Cough! Cough!
Eric's body doubled over, coughing hard into his fist, the sound loud in the small bathroom.
He straightened slowly, one hand braced on the sink, and looked into the mirror. There was nothing there, not his hair, not his face, not the pink of his eyes he knew should be staring back. The glass showed the bathroom behind him in perfect, ordinary detail. It simply left him out of it.
"Did I... black out just now?"
He tried to reach for the last few minutes and found only static — the sink, the water running, and then nothing, until now. A minute, maybe less. He couldn't be sure of even that much.
Eric breathed deeply for a few seconds, and slowly, he felt more like himself.
Eric washed his face in the bathroom and felt the fog lift. His eyes were back to normal, his mind clear, his vision sharper than it had been all night. He found a towel, wiped down his face and hair, folded it neatly, and switched off the light.
He stepped into the hallway without a sound.
Through the window, rain still fell. A little walk, then — the weather was too good to waste.
He turned left into the living room. A two-seater sofa faced a glass coffee table. A television hung against the wall. A dining table for four sat tucked to the side, its chairs pushed in with military precision — Ruby's doing. Straight ahead, the open kitchen's black marble tiles gleamed, spotless even in the dim light. She cleaned like it was a competition no one else knew they were in.
Even if her cooking is painfully average, he thought, a faint smile tugging at his lips.
Eric walked into the kitchen, took a glass from the sink, rinsed it, filled it with water, and drank. His Adam's apple bobbed as the cool liquid soothed his dry throat. He placed the glass back in the sink.
He opened the cupboard beside the TV and pulled out a white shirt and black trousers, leaving his pajamas folded on the sofa in their place. He dressed quickly.
He grabbed some keys from the kitchen counter, headed to the main door, took a black umbrella from the stand, unlocked the door, stepped outside, turned around, and locked it again.
He rested the umbrella across his right shoulder, gripping the handle loosely with both hands — a habit he found oddly comforting.
His gaze swept the entire street.
The street was lifeless, silent, peaceful, and serene, as if suspended in time. The air was cold and chilling, but Eric, dressed lightly, didn't feel it at all. Rainwater ran into the drains. Cars were parked in neat rows. Even the occasional vehicle that had been passing earlier had stopped.
The quietness brought a small smile to his lips. He opened the umbrella and felt satisfied hearing the familiar tap-tap of raindrops on its surface.
Eric started to walk.
Cold wind hit his face, wet footsteps the only sound in a street that felt, for a moment, entirely his own.
At the next intersection, two men crossed toward him from the far side of the street. The older one had a rough, tired voice and a beard he clearly hadn't looked at in days, his blue office uniform rumpled from a long shift. A cigarette burned between two fingers of his free hand; the other arm hung draped over the shoulder of the younger man beside him.
"Today's work was so hectic," the older man was saying, not really to anyone. "Swear to god, one more report and I would've—"
Eric's attention shifted to the one being talked at. It was a young man like Eric. An awkward smile fixed in place, eyes flicking around the street like he hadn't decided yet whether this job would let him keep it. For half a second, his gaze caught Eric's cold, indifferent, and distant gaze before darting away, fast, like he'd been caught at something.
New hire. Still trying to fit in. The thought passed through Eric's mind and was gone just as quickly.
As the two men drew close, Eric held his breath — an old habit, older than he cared to trace back tonight.
The young man's gaze met his again as they passed. Eric let his breath out only once they'd gone, the smoke and the tired voice fading behind him into the rain.
As Eric walked, he reached a shopping street.
It was past midnight, and most of the shops were closed, except a few whose lights flickered more than they should have.
Eric noticed the abnormality when he was three storefronts in. There was a rhythm to the flickering that didn't match faulty wiring. Faulty bulbs stuttered at random. These didn't. They dimmed and rose in a pattern too even to be an accident, like something breathing behind the glass instead of powering it.
In one bulb, for just a moment, the light didn't flicker so much as retreat — collapsing inward into a small, perfect absence, darker than the glass around it had any right to be. Eric held its non-gaze for half a second.
Then it was gone, and the bulb flickered back on as if nothing had happened at all.
Eric's steps slowed, though he didn't stop. Whatever that had been, it wasn't his business tonight.
The one shop that was still properly lit was a small convenience store halfway down the block, its open sign humming a steady, ordinary yellow. An old man sat behind the counter, chin low against his chest, asleep sitting up, a half-finished cup of tea gone cold beside his elbow. He hadn't moved in the time it took Eric to pass the width of the storefront window — not even a twitch, not even the small unconscious shifting of a light sleeper.
Eric's eyes lingered there a moment too long.
Nothing about the old man read as wrong, not exactly. Just still. Stiller than midnight usually allowed a person to be.
Eric kept walking.
Behind him, one of the flickering shops dimmed low enough that its window went nearly black, held there a beat longer than any bulb should hold anything, and then came back up to its usual dull, uneven glow — as if it, too, had simply been holding its breath.
Eric didn't turn around to check.
He already knew he wouldn't like what he found if he did.
He turned left, then right, then left again, letting the empty streets carry him where they would. After about thirty minutes of walking, he stood in front of Lottle Plaza — a mall so large it swallowed the block whole, its lights still burning bright despite the hour.
Eric stepped inside and closed his umbrella. As expected, most of the shops were shuttered, the space dimly lit and nearly deserted, the kind of quiet that made footsteps sound too loud.
A handful of people drifted between floors regardless — night-shift workers, insomniacs, the occasional soul with nowhere better to be, and their presence, thin as it was, kept the place from feeling entirely abandoned.
