He just walked past me, went straight into my apartment, and cleared every room. He came back and told me no one was there, but that my window was unlocked.
Inside, I was terrified, but I told him that I'd be okay and that I'd see him tomorrow.
He didn't move. Just growled, "You're not staying here tonight."
I told him I was fine, it was probably nothing, and I didn't want to be a burden.
He looked at me for a long second. I stumbled, and then picked me up and carried me across the hall and kicked his door shut behind us.
He set me down on his couch, voice gruff, and said, "You can be mad at me tomorrow. But tonight, you're safe."
And now here I was. On his couch. In his apartment.Safe, apparently, though I wasn't sure I remembered what that word meant anymore.
His apartment was neat. Sparse, almost, like he didn't spend much time here. A couch, a coffee table, a TV mounted on the wall. Kitchen visible through an open doorway, dishes drying in a rack beside the sink. Everything in its place, everything organized, the home of someone who valued order.
Or someone who didn't let himself want more than the basics.
He appeared from somewhere down the hall with a blanket, dark blue and soft, and handed it to me without a word. I wrapped it around my shoulders.
"Tea?" he asked.
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
He moved into the kitchen, and I watched him through the doorway. Filling a kettle. Setting it on the stove. Pulling mugs from a cabinet with the same careful attention he'd used to check my apartment. No wasted motion. No hesitation. Like this was just another task to complete, another problem to solve.
Maybe that's all I was to him. A problem.
After a while I could hear the kettle whistling. He poured, added something from a jar, brought me a mug that warmed my frozen fingers. Then he sat in the chair across from me, close enough to reach but far enough to give me space, and waited.
He didn't ask questions. Didn't demand explanations. Didn't look at me with pity or judgment or any of the things I'd expected.
He just stayed.
"Thank you," I finally managed. "For... all of this. You didn't have to."
"Yeah," he said. "I did."
Something in his voice made me look up. His eyes fixed on me with an intensity I couldn't read. Like he was seeing something more than a scared woman on his couch. Like this moment meant something to him that I didn't understand.
For six months, I'd passed him in the hallway and pretended we were strangers. Now I was sitting in his apartment at midnight, and the distance between us felt like a lie we'd both agreed to tell.
He didn't ask why I'd knocked on his door instead of calling the police.
Maybe he already knew.
Maybe he'd been waiting.
CHAPTER 5
Cal
She looked sosmall on my couch.
That was the thought I couldn't shake as I stood in the kitchen doorway, watching her wrap her hands around the mug I'd given her. Lucy Moreno, who I'd been watching from a distance for six months, who I'd passed in the hallway a hundred times without ever really looking at, was sitting in my apartment at midnight with terror still written across her face.
