Chapter 2: The misunderstanding
The apartment was dark and quiet when she stepped inside — Jess still out, probably still behind the bar with another hour or two left on her shift, which meant Alex had the place to herself for a while longer.
Normally she'd have minded the silence, but tonight it felt like exactly what she needed.She did what Taek said, more or less without deciding to. Glass of water first, then her favorite hoodie, then the TV on low, something mindless and rerun-worn that she'd seen a dozen times already. She curled up on the couch and let her body do whatever it needed to do — the small leftover tremors, the occasional flash of the guy's hand on her wrist that made her stomach drop all over again.
She didn't fight it. She just let it move through her, the way he'd told her to, and slowly, it did.But underneath all of that, quieter and a lot harder to manage, was something else entirely.She kept circling back to the elevator. Not the scary part — the after. The way he'd stood close enough that she could feel the residual heat of him, the low, steady sound of his voice telling her she was allowed to lean on the wall. It hadn't been romantic, not really, not on the surface. But it had felt like something cracking open all the same — like four years of nodding hellos had just been replaced, all at once, by an actual person standing in front of her, worried, gentle, real.It's just the adrenaline, she told herself, pulling her knees up to her chest. You're shaken up. Anyone would feel something right now.It was a reasonable theory. She almost believed it.Except she kept thinking about his voice saying her name like it mattered to him that he get it right.
She kept thinking about the way he'd hesitated outside her door, like he didn't actually want to leave yet. She kept thinking about how her heart had done something small and traitorous in that elevator — not fear, nothing like fear, something warmer and far more inconvenient.The crush she'd kept so carefully harmless for four years had never had to survive contact with the real him. Now it had, and it hadn't gone the way she expected. It hadn't faded under the weight of an actual conversation. If anything, it had gotten worse — more specific, more dangerous, less like a daydream and more like something she might actually have to do something about.
She groaned quietly into a couch cushion, equal parts amused and horrified at herself.Great, she thought. Just great.
She didn't sleep well. Every time she drifted off, her mind looped back to some fragment of the night — the guy's hand on her wrist, the calm in Taek's voice, the warmth of him standing close in the elevator — until she woke up tangled in her sheets sometime past three, heart going for no reason she could justify in the dark.
By the time her alarm actually went off, she felt like she'd run a marathon instead of slept.Jess was already up when she shuffled into the kitchen, hair still damp from a shower, humming something off-key while she poured cereal like it was a competitive sport.
"Sooo," Jess said, not even looking up, "how was the concert? You looked dead on your feet when I got home."
"It was good," Alex said, reaching for the coffee like it might fix the night's worth of bad sleep currently sitting behind her eyes.
"Really good, actually. My voice is still wrecked."
"And after?" Jess glanced up this time, spoon paused halfway to her mouth. "You texted me something about a creep outside the building and then just... stopped responding.
"Right. She'd forgotten she'd even sent that."Oh — yeah." Alex kept her voice deliberately light, focused very hard on stirring sugar into her mug.
"Some guy wouldn't leave me alone outside. Taek saw and stepped in, told him to back off. It was fine, it just kind of rattled me for a bit."
She gave Jess the short version — clean, factual, nothing about elevators or held silences or the way her heart had decided to misbehave. Just: guy was a problem, Taek helped, she went to bed.Jess set her spoon down slowly, studying her in that particular way she had — the one that made Alex feel sixteen again, caught sneaking in past curfew
"Okay, but why do you look like that."
"Like what?"
"Like that." Jess gestured vaguely at her whole face. "You've got this weird, far-off thing going on. You're not telling me something."
"I'm tired, Jess."
"You're tired and weird," Jess said, unconvinced, leaning back against the counter with the patient, knowing look of someone who had absolutely no intention of letting this go.
"Okay, talk." Jess folded her arms, settling into the counter like she was prepared to wait all morning if she had to.
"Something happened. You've got that face."
"Nothing happened. I told you what happened."
"You told me the Wikipedia summary." Jess tilted her head, eyes narrowing slightly.
"I'm asking about the director's cut."Alex busied herself with the coffee she didn't actually want anymore, stalling, trying to figure out how to explain the elevator without explaining the part where her heart had done something stupid and inconvenient.
"I'm just shaken up still. That guy grabbed my wrist, Jess. It scared me more than I want to admit."
"Okay, that I get." Jess's voice softened, but her eyes stayed sharp, still scanning her like she was looking for something underneath the words. "But that's not the whole thing, is it. You've got this look — like something else happened. After."
"After Taek stepped in? Nothing, we just—" Alex hesitated, searching for the right word for the elevator ride, the silence, the way she still felt warm thinking about it. "It was kind of awkward, honestly. Quiet."Wrong word. Jess latched onto it instantly.
"Quiet how?" Her arms uncrossed. "Did he say something to you? In the elevator?"
