Seven Steps Apart

The fan on the corner of his desk was losing the fight.

You’d cracked the window open earlier hoping for some kind of relief but all it let in was more of the same. Warm dead air and the distant sound of the street below. Sunday morning in Seoul during summer was its own particular kind of punishment. You pulled your chair in, spread your notes across the desk and got to work.

You were deep enough into it that you’d stopped noticing the heat when the noise started.

Not noise exactly. A voice.

You looked up from your notes.

Someone’s having a bad morning.

The thought came and went. You went back to your notes. The voice didn’t stop. If anything it got sharper, more concentrated, the kind of sound that had a specific target. You put your highlighter down and walked to the window.

Down below at the building entrance a girl was standing in front of a moving truck.

Even from the seventh floor you could see she was furious. Not the loud falling apart kind of furious. The other kind. The kind that had been building since before today, that had a whole history behind it that this moving man was just unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of right now. Arms crossed, chin up, not moving an inch. The man in front of her was bigger, louder, gesturing with his whole body the way people did when they assumed size and volume were the same thing as being right.

She didn’t flinch once.

You’d seen enough arguments to know when someone was losing and when someone had simply decided they were done. She’d decided. The man just hadn’t figured that out yet.

You leaned against the window frame and watched without meaning to.

There was something about the way she stood. Like the heat and the boxes and the fact that she was arguing with a stranger on a Sunday morning in front of her entire life packed into cardboard was all just an inconvenience she was moving through on the way to something else. No performance. No tears. Just this flat immovable certainty that she was right and she was going to stay right until the universe acknowledged it.

The man threw his hands up.

Said something you couldn’t hear but could feel from seven floors up.

His two assistants climbed back into the truck without looking at her. The engine turned over. And just like that the truck pulled out and disappeared around the corner leaving behind a pile of boxes and furniture and bags and one small shelving unit sitting in the direct path of the summer sun.

And her.

Standing exactly where she’d been standing. Arms still crossed. Staring at the space where the truck had been like she was giving it ten seconds to come back and make better choices.

It didn’t.

Something shifted in her posture then. Just slightly. The certainty was still there but underneath it, just briefly, you caught a glimpse of something else. The particular stillness of a person who is completely alone with a problem and has just fully understood the size of it.

She’s going to move all of that herself.

You looked at the pile. Then back at her. Then at the pile again.

You grabbed your keys off the desk.

The heat hit immediately stepping outside. You crossed the small distance between the entrance and where she was standing and she didn’t notice you until you were a few feet away. Up close she was sharper than she’d looked from the window. Jaw defined, eyes dark, a few strands of hair escaped from the high ponytail around her face. The black hoodie she was wearing made no sense for this weather but somehow she was pulling it off through sheer force of not caring.

She was staring at the pile with the focused expression of someone doing very unpleasant mathematics in their head.

“Need any help?”

She turned fast.

The look she gave you could have stripped paint. Her eyes moved over you once, quick and flat, and whatever conclusion she reached was not a generous one.

“I just dealt with a creep.” Even and precise. “I don’t want to deal with another one.”

Something about it caught you off guard. Not the words exactly but the delivery. The complete absence of apology in it. Like she’d said it so many times today it had stopped costing her anything.

A quiet huff of air left you before you could think about it. Not a laugh. Just the involuntary sound of someone who hadn’t expected that particular sentence in that particular tone at that particular moment.

Her eyes narrowed slightly.

“Sorry.” You found your footing. “Late introduction. I’m not a creep. I’m your neighbour. I live right across from you.”

She looked at you for a long second. Something moved behind her eyes. Recalculating.

“You live in 113?”

“Yep.”

The crossed arms dropped. Not all at once, just enough. She exhaled and it carried more than just the last five minutes in it. More like the last several hours. Maybe longer.

“Sorry for calling you a creep.” Less sharp now. Not soft exactly, just human. “I’ve been dealing with that guy since eight in the morning and he was ogling my ass—” She stopped. Reset. “Sorry. You don’t need to hear all of that.”

“Moving is a headache on a good day.” You glanced at the pile. “Today’s not a good day.”

She followed your eyes to the pile and said nothing for a moment.

“You really don’t have to do this.” When she looked back at you it was direct, no performance behind it. “You don’t know me.”