He didn't care about the closed shops. The one he wanted was open: the Sweets & Breads shop on the third-floor open space, decorated with props, plants, and flowers — daisies, roses, tulips, some real, some fake, all carefully tended.
Eric approached the counter, set down his umbrella, and studied the three display rows.
The first held pastries of every kind — vanilla, chocolate, blueberry, red velvet, and more, the smell of sugar and butter thick enough to taste.
The second featured Russian sweets: Medovik, Napoleon cake, pastila, syrniki, and a few treats he didn't recognize.
The third and final row was dedicated entirely to breads: white bread, Borodinsky, bukhanka, Stolichny rye, yeast karavai, and many others.
Behind the counter stood a woman on the night shift, chin propped on one hand, eyes half-closed in the particular way of someone counting the minutes until a shift ends.
Black curls had escaped whatever she'd tied them back with hours ago. A small mole sat just beneath her right eye, the kind of detail a person might spend years being told made them prettier and never quite believe.
She caught herself mid-yawn the moment she noticed him. She immediately sat up straighter, trying to look as professional as she could. She blinked hard, color rising faintly in her cheeks, the reflex of someone hoping they hadn't just been seen falling asleep on the job. Eric, absorbed in the display case, gave no sign he'd noticed at all.
She watched him a moment longer, clearly debating whether to offer help, then seemed to decide against it — the silence had gone on too long now for a suggestion to land naturally.
Eric straightened, looked at her, and smiled.
"Could I please have one of everything? My friend has a huge sweet tooth — his hunger is insatiable." His pink eyes met hers, gentle and unhurried. "And you should get some rest, miss. It's a shame to see someone so lovely worn thin by a long shift."
Her cheeks colored deeper, confirming what he'd already guessed. She bowed quickly, murmured an apology, and began packing his order with quick, practiced hands.
Eric chuckled softly. "Don't be agitated; it doesn't suit your personality."
She glanced at him from the corner of her eye, hands still moving. "You know my personality?"
Eric nodded and pointed first to the small embroidered tag pinned above her apron pocket. "Daisy." Then to the pots crowding the counter — daisies, roses, tulips, some real, some fake, every one of them trimmed and watered with the kind of attention that came from years of habit, not a job description. "And these aren't shop decorations. You brought half of them from home."
Daisy's hand drifted to the tag, as if checking it were still there. "That's... my name's on my apron, sure, but the flowers—"
"You didn't just water them. You arranged them — that vase by the register is a florist's cut, not a barista's." He tilted his head toward her purse on the counter, where a photo peeked from an open pocket: two people standing in front of a shopfront, a hand-painted sign behind them. "Your parents' shop, I'm guessing."
She went very still. "Okay. Creepy, but still — a photo and an apron tag isn't exactly—"
"You're studying botany," Eric went on, gentler now. "The way you sorted real stems from fake ones without looking twice tells me that much. And you work nights on top of it, which tells me you're not doing it for fun — you're trying to carry weight your parents shouldn't have to."
Daisy said nothing. Her jaw had gone tight, her earlier nervous flush replaced by something colder, more alert.
Eric held her gaze a moment longer, and when he spoke again, his voice dropped — quieter, no evidence behind it at all now, nothing she could point to and explain away.
"You bottle it up because you don't think anyone would actually want to hear it. So you don't ask."
The color drained slightly from Daisy's face. She took a small step back from the counter, though her eyes never left him.
"Who are you?" Her voice had lost its earlier warmth entirely — no longer confusion dressed up as a joke about stalkers, but something closer to real unease, and beneath it, despite herself, a thread of something she couldn't quite name — the way a held breath sometimes felt indistinguishable from excitement.
Eric only smiled, and said nothing further on the matter.
She finished packing his order in silence, her movements quicker than before, less certain. When she finally rang him up, her hand trembled slightly reaching for the register — and she gave him a 40-percent discount without being asked, murmuring something about "large orders" that neither of them quite believed.
Eric thanked her and lifted the bags with ease.
Just as he turned to leave, he looked back.
"You need a friend who'll listen all day, don't you?" It wasn't quite a question. "Two days from now, when you return to college, you'll meet a shy, introverted second-year student with black hair and dark eyes in the cafeteria. She'll be agitated, having just tripped and spilled her food. Be kind to her. Take it slow. That's the friend you've been waiting for."
He paused, something almost apologetic crossing his face. "Sorry — it really will be the cafeteria. I don't get to choose these things either."
He bowed slightly and walked away.
Daisy stood frozen behind the counter, watching the door long after it had swung shut behind him, the bell above it still faintly ringing. She didn't bow back. She wasn't sure her legs would have let her.
Who tells someone their future and apologizes for the location?
She didn't believe him. Not really. But two nights of half-sleep later, she found herself standing outside the cafeteria a full ten minutes before her usual lunch hour, telling herself she wasn't checking.
Two days after that, in the college cafeteria, she met exactly that girl.
Their friendship began that day and lasted a lifetime — two old ladies, decades later, still laughing together over the same story neither of them ever fully believed. But that is a story for another time.
...
Eric returned to the apartment, let himself in, and locked the door quietly behind him.
He put everything away in the fridge — the pastries, the bread, the little paper-wrapped sweets Adrian would tear through in a day — then changed back into his pajamas, folding his shirt and trousers back into the cupboard exactly where they'd come from.
He slipped into the bedroom without a sound. Ruby hadn't moved, still curled on her side, her breathing slow and even, exactly as he'd left her.
He eased into bed beside her, careful not to shift the mattress too much, and let his eyes close.
Sleep came quickly, and if anything from the night followed him into it, he didn't remember it in the morning.