"What? No, it wasn't like—"
"Alex." Jess's voice dropped, suddenly serious, all teasing gone. "You come home rattled, you barely text me back, and now you're being weird about the elevator ride specifically. Did he say something? Because I swear to god, if he made some comment after literally just saving you—"
"Jess, that's not—"
"I knew it." Jess was already moving, setting her mug down hard enough to clink against the counter, jaw tight in a way Alex recognized immediately and with rising horror. "After everything that happened to you last night, he made it weird? I don't care how nice he seems, that's not—"
"Jess, wait, that's not what happened at all—"
But Jess was already grabbing her keys off the hook by the door, moving with the kind of righteous, unstoppable momentum that meant logic wasn't going to catch her in time.
"Jess, wait—" Alex was already moving, coffee abandoned, scrambling after her down the hallway in socks that gave her zero traction on the floor.
"You don't even know what you're—"
But Jess was already at Taek's door, fist raised, knocking hard enough that it sounded more like a demand than a greeting.It took a few seconds — long enough for Alex to catch up, breathless, just as the door opened.Taek stood there in sweatpants and a faded t-shirt, hair still messy from sleep, blinking at the sight of an unfamiliar, furious woman on his doorstep at — he glanced past her, clocked Alex hovering a step behind, looking mortified — nine in the morning.
"Uh," he said. "Hi?"
"You wanna explain what you said to her last night?" Jess crossed her arms, chin lifted, every inch of her radiating I am ready to go to war for my best friend.
Taek's confusion deepened visibly. His eyes flicked to Alex, searching her face for context, finding none except sheer panic. "I'm sorry — what?"
"In the elevator," Jess said, like that should clear everything up. "After you helped her out. She comes home rattled, won't talk about it, and now I find out something happened in that elevator that's got her all—"
"Jess—" Alex tried, mortified, reaching for her arm.
"—weird about it," Jess finished, undeterred, eyes locked on Taek like she was daring him to lie.
Taek held both hands up slightly, the universal gesture of a man who had absolutely no idea what crime he was being accused of.
"I — genuinely don't know what you're talking about. I walked her up, made sure she was okay, told her to drink some water and put on a dumb show. That's it." He looked at Alex again, openly bewildered now, something almost hurt creeping into it. "Did I do something wrong? I didn't mean to—"
"No," Alex said quickly, finally getting a hand on Jess's arm and physically tugging her back a step. "No, you didn't do anything. This is a misunderstanding. A big, stupid misunderstanding."
"Jess." Alex's grip tightened on her arm, voice low and urgent now, the kind of tone meant for exactly one person to hear. "He didn't say anything. He walked me up, told me to drink water and watch TV, and then he said goodnight. That's it. That's the whole story."Jess's righteous fury wavered, confusion creeping in at the edges.
"Then why did you look like—"
"Can we please talk about this inside?" Alex's face was on fire, mortification crawling up from her chest to the tips of her ears. "Please. Go back to the apartment. I'll be there in a minute."
Jess glanced between them one more time, clearly still trying to do the math, but something in Alex's expression — pure, pleading embarrassment — finally got through. "...Fine," she muttered, already backing off, throwing one last suspicious look at Taek before retreating down the hall.
"I'll be right there, though."The door to their apartment clicked shut, and Alex turned back to Taek, wishing very much that the hallway floor would open up and swallow her whole.
"I am so sorry," she said. "She's just— she's protective. Overprotective. She heard 'elevator' and 'weird' and her brain just went straight to worst-case scenario. You didn't do anything wrong, I promise. I should've explained better instead of just standing there."
Taek's confusion had softened into something more careful, watching her with the kind of attention that made it hard to look away. "It's okay. I get it — she's looking out for you." A small pause, and then, quieter, more direct: "Are you alright, though? After last night?"
The question caught her off guard, gentler than she expected, completely unbothered by the chaos that had just unfolded on his doorstep. Like the only thing that actually mattered to him was that.
"I'm okay," she said, and found, a little surprising, that it was actually true this morning. "Better than okay, even. Thanks to you."
Alex shut the apartment door behind her and immediately wanted to sink straight through the floor."Okay, what was that," she said, voice climbing before she'd even fully turned around, the words spilling out faster than she could organize them.
"Jess, you can't just go pound on someone's door because I made a weird face over coffee, do you understand how insane that looked? He thinks I think he did something wrong, when literally nothing happened, nothing except him being nice and walking me up and telling me to drink water, and now he's probably standing in his apartment wondering what kind of unhinged household he lives across from, and honestly that's fair, because apparently we are the unhinged household—"
"Okay, breathe—"
"I can't breathe, Jess, I'm mortified." She dropped onto the couch, pressing both hands over her face like that might physically hold her together.
"I've spent four years being the quiet, normal neighbor. Four years of nods and held doors and minding my own business, and in one morning you've turned me into the girl whose roommate shows up swinging over nothing. He's going to think something's wrong with me. He's going to think I'm one of those people who can't have a single normal interaction without it turning into a whole thing."
