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Luca had learned to read spaces.

It wasn't just a matter of studies, architecture, third year, with a head full of sections and elevations, but something more visceral. For him, every space breathed life, every room told a story through the light that passed through it, the way sounds propagated, the silence that crept into the gaps. His apartment, a two-room flat on the third floor of a 1960s-era building on the northern outskirts of the city, was a territory he knew perfectly. He knew where the floorboards creaked slightly under the weight of his footsteps, he knew that at five in the afternoon the sun slanted through the living room window and painted the hallway wall orange, he knew that his neighbor in 3B, an elderly gentleman as deaf as a bell, watched the news at eight o'clock sharp with the volume turned up high.

He knew the boundaries of his world. He had traced them with the precision of someone who needs control to breathe.

Yet, that September morning, something had changed.

He noticed it first with his ears. The sound of boxes being dragged, voices muffled by the dividing wall, the dull thud of a piece of furniture being moved. 3B had been empty for two weeks; Mr. Bianchi had been taken to a retirement home by his children, and the apartment had been rented out. Luca had absentmindedly observed the visits of potential tenants, never paying much attention. Tenants came and went, and he preferred to keep his distance. The apartment building was a place of transit, not of relationships.

But that Tuesday morning, while he was making coffee with the moka pot on the gas stove, Luca felt something different: a rhythm... a presence.

He approached the wall dividing his living room from the adjacent apartment and placed his palm against the plaster, as he had done as a child to listen to the heart of the house. On the other side, someone was moving purposefully, with an energy that radiated even through the reinforced concrete. Then a pause. The sound of a shower being turned on, the water splashing against the tub in a steady, powerful rhythm.

Luca pulled his hand back, almost surprised by himself. He wasn't the prying type. Yet something about that invisible presence had taken him by surprise, like a draft creeping in through a forgotten open window.

He poured himself a cup of coffee—strong, bitter, unsweetened—and sat down at the desk that occupied the corner of the living room, facing the window. His projects were spread out on the table: a renovation of an industrial loft, an exercise in perspective, notes scribbled on sheets of tracing paper. But his concentration that morning was a fragile fabric. His eyes continually drifted toward the wall, as if they could pierce it.

It was only in the late afternoon that he saw the new neighbor.

He was probably returning from university, his shoulders hunched under the weight of his bag full of books and cardboard models, when the elevator, an old metal and wood cabin with a hand-operated grille, emitted its distinctive hum from the ground floor. Luca was waiting on the second floor, leaning against the railing, tired and with a sore back after hours of sitting on a drawing stool.

The elevator doors opened with a metallic creak.

And he was there.

Luca's first thought was of a sculpture. Not one of those smooth, perfect statues in museums, but something rougher, more alive. The boy—for he seemed little more than a boy, perhaps a few years older than Luca, perhaps not—occupied the space with a physical authority that made the small cabin feel even more cramped. Broad shoulders stretched the fabric of a worn gray T-shirt, muscular arms emerged from the edges of short sleeves, a solid neck supporting a face with strong features. His hair was dark, slightly tousled, as if he had run his fingers through it several times throughout the day.

But it was the eyes that struck Luca. A deep, almost unreal green, they stared at him with direct intensity, without the usual embarrassment of someone caught staring at a stranger.

For a second, a moment suspended in time, like a frozen architectural section, their eyes met. Luca felt something stir in his chest, a subtle vibration that had nothing to do with tiredness or hunger.

Then the boy smiled. Not a polite smile, not the automatic smile exchanged between neighbors by social convention. A smile that started from the corner of his mouth, slow, almost provocative, that ignited something in his green eyes.

"Third floor?" the voice asked. Deep, slightly hoarse, with an accent Luca couldn't immediately place.

Luca nodded, reacting belatedly. "Yes. Me too."

The boy—Ethan, as she would later discover, but who at that moment was just a name that didn't yet have a sound—stepped back inside the elevator, creating space. Too much space, actually. The space you create when you want the other to enter, to come closer, to share a narrow, intimate boundary.

Luca entered. The elevator was small, designed in an era when there were fewer people and bodies took up less living space. Their shoulders brushed as the grilled doors closed with a sharp thud. Luca felt the heat radiating from the boy's arm, a different temperature from his own, higher, more urgent.

"My name is Ethan," said that voice, so close that Luca felt its vibrato against his skin.

"Luca."

"Luca," Ethan repeated, as if tasting the name, testing its consistency. "The new neighbor in 3B."

"3A," Luca corrected, and immediately felt stupid. "I mean, I'm 3A. You're 3B."

Ethan laughed. A low sound that seemed to resonate in his chest before coming out of his mouth. "I know. I saw your mailbox. Luca from 3A. Student, I assume. Architecture?"

Luca looked at him, surprised. "How can you..."

"You have a bag full of rulers and construction paper. And ink on your fingers." Ethan jerked his chin at his right hand, which indeed still bore a black stain on the thumb. "Or you're a murderer with a hobby for technical drawings."

