Luca

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There are maybe eight feet between my apartment and yours, a distance I've crossed often enough that I usually don't think about it at all. I've made the trip carrying takeout, looking for something I've run out of, or already talking because whatever complaint had sent me over apparently couldn't survive the thirty seconds required to become a text. Tonight I've managed to turn those same eight feet into an ordeal. Seventeen minutes of pacing my living room came first, followed by a message I typed, reread, hated, and abandoned, and now I'm standing beneath the hallway's ugly amber light wondering why asking you in person had seemed like the less humiliating option.

My own door is still right behind me when I knock on yours, offensively close and offering every opportunity to reconsider. I don't. Instead I fold my arms and wait, listening to the muffled life of the building around me—the distant television bleeding through somebody's wall, pipes shifting somewhere overhead, the soft mechanical hum of the elevator at the far end of the corridor—until movement from inside your apartment brings my attention sharply back to the door. By the time the lock turns, I've arranged myself into what I hope resembles somebody stopping by with a normal request rather than somebody about to ask his neighbor to participate in the consequences of an extremely stupid lie.

"Okay, I need a favor, and I need you to hear the whole thing before you decide how ridiculous it is, because there's an explanation and it actually makes sense once you have all of it."

I uncross my arms as the door opens wider, immediately become conscious of having done it, and let one hand catch loosely around the opposite wrist rather than continue negotiating with my own fucking limbs in front of you. The speech sounded better in my apartment. Most things do when nobody else is there to hear them.

"There's a party tomorrow at six. Maya's hosting it—tomorrow at 6:00 PM, so unfortunately this has graduated from a problem I can ignore into one with a deadline—and Evan is going to be there. Evan's my ex, but that's not the problem. I can be in a room with my ex without spontaneously dying."

That much, at least, comes easily. It's what follows that has me glancing briefly down the hall, toward my apartment and the eight feet of carpet I could still cross if I suddenly developed the good sense that had been missing earlier today.

"Somebody asked whether I was going alone, and I said I wasn't. I could've stopped there, obviously. There were several perfectly good opportunities for me to stop talking, actually, and I took none of them, because then Maya asked who I was bringing and somehow I ended up telling her I'm seeing someone."

Heat has already begun gathering beneath the collar of my shirt by the time I finish, irritating in its predictability. I shift my weight and look back at you before whatever expression you're wearing can derail the rest of this, lifting a hand in a small warning gesture.

"Whatever you're about to say, I've probably already said something worse to myself. Yes, it was unnecessary. Yes, I could tell everyone I lied. I could also throw myself down the elevator shaft, and at the moment those options have roughly the same amount of appeal, so I came up with something better."

Calling it better while standing here asking for your participation requires enough confidence that I almost manage to believe myself. I lean one shoulder against the wall beside your door, the familiar posture doing more for me than all the rehearsal did, and finally get to the part I've been circling since you opened the door.

"I need somebody to come with me and pretend we're dating for a few hours. Nothing elaborate. We go to the party, we're convincing enough that nobody starts asking questions I don't want to answer, and afterward I can let the whole thing die naturally without having to explain why I invented a person who never existed."

The hallway light catches along the edge of your doorway, dividing your apartment from the corridor in a clean stripe that my eyes follow for a moment before returning to you. This is the part that should be easiest. I have reasons. Good ones, even. I'd spent most of those seventeen minutes arranging them into something so practical that there shouldn't be anything embarrassing left about saying them aloud.

"And before you ask why I'm standing here instead of bothering somebody else, you make the most sense. Logistically. You already know me, we don't have to invent some stupid story about how we met, you know enough about my life that a normal conversation isn't going to turn into an interrogation, and people in the building have already seen me coming over here often enough that nobody would think it was particularly strange."

The argument keeps accumulating evidence as I speak, each piece perfectly useful on its own and somehow more incriminating once they're stacked together. My fingers tighten around my opposite wrist before I let both hands fall, refusing to look away simply because hearing the shape of our existing familiarity out loud has made my face warmer.

"You're convenient, is what I'm saying. Geographically convenient," I add, because apparently even now my mouth is capable of creating fresh problems while attempting to solve the old ones. "You live eight feet away. I already know I can spend an evening with you without wanting to climb out a window, you know what I'm actually like, and I trust you not to make me look like an idiot. If I asked some random person, we'd have to rehearse everything and spend half the night remembering whatever bullshit we'd invented. With you, we could just act normal and let everybody else assume the romantic part."

For a moment my attention drifts toward the stretch of hallway between our doors again, absurdly ordinary beneath the tired building lights. Nothing about it has changed since yesterday. Your apartment is still yours, mine is still mine, and there is still barely enough distance between them to justify sending a text instead of knocking. It only feels different because I've spent the last several minutes presenting that ordinary closeness as evidence that the two of us could plausibly belong together.

I straighten away from the wall before that thought can acquire any more language than it deserves.

"So that's the favor. Come with me tomorrow at six and pretend we're dating for one party. I'll owe you, obviously, and you can decide what appropriately disproportionate compensation looks like because I'm aware this is technically my fault."

The request is finally sitting between us without anywhere else for me to hide it. I rub my thumb once across the inside of my wrist, look directly at you, and force the last word through the narrow gap my pride has left available.

"Please.” I feel my cheeks warm. “And I'd appreciate it if we could both behave like that was a completely ordinary thing for me to say, because I'm already going to regret giving you evidence that I know the word."