"Alex—"
"And the actual humiliating part," she pushed on, because once it started coming out she couldn't seem to stop it, "is that nothing even happened that's worth explaining. He didn't say anything. He didn't do anything. I just— I felt something, okay? In the elevator. Something stupid and inconvenient and completely out of proportion to a five-minute ride, and instead of just sitting with that quietly like a normal person, I apparently radiate it so loudly that you thought I'd been insulted."Jess had gone quiet, watching her with an expression that had shifted somewhere during the rant — less amused, more careful, finally starting to actually listen instead of jumping ahead.
"So nothing happened," Jess said slowly. "You're not upset because of something he did."
"No." Alex let her hands fall into her lap, defeated. "I'm upset because of something I'm doing. In my own head. And now he's involved in the fallout of it, and he doesn't even know why, and I have to go live across the hall from him forever knowing I let my best friend interrogate him over my own stupid feelings."
Jess sank down onto the couch beside her, all the fight gone out of her now, replaced by something gentler. "Okay. So tell me. What's actually stuck in your head?"Alex stared at the ceiling, weighing how much of this she actually wanted to say out loud.
"It's stupid."
"You've said that twice now. I'm gonna need details before I agree."
A long breath. "The elevator," Alex admitted finally. "It wasn't anything. We barely talked. But he stood there, and he told me I was allowed to lean on the wall, and he said my name like—" She stopped, hearing how it sounded even as she said it. "Like it actually mattered to him. And I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. Not the scary part. Not the guy outside. That part. The quiet part."
Jess didn't say anything right away, just watched her with an expression Alex couldn't quite read."And the worst bit," Alex continued, quieter now, "is that I don't know if it's real or if I'm just— rattled. Like, is this an actual feeling, or is it just adrenaline wearing a feeling's clothes? Because last night, in that elevator, my heart did this thing it's never done before around him, not in four years, and I can't tell if that's because something's actually changing or because I almost got grabbed by a stranger twenty minutes earlier and my whole nervous system was just looking for somewhere safe to land."
"Okay," Jess said slowly. "That's... actually a real question."
"And on top of that," Alex pushed on, "now he probably thinks I'm unstable, because you showed up ready to fight him over nothing, and I don't even get the luxury of quietly figuring my feelings out in private anymore, because apparently my face is a billboard and my best friend reads it louder than I do."
Jess winced, a little sheepish. "Okay, fair. That part's on me."
Jess was quiet for a second, which for Jess was practically a warning sign that something thoughtful was coming."Okay, first," she said, "stop spiraling about what he thinks of you. You apologized, you explained, it's fine. Guys like that don't sit around overanalyzing a weird five minutes in a hallway. He's not writing a report on your mental stability, Alex. He's probably already forgotten about it and gone back to napping or whatever it is he does in there."
"That's not super reassuring, but okay."
"Second." Jess held up a finger. "The adrenaline thing — yeah, that's real, fear and attraction mess with the same wiring, everyone knows that. But here's the thing: it doesn't actually matter why it showed up. What matters is whether it's still there now, hours later, with you sitting on your couch in pajamas with zero adrenaline left in your system."
She tilted her head, studying her. "Is it?"
Alex hesitated, which was, again, answer enough."Yeah," Jess said, satisfied. "That's not adrenaline, babe. That's a crush finally getting room to breathe."
"Great. Wonderful. Exactly what I needed today."
"Third," Jess continued, undeterred, "you don't have to do anything about it right now. You don't have to march over there and confess your feelings or whatever spiraling version of that is currently playing in your head. You're allowed to just sit with it. Let it be true without turning it into a crisis."
Alex pulled a cushion into her lap, hugging it like a shield. "It feels like a crisis."
"It's not. It's just inconvenient." Jess bumped her shoulder gently. "You've had a crush on the guy for four years and refused to let it be a real thing. Last night it became one whether you wanted it to or not. That's not a disaster, Alex. That's just Tuesday catching up to four years of denial."
"And honestly?" Jess shifted, pulling her knees up onto the couch, settling into actual advice mode now instead of chaos mode. "Don't force anything tonight. Let it sink for a few days. You're running on zero sleep and leftover adrenaline — that's not the headspace to make any big decisions in."
"Okay," Alex said. "That part I can do."
"But after that—" Jess gave her a look, the knowing kind. "You actually have to test it. You can't just sit in your apartment cataloguing his every move through the wall for another four years and call that a relationship with your own feelings."
"I don't catalogue—"
"You know the sound of his keys, Alex."
"...Fair."
"So once you've slept and you're not running purely on panic anymore, find an excuse to actually spend time with him. Doesn't have to be some big dramatic thing. Coffee. A walk. Ask if he wants to grab food sometime, as a thank-you for last night — completely reasonable, completely low-stakes on paper." Jess shrugged. "See how it feels when it's not an emergency. See if the flutter's still there when nobody's in danger and there's no excuse for it. That's how you'll actually know if this is real or if it was just a really intense Tuesday."
Alex chewed on that, the cushion still clutched to her chest. "And if it is real?""Then you've got a great excuse to finally use more than two sentences with the guy you've been quietly losing your mind over since you were twenty-one." Jess smiled, softer now. "Either way, you stop wondering. That's worth something."