Chapter 4: Dinner and a Sin
The last container of kung pao chicken was empty, a casualty of their easy, standing-around-the-kitchen silence. Y/n crumpled the box with a satisfying crackle.
“I should head home,” she said, rinsing her hands again at the sink. “Let that first coat cure. Your wall’s a good patient. It’ll heal clean.”
Margot walked her to the door, the newly quiet apartment feeling different now—not empty, but waiting. “Thank you. For the fix. And for the… other thing.”
“No sweat.” Y/n offered that small, crooked smile, a flash of warmth in the cool hallway. “See you around, Margot.”
The door clicked shut.
For three full seconds, Margot leaned against it, the solid wood at her back. The encounter replayed in vivid fragments: the sanding sound, the feel of the cardboard food container, the direct grey-blue of Y/n’s eyes when she’d said I don’t let people in. A current of something—restlessness, curiosity, a fizzy, unwanted arousal—crackled under her skin. She pushed off the door.
In her bedroom, she bypassed the plush bed and went straight to the sleek, minimalist dresser. The bottom drawer slid open silently. Inside, nestled next to silk scarves, was a discreet, navy-blue silicone toy and a burner phone, its screen dark and anonymous. She’d bought them in a single, defiant act of privacy after the last breakup, a rebellion against the feeling that every part of her life was potentially for public consumption.
She propped the phone against a lamp, its camera facing the blank wall. No recording. Just a mirror. A way to see only herself, for herself.
Her breath was already coming short. She sank to the thick rug, the city’s glow a muted backdrop. The cool touch of the toy was a shock that quickly turned to a focusing heat. She closed her eyes, but the images came anyway—not of fantasy strangers, but of the recent, charged reality. A strong, capable hand applying joint compound with steady sweeps. The line of a jaw tightened in concentration. The low timbre of a voice saying I’d take your picture. It was inconvenient, this specific pull. It felt dangerously close to crossing a line she’d drawn for herself. Her movements grew quicker, a frustrated rhythm chasing a release that felt just out of reach, tangled up in ethics and proximity.
A few floors below, in an apartment that smelled of sawdust, citrus cleaner, and simmered beans, Y/n kicked off her boots. The familiar ache in her shoulders from a day of labor was a comfort. So was the routine.
She dropped onto the worn, brown leather couch, the springs sighing. The television was old, the remote sticky. She pulled up a site, scrolling past the glossy, performative thumbnails until she found something that looked real, unpolished, with people who seemed like they might actually know each other. The sound was off. She didn’t need it.
Her work-rough hand moved with practiced, unhuried ease over herself. This was a physical punctuation mark at the end of a day, a way to reset her own systems. The images on the screen were just geometry and motion, a focal point. Her mind, however, drifted from the pixels.
It replayed the feeling of Margot’s palpable embarrassment dissolving into something softer over cheap food. The startling blue of her eyes wide with confession. The weirdness wasn’t about you. It was about the reflection I thought you saw. Y/n understood reflections. She lived with a million of them, in shop windows, in the glances of strangers, in the eyes of old relatives who still struggled to find the right pronoun. The vulnerability in Margot’s admission had been more intimate than any nudity.
Her rhythm stuttered. A low groan escaped her, part frustration, part something else. This was stupid. Dangerous. She was her own boss, she built solid things, she didn’t get tangled up in fantasies about famous neighbors in penthouses. That was a recipe for a specific, quiet kind of hell.
She focused on the screen, on the simple, anonymous mechanics of it. The release, when it came, was a wave of warmth that left her boneless and momentarily blank, staring at the water-stained ceiling.
Silence pooled in the apartment. Then, a sound. A faint, rhythmic buzzing, mechanical and muffled. It was coming from the vent near the floor. It buzzed for a solid minute, then stopped.
Y/n lay still, listening. Her brain, sharp from years of diagnosing problems by sound alone, automatically mapped the building’s plumbing and ductwork. That vent tied into the central chase that ran up through the building’s core, servicing the units directly above.
The sound hadn’t been a power tool. It was smaller, more personal. The timing was a coincidence that felt like a physical touch.
A slow, deep blush heated her neck and chest. She swung her legs off the couch, suddenly needing to move. She stood in the middle of her living room, the ghost of that distant, muffled vibration humming in the soles of her feet. A laugh bubbled up in her throat, dry and humorless. Of all the possible, stupid, universe-aligned conclusions…
She walked to the kitchen, splashed water on her face. The reflection in the dark window showed her own tired eyes, wide with a dawning, complicated awareness. The quiet between their apartments was no longer empty. It was charged, now, with a parallel, private knowledge she was never meant to have.
Upstairs, Margot was already asleep, one hand flung out across the cool sheets, chasing something in a dream.
Downstairs, Y/n didn’t sleep at all. She sat at her small table, a single lamp on, mechanically taking apart and cleaning a power drill she didn’t need to clean, each click and whir of the brush against metal components a grounding counter-rhythm to the quiet, echoing buzz she couldn’t unhear.