The night rain had washed the city clean, leaving a thin film of droplets on the glass that filtered the morning light into a soft, pale haze. Inside the apartment, the air smelled of warm sheets and coffee yet to be brewed, an air of temporary calm, like a breath held before something important is spoken.
Clara opened her eyes first.
Her face rested against Adrian's chest, her ear pressed to his heartbeat, a full, deep thud, then another, and a tiny tremor every time he slipped further into a dream.
She didn't move right away. She let her breathing match his, inhaling the warmth of his skin and that faint, metallic trace she'd come to associate with the tension he carried beneath the surface. Her fingers traced a distracted line along his ribs, and at her touch his skin twitched ever so slightly, a reflex, a memory of the night.
She pulled away carefully, not wanting to break the outline of their embrace. The floor was cold under her bare feet, dry, clean cold that rose up her legs and urged her fully awake. The bathroom door closed behind her with a soft click. She turned the water on: a sharp metallic sound, a hollow thump, and then the shower bloomed into a thin, steady rain.
The first touch on her forehead was tepid; on her neck, warmer; on her collarbone, almost hot. Steam wrapped around her mouth, her nose, her eyes, until everything that belonged to the apartment, the table with the pen, Adrian's jacket over the chair, the night they had survived, faded behind a veil of vapor.
She pressed her forehead against the tile and closed her eyes. The water coursed down her back, loosening the knots in her muscles one by one, like patient fingers. A low hum pulsed through the pipes—a faint electric vibration that mingled with the rhythm of droplets sliding from her elbow to her wrist and then to her fingertips. That rhythm alone was enough to open a door.
It wasn't a thought. It was an image: a pale room, a tall window with the blinds half-drawn, a chair too large for a trainee.
Her badge was still new then, her pen too tight between her fingers, her hand trembling just slightly when she entered. The smell of disinfectant in the east wing, sweeter, heavier than anywhere else. And him. Sitting near the window, the light cutting his profile cleanly in two. The blue shirt faintly creased over his chest.
Adrian looked up. His eyes, that cold, clear blue, locked onto hers and it wasn't just meeting, it was fitting. That first look slipped under her skin like a needle: almost painless, but irrevocable. She remembered the exact feel of her tongue against her palate when she swallowed before answering his greeting; the temperature of the air between them, denser than the corridor outside and the faint noise of a stretcher rolling far away. When she handed him the questionnaire, their hands brushed. Not palm against palm, not fingers entwined: a small contact between his knuckle and her finger, his skin warm and magnetic. No obvious spark, no dramatic shiver, just one missed breath, a metronome skipping a beat.
The first kiss hadn't been planned. She remembered the edge of the armchair pressing against the back of her knee as she bent to hand him a fallen pen; his scent, wood, tobacco, something that lived in her throat rather than her nose; and the half-second when their eyes met without defenses. Then gravity shifted: their lips found each other. It was slow, hesitant and utterly inevitable. The world folded itself into that single point where two mouths met, and everything else, the curtain flapping, a voice in the hall, became a sound heard through water.
The first time they made love came back not as a scene but as sensations: the roughness of cotton against her shoulder blade, the warmth of his fingers tracing the length of her spine, his attention steady and precise as a vow. No rush, only the slow rhythm of shared breath.
His heartbeat against her ear.
The scent of skin and salt at the base of his neck. The line of his jaw tightening when desire overtook his restraint, then softening again. Their breaths colliding when, in the same instant, they recognized each other. It hadn't been possession, it had been return.
The water grew hotter. Clara blinked back to the present with a start; her lips were parted, her breath trembling. She stretched out her hand into the stream and watched it shake.
It wasn't just memory, it was touch made real.
The bathroom door opened quietly. Not a noise, but a change in air pressure. The vapor shifted, the light dimmed slightly.
Adrian stood in the doorway for two heartbeats. When he stepped forward, Clara didn't have to turn to know he had the same stunned expression she felt inside.
"You saw it," she said, her voice barely rising over the water.
Adrian moved closer, stopping at the edge of the shower. Strands of hair clung to his forehead; a drop ran slowly down his collarbone. "Yes."
It wasn't surprise, it was relief.
"I saw you walk in. I felt your hand on mine. I felt…" He closed his eyes briefly. "I felt you inside me. Not the way I used to hear thoughts, from outside, but inside."
She turned fully, pulling the curtain aside. Water spilled over the edge, pooling at their feet. She made room for him. The distance between them shrank like darkness before dawn, gradual, then all at once.
"I can do it," Clara whispered. "I didn't know before, but I can. I can enter you. I can show you what I feel, without words. If you let me."
Adrian didn't answer immediately. He cupped her face, thumbs brushing beneath her eyes, a useless gesture, since the water kept falling, but one filled with meaning. "I want that," he said, his voice a soft scrape.
Clara closed her eyes. She didn't hold anything back. She let everything she was, fear, anger, longing, love too large for words, rise up and become substance. Not images, but textures: the heat in her chest whenever he entered a room, the release in her neck when he fell asleep with a finger tangled in hers, the hunger not just for his body but for the space around him that smelled like safety.
Adrian flinched slightly, as if struck by an unseen wave. His breath caught. "I feel it," he murmured and it wasn't a metaphor. He felt it, like the air changing before a storm.
