[Miles’ POV]
* Two years ago *
Rae burst through my apartment door at 11:47 PM like a category five hurricane in a cocktail dress the color of expensive wine. Which felt appropriate since she'd probably consumed enough of it to float a small yacht.
"He ambushed me with investors, Miles. At my birthday dinner. My birthday." She kicked off her heels with the violence of someone declaring war on footwear. "Who brings a PowerPoint to Red Lobster?"
"Your father doesn't eat at Red Lobster," I pointed out, because accuracy matters even during emotional meltdowns.
"It's the principle. He turned my turning twenty-four into a hostile takeover presentation."
She paced my living room, which took exactly three and a half steps in each direction.
Her makeup had given up somewhere around dessert. Creating what fashion magazines would probably call 'smoky eye' but looked more like she'd fought a charcoal drawing and lost.
At least her forest green eyes are brighter than ever with fury.
"He systematically dismantled every point I made about Florisight. In front of people who think a boutonniere is a French pastry!"
I made the appropriate sympathetic noises while mixing her gin-tonic with the precision of someone who'd memorized her exact lime-to-gin ratio two years ago.
Three weeks of planning down the drain—tonight was supposed to be different.
I'd practiced nine different ways to say "I've been in love with you since sophomore year when you threw a calculator at that guy who said women couldn't do advanced mathematics."
None of them included watching her rage about Laurent while I pretended my chest wasn't experiencing its own hostile takeover.
"He called it a 'hobby enterprise,'" she continued, accepting the drink without breaking her rant momentum. "Like I'm collecting stamps instead of building a legitimate business. Then he suggested maybe I should focus on 'more achievable goals,' which is Father-speak for 'marry someone useful and shut up.'"
She collapsed onto my couch—the one I'd rescued from a curb and spent six hours disinfecting—with the dramatic flair of someone auditioning for a tragedy where all the characters die of capitalism.
"He actually said, and I quote, 'emotional investments rarely yield profitable returns.' At my birthday dinner. While I was holding a piece of cake shaped like a butterfly!"
"Butterflies are actually profitable," I offered. "Monarch butterfly tourism generates millions annually in Mexico."
She laughed, the sound bouncing off my walls like drunk geometry. "This is why you're my favorite person. You make my disasters feel manageable with lepidopteran economics."
The planned confession withered in my throat like a houseplant in a nuclear winter.
Instead, I sat next to her on the couch, maintaining the exact seven inches of space that said "supportive friend" rather than "man who's catalogued every variation of your laugh."
We watched three episodes of a reality show about people who marry strangers for immigration purposes. Rae provided running commentary about their fake relationships having more authenticity than real marriages in her social circle.
Her head found my shoulder somewhere during episode two, her blond hair smelling like expensive shampoo and broken dreams.
"You know what the worst part is?" she said during a mattress commercial. "He's probably right. I'm twenty-four, bleeding money into a flower startup, refusing to play the merger-marriage game. What kind of business model is that?"
"The kind where you wake up without wanting to set your life on fire," I suggested.
She turned to look at me, and suddenly her face occupied approximately ninety percent of my visual field.
Wine had turned her eyes glossy, as if I’m looking into an emerald, the kind scientists would preserve for exhibitions. I could map every eyelash, chart the exact angle where her jaw met her neck.
Calculate the decreasing distance between us down to millimeters.
"You're the only person who actually sees me," she whispered, her breath featuring notes of gin and terrible life choices. "Everyone else sees Laurent's daughter, or a potential merger, or a problem to solve. But you just see... me."
The space between us shrank to mathematical impossibility. Her eyes dropped to my mouth with the focus of someone discovering gravity. My heart developed its own seismic activity, registering somewhere between "mild earthquake" and "complete tectonic failure."
Then she blinked, laughed like someone remembering a joke at a funeral, and pulled back fast enough to cause whiplash in nearby air molecules.
"God, I'm drunk and stupid. Sorry. That was… Ignore me. I'm having an emotional breakdown sponsored by Tanqueray."
"Already forgotten," I lied with the expertise of someone who would remember this exact moment during every future dental appointment, tax filing, and grocery store trip until death or dementia, whichever came first.
She commandeered my bedroom with the authority of someone who'd claimed it as territory years ago. I didn't mention that the sheets were new, bought specifically because she'd mentioned liking hotel-quality thread counts.
She'd never notice. Just like she never noticed that I kept her favorite tea stocked.
Or that I'd memorized her coffee order including seasonal variations.
Or that I'd restructured my entire sleep schedule around her crisis management needs.
I sat at my kitchen table, laptop casting shadows, and opened Florisight's quarterly books. The numbers were a disaster taxonomy—every spreadsheet a different species of financial extinction.
Row 247 contained an error that would've triggered an IRS audit. I fixed it, rerouted three expense categories, and found $7,000 hiding in accounts payable like a witness protection program for money.
From the bedroom, Rae sighed in her sleep. The sound of someone whose subconscious was still arguing with her father.
I allowed myself exactly sixty seconds to imagine an alternate universe where she didn't pull back. Where my apartment meant something other than "emergency emotional triage location".
Where I said the words that had been living in my throat like evolutionary failures for years.
Sixty seconds expired. I closed the laptop, unfolded the couch into its bed configuration—a process requiring origami-level spatial reasoning—and settled into the familiar geography of ‘almost’.
Tomorrow she'd steal my coffee, kiss my cheek with casual precision and we'd pretend this almost-moment got filed under "things that never happened."
I'd gotten very good at pretending.
Practice makes perfect, and I'd been practicing since the day she walked into Advanced Statistics wearing a shirt that said "Math Puns Are The First Sine of Madness" and my brain forgot how to process anything except her laugh.
The couch springs sang their nightly opera while I stared at the ceiling, counting water stains shaped like rejected constellations.
Tomorrow would be identical to today. Me smoothing edges she didn't know existed, catching problems she didn't see coming, and making myself essential in ways she'd never quite notice.
This was the trade: proximity without possibility, necessity without reciprocity. Love restructured as a service industry where the customer didn't know they had an account.
The bedroom door stood partially open, a rectangle of darkness where everything I wanted lived in a different timezone.
I closed my eyes and practiced forgetting the exact shade of her eyes when she'd looked at my mouth. The precise weight of her head on my shoulder. The specific frequency of her laugh when she's actually happy.
Tomorrow the performance will resume.
Tonight, I had the couch, the water stains, and the familiar ache of ‘almost’—which was still more than nothing, even if it was less than everything.
I'd gotten very good at that kind of math.