“Is anyone coming to help? A friend, anyone?”

“No, but—”

“No buts.”

“Moving all of this alone in this heat will take forever.”

“But you don’t even know my—”

You’d already turned toward the pile. The biggest cardboard box was closest, sealed and marked FRAGILE on two sides in red marker. You crouched down, got your arms underneath it and stood.

“Let’s finish this and order Jajangmyeon after.” Already moving toward the entrance. “I know a good place.”

Silence behind you.

Then small footsteps.

You didn’t smile. But it was a close thing.

The elevator was narrow enough that two people and a large box made for an uncomfortable arrangement. You worked out a system by the third trip. Bigger items first, then boxes, then the loose bags last. Sooin, which was the name she’d offered somewhere between the second and third trip in a voice that was still a little careful, turned out to be more capable than the oversized hoodie suggested. She carried more than expected and didn’t complain once about the heat even though the back of her neck was visibly damp by the fourth trip.

She was quiet mostly. Not uncomfortable quiet. Just the kind that belonged to someone still figuring out where to put you.

Every now and then something small.

This box has my books in it, be careful.

The shelf goes up first or it won’t fit through the door properly.

You can set that one anywhere, I’ll figure out where it goes later.

You answered when she spoke and didn’t push for more than that. The trips settled into a rhythm. Down seven floors, across the lobby, back up again, the small elevator humming around you both each time. By the sixth trip the silence had lost whatever tension was left in it. By the last one Sooin was holding the elevator door open for you with her shoulder, both hands full, saying okay last one in a voice that had gone soft around the edges without her seeming to notice.

You set the final bag just inside her door.

The apartment was bare the way new spaces always were. Full of potential and cardboard. The morning light came through the window and landed across the floor in a wide warm stripe. Sooin stood in the middle of it all and pushed a loose strand of hair back from her face, looking around at everything still left to do.

Then she looked at you.

“Thank you.” Genuine. A little unguarded. “Really.”

“It’s nothing.”

She looked like she wanted to argue with that but didn’t quite get there. Instead the corner of her mouth moved into something small and quiet that wasn’t quite a smile yet but was getting there.

You pulled out your phone.

“Jajangmyeon?”

She let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

“Jajangmyeon.”

After that Sunday, running into each other stopped being a coincidence and started just being the way things were.

The hallway. The elevator. The convenience store on the corner that you both apparently went to at eleven at night for the same brand of banana milk without knowing it until you reached for the last one at the same time and she got there first and didn’t apologize about it. The campus too, though that one took longer to registered.

You had seen her around the arts building before without knowing who she was. The girl with the sharp ponytail who moved through corridors like she had somewhere to be and meant it. It wasn’t until a Tuesday morning three weeks after move in day that you connected her to 112. She was crossing the main courtyard with her dance bag over one shoulder, earphones in, head down, when she looked up at exactly the wrong moment and caught you looking.

Or the right moment, depending on how you counted these things.

She gave you a single nod. You gave one back. She kept walking.

That was all.

But something about it settled differently than the hallway run ins did. Like the campus was its own separate world and finding her in it meant something you hadn’t worked out yet.

You noticed she wasn’t eating properly on a Wednesday.

Her door opened at ten, footsteps fast down the hallway, the elevator, gone. No breakfast. Probably running straight from a late backup dance practice the night before into a full morning of classes with nothing in between. You knew the schedule those gigs kept. You’d seen her come home past midnight more than once, dance bag on one shoulder, the particular exhausted quiet of someone who had given everything they had to something and was now just trying to make it to the bed.

You didn’t say anything about it.

You just started making enough for two on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Left it outside 112 in a container before eight with a note torn from the corner of a notebook page.

Made too much. Would go to waste otherwise. — 113

You didn’t wait to see if she took it.

She did.

The container came back the same evening, clean and stacked neatly outside your door with a small sticky note on top. The first one just said thanks with a drawing that was either a star or an explosion, you genuinely couldn’t tell. The second one had a tiny face with what appeared to be a very satisfied expression. The third one had nothing written on it at all, just a small sunflower drawn in the corner.

You put them all in the same drawer without thinking too much about why.

After a while the notes stopped because they weren’t necessary anymore. She knew. You knew. The container went out, the container came back. Tuesday and Thursday mornings in the narrow seventh floor hallway acquired their own quiet grammar that neither of you had written down but both of you could read.