He drew her against him, not roughly, not urgently, but as someone retrieves what he can't bear to lose again.
Her head pressed against his chest; his open palm on her back.
One word, spoken by two mouths at once:
"Here."
Then a time without measurement.
Water beat softly around them. Droplets slid from eyelashes to cheeks, from cheeks to the corners of their mouths.
Beneath her fingertips his skin was taut, then giving, then taut again.
Adrian felt, with unbearable clarity, the way she perceived him, the way her pulse quickened at his voice saying her name, the faint clench of her jaw before she kissed him, the flood of relief when his arms closed around her like shelter. And Clara felt his silence, the discipline it took to keep from breaking, the fierce gentleness hidden behind control, the devotion that frightened him more than desire itself.
Their fusion wasn't an explosion, it was the quiet realization that they had already been standing under the same shelter all along.
They shared the same memory at the same instant: a summer window open to cicadas, the buzz of an old air conditioner, Clara's stifled laugh when he pressed his forehead to her shoulder to keep from saying stay.
The sound was so vivid they could name its pitch.
"Show me everything," he whispered.
Not a demand for images, but for truth.
Clara let the last defense slip.
She showed him the moment she understood she could never be safe without him; the nights she woke terrified he might not be alive; the desire that scared her because it left no escape. There was no shame in what passed between them, only reverence, the quiet of a sacred place.
Adrian held her as one holds something made of glass, not out of fear, but out of awe.
He kissed her. It was slow, deliberate, a kiss meant to match perfectly the imprint they had shared. It didn't seek to ignite; it sought to confirm. Beneath the taste of water she found his: wood, night, something faintly bitter that melted on her tongue like medicine that heals.
The curtain clung to their backs; the angle of the water shifted; one of them laughed softly without pulling away.
When they stopped, it was to breathe in the same space. They stayed forehead to forehead, eyes open.
There was no need to step back to see each other.
"Now I know," Adrian said, barely audible.
"What?" Clara breathed, her voice trembling on the word.
"What you are to me. Not refuge. Not cure. You're…" he searched for the word, found it where he never thought to look, "…you're proof that I'm real."
Clara smiled, not out of joy, but recognition.
The kind of smile made when the world, for a second, finally fits.
Steam fogged the mirror, drawing invisible lines only someone very close could read.
Beyond the door, the apartment held its silence, as if it too had been holding its breath. The water slowed; Clara reached out and turned it off. Sound echoed once, then faded. Their breathing filled the space, simple and miraculous.
They stayed like that, foreheads pressed, lips close but still. It was a living stillness, the quiet that follows a wave too big to name, while the deep water keeps moving underneath.
Adrian closed his eyes, not to shut the world out, but to hold it in.
"You've entered me," he said, and there was no possession in the words, only gratitude.
"I'll never, never be able to make you understand how much I owe you. But you'll feel it. You'll always feel it."
Clara nodded, and he felt the motion on his skin like a heartbeat.
"And you entered me long before I ever realized it," she whispered. "Now I know. It didn't happen here. It happened before, and before that."
Then the strangest, most natural thing happened: at the same instant, without planning, they both saw the same flicker of the future. Not a clear image, a sensation.
Footsteps in the clinic hallway. A light burning where it shouldn't. A familiar scent in the lab. A pull. Not threatening yet, but inevitable.
They stepped apart. The air cooled instantly, covering their skin in shivers.
Adrian grabbed a towel, running it across her shoulders first, then his own, moving with the care of someone touching the irreplaceable.
"We're the same memory," Clara said, surprised by the sound of her voice.
"We're two sides of the same remembrance," he replied, as if finishing a line learned long ago.
The wet curtain peeled off her thigh with a quiet sound. Their footprints on the floor were twin but not identical, each belonging unmistakably to the other.
In the kitchen, the clock began to tick again: one beat, then another, then another, like a hand tapping twice to draw attention. Not a countdown, but a reminder that time still existed.
Adrian brushed his fingers, still damp, over her wrist where the skin was thinnest.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Tomorrow we go back, to where it all began."
Clara breathed in deeply. The air smelled of soap and of them.
"Yes. But today…" She lifted his hand to her lips, kissing it like a seal. "…today we remember we're alive."
They sat for a while on the edge of the tub, legs touching, her chin resting on his shoulder. They didn't speak, what was the point, when listening was enough?
Every now and then, without warning, a shared memory flared to life: the laugh of an old woman in the waiting room; the flicker of a fluorescent lamp; the scent of a plant in the clinic's atrium. Little echoes that came and went like fish beneath the surface.
When they finally rose, they did it together, not from habit, but from instinct, like two musicians inhaling at the same instant before a note.
They dressed in silence. The dry fabric whispered against damp skin, a sound that tasted of new day.
At the door, Adrian's hand paused on the handle. He looked back at her.
"I don't know if we're two people in love," he said, smiling faintly at his own audacity, "or two fragments of the same mind finding each other again."
Clara stepped closer, resting her forehead against his temple.
"Whatever we are," she murmured, "it can't be undone."
The morning light spread across the hallway floor. The steam thinned, slowly disappearing.
In the silence that followed the fading echo of water, their footsteps sounded like the beginning of a journey they had already taken in another time. And for the span of a single shared breath, the world seemed to agree.