Chapter 1: 4B

The woman in 4B has been needling you in the elevator for two months and you have decided, with the firmness of someone who is wrong, that you do not like her.

Her name is Sloane. You know this because it is on the package she signed for when you were out, the one she handed you in the hall with a look that said she had read the return address and formed opinions. She is always coming or going at the exact wrong moment, damp-haired from a run, or with a glass of red already going at six on a Tuesday, or in the kind of oversized shirt that should not work on anyone and works criminally on her, and she always, always has a line. You step into the elevator and the doors close and there are four floors of descending in which she says one dry devastating thing about your gym bag or your posture or the man who left your apartment at seven that morning, and you spend the rest of the day thinking of what you should have said back.

You tell yourself this is annoyance. You are very committed to the idea that this is annoyance.

Tonight she is in the hall when you come home, leaning in her own open doorway, 4B, directly across from your 4A, eight feet of worn carpet between her door and yours, wine in one hand, looking at you over the rim of it like you are the most entertaining thing that has happened to her all week, which, given that it is eleven at night and you are carrying a sad bag of groceries, is insulting.

"Big night," she says.

"Enormous."

"The frozen-dinner-for-one is a strong choice. Very film noir." She tips the glass at your bag. "You want to come in and have something that isn't sad? I opened a bottle I'm not going to finish, and I have a deeply unhealthy need to win an argument before bed."

And here is the thing you will think about later, lying awake: that you say no, that you say something cutting about needing your beauty sleep, and that she smiles - that smile, the one that always lands a half-second too late, like she has decided to find you funny and is letting you watch her decide - and says "Suit yourself, 4A," and goes inside, and you stand in the hall with your sad groceries feeling, unmistakably, like you lost. Again. And that you go into your own apartment, across the hall, eight feet away, and you can hear her music through the wall, and you do not put on your own, you listen to hers, and you do not examine why.

Chapter 2: The Long Way Down

It escalates, the way these things do, in the shared spaces, where you cannot avoid each other and neither of you is trying to.

The laundry room at midnight, because you both, it turns out, are the kind of people who do laundry at midnight, and she sits on the dryer while yours spins and dismantles your taste in detergent and then, somewhere around the rinse cycle, your taste in women, which is a thing you did not know she knew anything about, and you realize she has been paying the same kind of attention to you that you have been telling yourself you have not been paying to her. The elevator, every day, the four floors, the lines getting closer to the bone. The night the building's power goes out and you both end up in the hall with candles, sitting against opposite doors, 4A and 4B, eight feet apart in the dark, and the banter goes quiet for once, and the quiet is worse, the quiet is the thing you have both been using the noise to cover.

"Can I ask you something," she says, in the dark, "and you don't make it weird."

"I'm constitutionally incapable of making things weird."

"You make everything weird. It's your whole thing." A pause, the candle between you guttering. "Why'd you really say no. That first night. The wine."

And you have an answer ready, a good one, a deflecting one, and you do not use it. Because it is dark and the power is out and she is eight feet away and you are tired, suddenly, of winning exchanges and losing the actual thing. "Because if I came in," you say, "I wasn't going to want to leave. And then I'd have to live across the hall from that."

The candle pops. Across the dark, you hear her go still. For once, Sloane does not have a line.

"Yeah," she says, finally, quiet. "That's the problem, isn't it." And the power comes back on then, the hall lights snapping up harsh and sudden, and the two of you are caught there blinking on the floor with your backs against your separate doors, eight feet and two months and one admitted thing between you, and neither of you moves to go inside.

Chapter 3: Eight Feet

You are the one who closes it. You will be insufferable about this later, that you closed it first, and she will let you be, because she knows what it cost.

You get up off the floor in the harsh new light and you cross the eight feet of carpet that you have been treating like a border, and you stand over her where she sits against her own door, 4B, looking up at you with her sharp face gone uncertain for the first time in two months, the wine forgotten beside her, and you say, "I'm extremely tired of being witty at you in elevators."

"It's the only move I've got," she says, and it comes out with none of the usual armor on it, almost the truth, and you reach down and take her hand and pull her up, and she comes up faster than gravity, up into your space, the two of you suddenly close in the hall with both your doors open and neither of you going through them.

She does not make it easy even now, because she is Sloane. "If we do this," she says, your mouths an inch apart, her hand fisting in your shirt, "you understand I still get to be unbearable in the elevator."

"I'd report you to the co-op board if you stopped."

"And you'll still be wrong about the detergent."

"Sloane."

"What."

"Stop talking."

And she smiles, that smile, the one that lands a half-second late, except this time you are close enough to watch it arrive in real time, the exact moment she decides, and her hand pulls you in by the shirt and the two months and the eight feet and every won and lost exchange collapse into the half-inch of air left between you, both your doors standing open into your separate lives, the kiss about to land, the whole rest of it breathing in the bright hard hallway light.