It just was.

It was a Friday night in late September when she knocked.

You almost missed it over the music playing low from the shelf, something old on vinyl that you’d found in a secondhand shop. You opened the door to find Sooin standing there with a paper grocery bag held in both hands and her dance bag still on one shoulder like she’d come straight from practice. She had. You could tell from the way she was standing, that specific kind of tired that lived in the body differently than regular tired did. The kind that came from working hard at something you chose and kept choosing even when it cost you.

She looked at the space just past your shoulder for a half second before looking at you.

“I bought groceries.” Then immediately after, like she’d only just heard herself say it out loud. “As like. A thank you. For the breakfast thing.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“I know.” She shifted the bag. “I wanted to.”

You looked at the bag.

Then at her. Then at the open door.

“Do you want to cook together?”

Something moved across her face quickly. She glanced past you into the apartment the way people did when they were making a decision without wanting to look like they were making one.

“Okay.” Quiet. Like she was agreeing with herself as much as with you.

She came inside like she was cataloguing everything.

Which, you realized within thirty seconds, she absolutely was.

You‘d gone straight to the kitchen to start on the pasta and she’d drifted away almost immediately, hands clasped behind her back, moving through the small space with the focused attention of someone in a museum they hadn’t expected to find interesting.

“You paint?”

“Sometimes.”

She looked at the small stack of canvases leaning against the wall, most of them unfinished. Moved on to the shelf.

“These are actual CDs.” She said it with the careful reverence people reserved for things that had no business still existing. She picked one up and turned it over slowly. “Physical CDs. You actually buy these.”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“I like having the thing itself.”

She put it back exactly where she’d found it. You noticed that. Then she found the camera on the desk, old enough that she paused trying to identify it.

“Film?”

“Yes.”

She set it down carefully and kept moving. Stopped at the small shelf near the window. Picked up the figure standing between a book and a succulent with two careful fingers, held it up and looked at it.

“Is this an anime figure.”

It wasn’t a question exactly.

“It is.”

She set it back down. Turned and looked at the rest of the room. Then at you standing at the stove. The expression on her face was doing several things at once.

“You’re like a old man.”

You stirred the sauce.

“I’ve heard that.”

“No but genuinely.”

She came to lean against the kitchen doorframe, arms crossed, something between amusement and bewilderment working across her face. “You’re what, twenty two?”

“Twenty two.”

“Vinyl records. Film camera. Physical CDs. Anime figures. Everything is organized.” A pause. “Your kitchen is actually clean.”

“Is that strange?”

“For someone our age? A little bit yes.” She tilted her head. “How are you even this good at cooking? Where does all of this come from?”

You kept your eyes on the pan.

“I looked after my younger sister and brother a lot growing up.” You turned the heat down. “My parents were busy most of the time so you just. Learn.”

The apartment went a little quieter after that. Not uncomfortably. Just the way spaces did when something honest had been said in them.

You didn’t look at her. But you felt the quality of her attention shift. The particular way she went still when she was actually listening, not just waiting to respond. Filing something away somewhere careful.

She didn’t push. Just let it sit where you’d put it.

After a moment she came fully into the kitchen and hoisted herself up onto the counter beside the stove. Close enough to see what you were doing. She watched the sauce for a moment.

“I have a dog back in Daegu.” Casual. Offered simply, like something small in return. “And a sister. So it was similar I guess. Minus the cooking. My sister did all of that.” A small pause. “I mostly just ate it.”

“What’s the dog’s name?”

She looked at you sideways.

“You’re going to laugh.”

“I’m not.”

“Yomi.”

You didn’t laugh. You smiled, just slightly, eyes still on the pan.

She relaxed a little on the counter.

“He’s very fat and very opinionated and I miss him a lot.” Said it completely matter of factly. “Don’t tell anyone I said that.”

“Said what?”

She looked at you for a second.Then something in her face went soft in a way she probably didn’t know was visible.

The pasta was simple. Cream sauce, nothing complicated. You set the plates on the small table and she sat across from you and ate with the focused sincerity of someone who hadn’t had a proper meal in longer than they’d admit. After the first few bites she looked up.

“How is it.” You asked it before she could say anything.

She considered it seriously, chewing.

