I step out of the taxi in the highest heels I own and make my way into the brutalist lobby. I sink into a plush sofa and almost disappear into my fur coat. It feels like sitting by a fireplace.

I want to write it down.

The moment I take out my notebook, a waiter interrupts. Would I like anything?

No—we’re going upstairs. He insists on water. I agree, just to make him leave.

I burrow deeper into the fur and look forward to ten, maybe twenty minutes of uninterrupted thought. He’s never on time.

But today, he is.

I sense him before I see him. I don’t even look up. My skin hums. And if I weren’t slightly annoyed he’s cutting my waiting short, part of me would lift off the ground.

He smiles. Pulls me up from the sofa, his arm steady like a crane.

I don’t need to.

With him, I’m exactly where I should be.

In the elevator, we hold each other a little closer—but not too much. No shots fired too early.

Upstairs, it feels like a living room. Except for the food. Pumpkin pudding with something I can’t quite name, sturgeon with black caviar. I wouldn’t serve any of it at home. Not even Becherovka jelly.

Still, it does.

It always does with him.

I want to say it, but he keeps asking questions. I don’t understand how everything about my life can still interest him so intensely, even now. Then again, I do have a new business idea, and our romance quickly turns into shaping a plan.

I can see it through him. Even though it isn’t his.

I can see everything he’s already built, everything he’s brought to life—and how much he wants this to work for me. He loves my contentment. And today, he acts as if it might still be his assignment twenty years from now.

As if he were setting it up for me—so that one day, he could die in peace.

I don’t resist. I don’t argue. I listen.

It’s no longer just a stream of clever stories in a confident body.

I feel him reading me.

Reading even what I meant to write down, but didn’t—because of him.

At the end, over espresso, he tells me he read all my texts online today.

He says it calmly.

As if there were nothing unusual about having done it only now.

In the elevator, I hold him.

Enthusiastically, but calmly.

As if there were nothing unusual about the fact that I truly heard him for the first time— only today.

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