Wrong Number, Right Floor

For three weeks the messages came to the wrong phone.

*Left the kettle on again. Tell the building I apologise.*

*Rain on the fire escape sounds like someone packing.*

*You will not like what I look like in the morning.*

Ellis never replied. She read them in the stairwell with her coat still on, and she had decided twice that she would answer, and twice she had put the phone face down instead. It was other people's honesty, delivered to the wrong number, and she had no idea what to do with it.

Tonight she typed: *Who is this?*

The reply came in nine seconds. *Oh.* Then: *oh no.* Then: *Third floor. 3B. I have been talking to a stranger for three weeks like an idiot.*

Ellis was in 3D. She was standing in the hall in her socks before she decided to be.

There was a pause long enough that she thought it was over. Then a door opened two doors down and a man stood there in a paint-stained t-shirt, holding his phone in both hands like something borrowed. He looked at her with the particular alarm of a person whose private life has been read by a stranger in a stairwell.

"You are not what I expected," he said.

"That is unkind."

"That is honest. I'm Teodor."

"I know. You said you don't sleep before one."

He winced, pleased, embarrassed. "Come here, or I will apologise through the doorway, and I have a lot prepared."

Her apartment was smaller than his and the light was worse, and none of that mattered after he sat too close on the arm of her chair and stopped talking about the kettle. He kissed her jaw first, an inch off, and let her close the distance, and she made a sound at the back of her throat that he laughed at, quietly, into her mouth.

Her blouse went first because it was in the way, then his shirt, and the paint on his fingers left a mark under her breast that she noticed and did not mind. He put his mouth there instead, on the mark, and her hand fisted in the front of his trousers and found him already hard and hot and leaking through the cotton, and when she looked at his face he had his eyes shut and his jaw set like a man holding something up.

"Three weeks," he said, when he could talk again. "Three weeks of typing it into the dark."

"You could have knocked."

"I know." He got her belt undone with more patience than she thought he had in him, then her jeans, then he sat her back against the arm of the chair and pushed her underwear to one side and put two fingers inside without any preamble at all, and she gasped into his shoulder. He curled them, once, twice, found the place her hip jumped for, and worked it steadily while her breath went to pieces.

"Bedroom," she managed.

"Mm." He did not move. His thumb circled, then his fingers did more, and she was wet on his hand, wet on the chair, making small unguarded noises she had not made in years. When he drew his fingers out she made an offended sound and he laughed and kissed her, tasting his own hand on her mouth.

The bedroom was worse light and better sheets. He took his trousers off standing and she liked the shamelessness of it, then he was over her again, lined up and slick with her, and he looked at her face the whole way in, slowly, until they were both breathing the same air.

"You are here," he said, like he could not get it done any other way.

She wrapped a leg around his hip to get him further in and he groaned at the change and started to move, long and unhurried at first, then not. Her heels dug into the mattress. He braced on one forearm, and the other hand found hers and kept it there, and whatever that was, it undid her faster than the friction did.

She came with her hand in his and him saying her name badly, and he came a moment later with his forehead against her shoulder, hips stuttering, and after that the only sound was the rain on the fire escape, which did sound like someone packing, for a little while.

Later — and he laughed when she said it — he went back for the kettle.