“It’s really basic.” She said it like a verdict. “But it’s just everything it needs to be.”

You took that as a compliment because it was one.They ate mostly in comfortable quiet after that, the kind that didn’t need filling. At some point she was talking about a piece she was working on for the upcoming showcase, hands moving as she described the choreography, and you were listening the way you always listened, fully, without interrupting, and she was mid sentence when you reached over with a napkin and wiped the edge of her cheek where a small streak of cream sauce had been sitting unnoticed.

Completely automatic. Like something you’d done a hundred times.

You went back to eating.

She didn’t.

You noticed after a moment that she’d gone very still across the table, fork suspended halfway to her plate, eyes slightly wide, staring at a point somewhere past your shoulder.

You didn’t say anything about it.

Neither did she.

But she was quiet for a different reason after that.

Back in 112 later that night she sat on her bed and stared at the wall.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like it. That wasn’t the problem at all. The problem was that she didn’t have a word for what it was. People didn’t just do that. Reach over and wipe something off your face like it was the most natural thing in the world and then go straight back to eating pasta like nothing happened. Like you were just someone they’d always known. Like the space between you was already familiar enough for small casual gestures that somehow felt enormous from the inside.

She pressed her fingers to the side of her cheek where the napkin had been.

What is that.

She didn’t have an answer. Just the warmth of it sitting somewhere in her chest like something that had always been there but she’d only just noticed.

She lay back on her bed and looked at the ceiling for a long time.

Tuesday morning the container was outside her door at the usual time.

She opened her door still half asleep and looked at it for a moment.

Then she picked it up and smiled so wide she had to press her lips together to make it stop. It didn’t really stop.

She was still thinking about it three days later when Gawon caught her.

“Why are you smiling like that.”

“Like what.”

Sooin didn’t look up from her phone.

“Like that.” Gawon leaned across the table and pushed the phone down. “That specific smile. The one you’ve been doing for three days when you think no one’s looking. What happened.”

“Nothing happened. I was just thinking about something.”

“Something.” Gawon repeated it flatly.

“Something.” Sooin took her phone back.

Gawon looked at her for a long moment with the expression of someone choosing their battles. Then her eyes moved past Sooin’s shoulder and she straightened up slightly.

That was when Sooin turned.

And there was Y/N.

He was crossing the far end of the courtyard with his bag over one shoulder, head slightly down, the particular unhurried way he moved that she’d noticed before, like he was never in a rush because he’d already accounted for the time. And beside him, laughing at something he’d apparently just said, was a girl.

Pretty in the immediate obvious way. The kind of pretty that made people look twice and then look again. She touched Y/N’s shoulder lightly when she laughed.

“There’s Y/N.” Gawon said. Then, nodding at the girl. “And Anna.”

Sooin turned back around. “Anna?”

“You don’t know Anna?” Gawon looked genuinely surprised. “She’s like. The campus princess. I have no idea what she’s doing in CS, she’s way too cute for computer science. Don’t you think?”

Sooin glanced back once.

“Yeah.” She said it without expression. “She’s cute.”

But the question was already forming somewhere underneath that, quiet and uninvited and irritating in the specific way that questions were when you didn’t want to be asking them.

Why is she with Y/N.

“I’m honestly so jealous of him right now.” Gawon had her chin in her hand, watching them across the courtyard with open admiration. “I wish I could be with someone like that. Just looking at her makes me want to—”

“Please don’t finish that sentence.”Gawon looked at her. “Why are you making that face?””I’m not making a face.”

“You are absolutely making a face. Look at her, she’s gorgeous, don’t you feel—”

“No.” Sooin picked up her bag and stood. “I don’t.”

She walked off toward the arts building.

“Hey.” Gawon scrambled after her. “The auditorium is this way, wait—”

She started leaving earlier in the mornings.

Not by a lot. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty. Enough to be already gone by the time eight fifteen came around. The container still appeared outside her door on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She still took it. But she stopped sitting with it in the kitchen the way she’d started doing recently, eating slowly, listening to the small sounds of the building waking up around her.

She just took it and left.

Y/N noticed. Of course he noticed. But he didn’t change anything about what he did and he didn’t bring it up. The container kept appearing. That was all.

She told herself she didn’t feel guilty about it.

She felt guilty about it.

