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Luca had never been the type to leave the window open.

His kitchen, small and functional, with its windowsill overlooking the condominium's internal courtyard, was a closed, controlled, geometric space. The window was opened only to ventilate, never for more than twenty minutes and never after sunset. But that week, something inside him had stopped obeying the rules.

He left it ajar. Not on purpose, or maybe he did, and he didn't want to distinguish between the two. A ten-centimeter gap, just enough to let the humid September air in, but more importantly, enough to let it out. The sound of his music, slow jazz, very low, filtering into the courtyard. The study light, which remained on late, a yellow rectangle reflecting on the opposite wall, visible from the corresponding window in 3B.

Luca never looked directly outside. He simply drew, felt, and knew that his signal—weak, encoded, almost subliminal—was crossing the empty space of the courtyard and reaching the other side.

Ethan's response came without words.

The first night, it was the shower. Luca was returning to 3A when he heard the water rushing from the other side of the wall. He looked at the clock: 2 a.m. An absurd hour to wash, a time that had nothing to do with hygiene and everything to do with performance. The water had flowed for a long time, a constant, powerful flow that seemed to last an eternity. And when it finally stopped, Luca heard, through the plaster, through the silence, Ethan's bare footsteps moving in the next room, close, so close it seemed he could count the steps.

The second night, it was the perfume.

Luca was about to leave, his hand already on the doorknob, when the smell hit him. Sandalwood. Thick, woody, almost incense, seeping under the door of 3B like solid smoke, like an invisible hand insinuating itself into the corridor and reaching him. It wasn't the scent of a man leaving: it was the scent of a man exposing himself. Offering himself to the air, inundating it, marking it. Luca remained still for three minutes, his forehead resting against the wood of his door, breathing in that scent that wasn't his but was invading his space.

The third night, it was glass.

Luca was in the kitchen, heating water for a tea he wasn't going to drink, when he looked up at the courtyard. The window in 3B, the one opposite his, was illuminated by a warm, yellowish light. And against that rectangle of light, there was a hand. Leaning against the glass, fingers spread, palms pressed against the glass as if trying to pierce it. A broad hand, with prominent knuckles, long fingers, the hand Luca knew, the one he had studied in every photograph, in every imagined touch.

His hand.

Luca felt his left wrist throbbing. That pulse, always that pulse. Without thinking, he raised his right hand and placed it on the glass of his window. Across the way, in 3B, the shadow of Ethan's hand seemed to move, the fingers closing slightly, as if clutching something invisible. As if they were holding Luca's hand across the space of the courtyard, across the humid air, across the meters of emptiness that separated them.

No faces were visible. Only hands, only the glass, only the light. But it was enough. That night, Luca didn't close the window. He left it open, wide open, inviting the smell of sandalwood, the sounds, the air Ethan breathed to enter 3A and mingle with his own.

On the fourth evening, the blackout came without warning.

Luca was at his desk, the table lamp illuminating a section of an industrial building that refused to take shape. The ceiling fluorescent light was off; he always kept it off when he worked, preferring the warm, circumscribed light of the lamp. But when the lamp also went out, when the refrigerator in the kitchen stopped humming, when absolute silence fell over 3A like a black velvet sheet, Luca realized it wasn't just his apartment.

The whole city seemed to have shut down.

He stood up. The darkness was total, dense, almost physical. There was no light from the windows, no noise from the neighbors, no electrical hum that forms the inaudible background of modern life. Luca remained motionless in the center of the living room, his hands outstretched in front of him, disoriented. Then, instinctively, he looked toward the wall that overlooked 3B.

Silence. Even there, everything was quiet.

But not all was silent.

Luca heard a noise. A footstep. Light, bare, on the tiles of the corridor. Then another. And another. Someone was moving in the pitch black, and the sound came from the corridor, from the 3B side, approaching. Luca held his breath. His heart pounded in his chest with a force that seemed to want to split his ribs.

The footsteps stopped. In front of his door.

Luca didn't move. He didn't turn on his phone to illuminate the room, he didn't make a sound. He remained there, shirtless as he was, sweat dripping down his back not from the heat but from the tension. And he listened.

He heard breathing. Close, so close it seemed to come from inside 3A, not outside. A deep, controlled, but labored breath. The breathing of a man walking fast, in a hurry, who has stopped only at the last moment. Ethan's breathing.