Before Luca could think of a witty retort, the elevator stopped on the third floor. The doors opened. The corridor unfolded before them, its faded tiles, the dim light of the fluorescent lamp flickering, the two entrance doors facing each other like mirrors reflecting different worlds.

"So," Ethan said, exiting first and turning to look at Luca, who had remained motionless in the cabin. "Welcome to the building, neighbor of 3A."

And with that, still smiling with that expression that was half challenge and half invitation, he walked to the door of 3B, opened it with a key that looked new, and entered.

Luca remained in the hallway for a few seconds after the door closed. He felt his heart beating in a way that wasn't his own, a rapid rhythm that wasn't due to the climb—he hadn't taken the stairs—or to the fatigue of the day.

That evening, while trying to concentrate on a section of a public building he couldn't decipher, Luca realized he was hearing sounds from the dividing wall again. The shower, again. Then footsteps. Then the sound of low music, something like jazz, filtering through the plaster like shared breathing.

He got up and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. The kitchen window looked out onto the apartment building's internal courtyard, a narrow space between the two buildings, a well of light that collected the sky above them. And from 3B, the corresponding window, the one that looked into Ethan's kitchen, was illuminated.

Luca remained still, glass in hand, watching that light like a lighthouse on a starless night. He didn't see Ethan, he saw no movement. Only the warm, yellow light filtering through a thin curtain.

But something made him hold his breath. A feeling, instinctive and irrational, of being watched himself. Of having eyes on him, even though there was no one at the window.

He stepped back, feeling suddenly exposed. Yet, as he returned to the desk, he felt something different stir within him. It wasn't just curiosity. It wasn't just interest in a new neighbor. It was something older, more physical, responding to that green gaze, that asymmetrical smile, the promise implicit in that shrug in the elevator.

In the days that followed, the game began without either of them stating the rules.

It was a game of glances, first and foremost. Meeting by chance, or perhaps not by chance, on the stairs or in front of the mailboxes. Ethan leaving the apartment just as Luca returned, with a precision that defied statistics. Their gazes met, lingered a moment longer than necessary, then touched and moved away, like fingers touching a flame to test its heat.

Then came the messages. Not the written ones, not yet, but the ones made of gestures, postures, presences. Ethan leaving his apartment door ajar as Luca passed by in the hallway, allowing Luca to glimpse an orderly, essential space, with a wall painted a deep blue that seemed to absorb the light. Luca stopping in front of his door, key in hand, feeling Ethan's eyes on him even without turning around.

One evening, Luca was returning home late. He had been in the library until ten o'clock, immersed in a Louis Kahn book that had made him lose track of time. The third-floor corridor was silent, illuminated only by the dim light of the single working lamp. He was inserting his key into the lock when he heard the door to 3B open behind him.

He didn't turn around. Not right away. He heard footsteps approaching, slow, measured, on the tiled floor. He felt the heat of a body stopping behind him, close, very close. Close enough to smell the scent, something woody, sandalwood perhaps, mixed with a wilder, more human odor.

"Late tonight," Ethan's voice said, a whisper that seemed to fill the empty hallway.

Luca turned. Ethan was there, less than a hand's breadth away. In the dim light, his green eyes seemed to glow with their own light. He was wearing only a pair of low-waisted black sweatpants, and his bare torso was a map of shadows and muscles that Luca felt the irrational urge to trace with his gaze, like an architect studying a plan for the first time.

"Library," Luca replied, his voice sounding hoarse than expected.

"Architecture?"

"Yes."

Ethan smiled. That smile. "You must be hungry."

Luca didn't answer. He didn't know what to say. He didn't know if it was an offer, a remark, or something else. He only knew that the corridor had become very small, that the air had become very thick, and that his heart was beating in a way that reminded him of being alive.

Ethan took a step back, but his gaze never left Luca's. "Goodnight, neighbor from 3A."

And he returned to his apartment, closing the door slowly, leaving Luca in the corridor with the key still in the lock and his breathing not returning to normal.

That night, Luca didn't sleep well. Lying in the dark of his living room, he slept on the sofa bed—he'd never found the time to furnish his bedroom—and he stared at the ceiling and heard the sounds of 3B filtering through the wall. Footsteps. The sound of a glass being placed on a table. Then silence. Then, very late, the sound of a voice speaking softly, perhaps on the phone, perhaps to herself.

But more than any other sound, Luca felt the memory of that green gaze, fixed on him in the dark corridor. And he felt, with a certainty that frightened him almost as much as it excited him, that something was about to happen. That the boundary between 3A and 3B, that wall of concrete and plaster he had always thought impassable, was becoming permeable. That the game they had begun in the elevator, those first glances, those first smiles, was evolving into something more tangible, more dangerous, more indispensable.

And when, just before dawn, he heard the sound of a door opening and closing in the hallway, followed by footsteps approaching his door, Luca knew the first move was about to be made. And that he, for the first time in his entire orderly and controlled life, had no intention of turning down the invitation.