What she didn’t know was that on a Thursday afternoon two weeks into this, Y/N had made lunch.

Not breakfast. Lunch. He’d thought about it the way he thought about most things, quietly and practically. She had the showcase rehearsals running long every day this week. She was probably not eating between morning classes and evening practice. He made enough for two, put it in a container and walked across campus to the arts building in the late afternoon with no particular plan beyond leaving it at the door for her.

He heard the music before he reached the rehearsal room.

The door was open just enough.

He stopped without deciding to.

Inside, the rehearsal room was lit warm and low, most of the team already gone for the day. Just two people left. Sooin and a guy from her team, running the duet section of the showcase piece. He’d seen her dance before, briefly, in passing, the way you caught things at the edge of your vision on a busy campus.

This was different.

The piece they were doing was slow and close and built around the specific tension of two people in each other’s orbit. Her partner moved with her like he knew exactly where she was going before she got there. And Sooin.

Sooin danced like the music was already inside her and she was just letting it out through her hands and her spine and the exact measured way she turned her face at the end of a phrase. Every movement carried something. You couldn’t look away from it. Not because it was technically perfect, though it was, but because it meant something. You could feel what it meant from the doorway and you didn’t even know the piece.

He stood there longer than he should have.

This is why people dance instead of talking.

The thought arrived quietly and settled there.

When the music ended she dropped her head forward, breathing hard, her partner’s hand still at her waist for a moment before they separated. She laughed at something he said, low and tired and real.

Y/N stepped back from the door.

He was halfway down the corridor before he registered that he was moving. The container was still in his hand. He looked at it for a moment, then kept walking.

Outside the arts building the late afternoon light was doing something golden and indifferent across the courtyard.

Just because she takes the breakfast you make and had dinner once doesn’t mean anything.

He said it to himself very clearly and with complete conviction.

His chest disagreed.

She was dancing with someone else. That’s her job. That’s her life. You don’t get to feel like that.

He walked home.

He put the container in the fridge.

He sat at his desk and looked at his notes for a while without reading them.

The distance between 112 and 113 had never felt like anything before.

Seven steps across the hallway. Less, even. Close enough that you could hear music through the wall if it was late and quiet. Close enough that you’d gotten used to the particular sound of her door, the way it closed differently than his did, a little softer, like she was always conscious of the hour.

Now it felt like something you’d have to cross deliberately and neither of you were crossing it.

The containers kept moving. That was the only thing that didn’t stop. Tuesday and Thursday, out and back, the small wordless transaction that had become its own kind of language before either of them had noticed. He kept leaving them. She kept taking them. Neither of them could have explained why they were both still doing it.

Maybe because stopping would have meant saying something neither of them had words for yet.

The hallway stayed quiet.

The distance stayed.But distances had a way of accumulating weight the longer they were maintained. And weight had a way of eventually becoming unbearable.

The night before the showcase.

He’d stayed late helping set up the main auditorium, one of those things he’d agreed to without remembering agreeing to, some request from a classmate who needed an extra pair of hands for the lighting rig and the staging. He didn’t mind. He rarely did.

By the time it was done the building had gone quiet around him, the kind of quiet that large spaces got late at night when everyone had left and all that remained was the echo of a place that was used to holding a lot of people. He gathered his jacket from the back of a seat and headed for the exit.

That was when he noticed.

The light under the auditorium’s side door. The one that led to the smaller rehearsal stage. Still on.

He knew who it was before he opened the door.

She didn’t hear him come in.

The music she had playing from her phone on the floor was low but it filled the space the way music did in empty rooms, larger than itself. And Sooin was moving through the piece alone, no partner, filling both parts of it from memory, her reflection keeping pace with her in the dark mirror along the far wall.

She was exhausted. He could see it in the way she was carrying herself, the slight heaviness in the transitions that wouldn’t be there tomorrow when the adrenaline of performance took over. But she was still there at past midnight the night before the showcase running the piece again because that was who she was.

He stood at the back of the room and didn’t move.

Every phrase she danced carried something. He’d thought that at the rehearsal two weeks ago and he thought it again now, more clearly. She was funnily the kind of person who could say things with her body that most people spent their whole lives searching for the words to. The tilt of her head at the end of a phrase. The way her hands moved through the air like they were leaving something behind. The exact quality of stillness she found right before the music shifted.