Luca took a step toward the door. Silent, naked, his feet knowing every creak of the floorboards and avoiding them. He moved closer until his forehead touched the wood. And he remained there, motionless, his hand slowly rising and resting on the lock, without turning it.

On the other side, she heard movement. The sound of fabric, perhaps an arm brushing the door, perhaps a shoulder leaning against it. Then, again, breathing. Closer. As if Ethan, too, had rested his forehead against the wood, mirroring hers.

The wood was cold. Perhaps four centimeters thick. An absurd, ridiculous barrier separating two bodies less than a hand's breadth apart, separated only by that layer of material. Luca felt the blood pounding in his temples. He felt the physical urge to open the door, to turn the handle, to break the barrier. And he felt, with equal intensity, the need not to. To prolong this wait, to let it grow, to let it become unbearable.

Nobody knocked.

The silence thickened. Luca imagined Ethan on the other side: naked, perhaps, or in low-cut pajama pants, the scent of sandalwood still on his skin, his forehead pressed against the wood just like his own. He imagined their breaths mingling through the crack under the door, exchanging in the stagnant air of the hallway. He imagined Ethan's hands, the hand he'd seen on the glass, now resting on the wood, inches from his own.

He wanted to speak. He wanted to whisper something, a name, an invitation, any word that would break the spell. But his voice was stuck in his throat, trapped by a tension that had neither shape nor name. And maybe, he thought, it was for the best. Maybe words would ruin everything. Maybe this silence, this lack of contact, this denied proximity was the truest language they had ever found.

The minutes ticked by. Luca didn't know how many. In the total darkness, time had dissolved. It could have been ten minutes or an hour. His body was rigid, glued to the door, his forehead aching from the pressure against the wood. Yet he didn't move. He didn't want to break the spell. He didn't want to be the first to give in.

On the other side, Ethan didn't move away. Luca could hear his breathing, steady, deep, sometimes labored. He felt the tiny movements, a finger tapping silently on the wood, a shift of weight from one foot to the other, a sigh that was stifled before it escaped completely.

And then, a new noise. A contact. Light, almost imperceptible. Something brushing the door on the other side. Not a full hand, but a finger. A single finger, tracing a line on the wood. Up and down. Slow. As if writing something. As if drawing.

Luca closed his eyes in the darkness. He followed the sound in his imagination, feeling Ethan's finger move just inches from his face, separated only by the wood. What was he writing? A letter? A word? A name? Or simply a line, a sign, an "I am here" that needed no calligraphy?

His hand moved. Slow, trembling, his palm opening against the wood. And with his index finger he began to trace a line right where he felt, or imagined, Ethan was tracing his. Two fingers, two lines, moving in sync on either side of a layer of wood, as if contact were possible, as if the wood had become permeable, as if the boundaries were merely an illusion to be transcended.

They didn't open. They didn't knock. They didn't speak.

They stood there, separated by four centimeters of wood, in total darkness, until the sky began to lighten. Luca didn't know when Ethan had left. At a certain point, the breathing became more distant, the footsteps quieter, and then absolute silence. But when, shortly after dawn, the electricity returned with a click and a buzz of neon, Luca still found his forehead resting against the door, his hand still outstretched against the wood, his index finger leaving an imperceptible trace of moisture on the paint.

He pulled away. The corridor, seen through the peephole, was empty. 3B was silent. But on the windowsill of his door, Luca noticed something. A small rectangle of paper, tucked under the jamb. He picked it up with trembling fingers.

A blank sheet of paper, without a header or signature. Just one word, written in rapid, almost illegible characters.

Permeable.

Luca looked at the word. Then he looked at the wall that led to 3B. Then at the door, the thick wood that had separated two bodies all night, two breaths, two fingers that had traced parallel lines without ever meeting.

He folded the paper. He held it tightly in his hand, close to his heart, as the morning sun streamed in through the window he'd left open. And he understood that the border, that border he'd defended for weeks, that he'd measured, respected, feared, was no longer a barrier. It had become a membrane. Thin, vibrant, passable. And that the next time, because it was now inevitable, written in that word, on that night, in that breath shared through the wood, there would no longer be room for distance.