He’d always been quietly envious of people who could do that. Put something true into a form that didn’t need explaining.

He watched her and forgot, for a long moment, that he’d been meaning to go home.

She stopped.

The music kept going for a few more bars before she reached down and turned it off. The silence came in like a tide. She stood with her head dropped forward, breathing hard, hands on her knees.

Then her legs gave.

Not dramatically. Just quietly and completely, the way bodies did when they’d been asked for too much for too long and finally submitted the invoice. She went down to the floor in a slow collapse, sitting back on her heels and then sideways.

He was already moving.

“Sooinah—”

She looked up fast, startled, eyes wide and trying to locate him in the low light. He was already crouched beside her, one hand at her back, steadying.

“What are you doing here.” Not angry yet. Just confused, still catching her breath.

“I saw the light was still on.”

She looked at him. Then something shifted in her face and the confusion became something else. She pulled back slightly, not far, just enough.

“Don’t you have other girls to check on.”

He looked at her. “What girls.”

“The college princess.” She said it to the floor.

“Who.”

She looked up at him then, and there was something in her eyes that had been sitting there for two weeks looking for somewhere to go.

“Don’t play dumb with me. I’m talking about Anna.”

“She’s just a junior.”

“Don’t.” Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to. “Last Friday you were laughing with her the whole time. I saw.”

“I mean. She is funny.”

“See.” She pointed at him like he’d just confessed to something. “You do like her.”

“Sooin.” He said it patiently. “Laughing with someone doesn’t mean I like them. She was asking for help with a project and she said some dumb stuff and I laughed. That’s it. You two could probably actually be friends.”

“I don’t want to be her friend.” Said with complete certainty. “You go be her friend.”

“Okay.” He watched her for a moment. “Is that why you’ve been avoiding me for two weeks.”

She opened her mouth.

“Just promise me.” The words came out before she could stop them, a little raw around the edges. “Okay? Just promise me you don’t like her. I just need you to say it.”

He looked at her for a long moment. This girl on the floor of an empty rehearsal room at midnight, exhausted from dancing alone for hours, asking him to promise something she didn’t even fully have the words for yet.

“I promise I don’t like her.” Simple. Absolute. “Are we clear?”

She nodded. Then kept nodding slightly past the point of necessity.

“Is everything okay now?”

Another nod. Her eyes had gone a little glassy around the edges and she blinked it back with the focused determination of someone who had decided they were not going to do this right now.

She did it anyway. Just slightly. Just enough.

He looked at her. This impossible girl, still trying to hold herself together on the floor of an auditorium at midnight, cheeks pink, eyes wet, somehow still the most stubborn person he’d ever met.

He smiled. Couldn’t help it. The defeated kind, the kind that happened when you looked at something and realized you didn’t stand a chance.

“Okay.” He said it gently. “Let’s get you home. And get you something to eat.”

She looked up at him.

Then she raised both arms toward him. Fully. Like a child. Not a word of explanation, just both hands up, the universal signal of I am done and I am not walking.

He looked at her hands. Then at her face.

Then he stood, reached down and in one easy motion turned and brought her up onto his back, her arms coming around his shoulders, her chin finding a place to rest.

“Everything okay back there?”

A small sound. Affirmative.

He adjusted his hold on her and walked toward the door.

The campus at this hour was its own quiet world. The paths were empty, the lampposts doing their patient work, the summer night finally cool enough to be bearable. He carried her without difficulty and she let herself be carried, which he understood was its own kind of trust from someone like her.

By the time they reached the main path he could feel from the changed weight of her that she was more asleep than awake. Her grip on his shoulders had loosened to something softer. Her breathing had evened out against the back of his neck.

He kept walking.

Above the path the sky had opened up between the buildings and there it was. Full and very white and sitting in the dark sky like it had always been there waiting to be noticed.

He looked at it for a moment.

Then quietly, to no one in particular, or perhaps to someone very particular.

“Doesn’t the moon look beautiful tonight.”

Behind him, from somewhere most of the way into sleep, she said something. Small and muffled and completely unintelligible against his shoulder.

He smiled.

Kept walking.

The building came into view. The seventh floor was waiting. 112 and 113, seven steps apart, which had never been a distance at all.

He carried her home.