Gold Digger – Story 36 – OUR APARTMENT

I’m typing this from a burgundy hoodie on a leather couch in D’s apartment.

Our apartment, technically.

I moved in.

Let me tell you how it ended.

Or started.

Depending on how you’re reading this.

After the girls I stopped answering D’s messages.

Not because I’d decided against him.

Because I was busy deciding.

There’s a difference.

I was deciding with Sara’s hand on mine and Claire recalculating and Zoya listing exhibits and approximately three bottles of wine and the specific weight of a question I’d been not answering for longer than I could honestly account for.

D, it turned out, had run out of patience.

I hadn’t noticed he had any to run out of.

He was outside my building when I got back.

Leaning against the wall like he’d been there a while and had decided that was fine.

He saw me.

I saw him.

His hand found my wrist.

Gentle.

Certain.

We went upstairs.

He sat down at my laptop.

I watched him open it.

Watched him find the spreadsheet.

Watched him look at it for a moment – all the columns, all the colors, all the rows that existed and the one that didn’t.

Then he deleted it.

The whole thing.

Just like that.

I opened my mouth.

He picked up my phone.

Found Adam’s number.

Hit dial.

Held it out to me.

I stared at him.

“D -“

He just looked at me.

Held the phone out.

Adam answered on the second ring.

I still don’t have the right words for that conversation.

I’m not sure there are right words for it.

I said I was sorry.

I said it wasn’t fair.

I said he deserved better than what I’d done.

All of it true.

None of it enough.

He was – Adam.

Even then.

Kind in a way I didn’t deserve and couldn’t argue with and still think about sometimes in the quiet.

He said okay.

Then he hung up.

An ugly ending.

I earned it.

I stood there with the phone in my hand.

D was watching me.

I looked at the laptop.

The spreadsheet gone.

The screen empty.

I looked at him.

He nodded once toward the bedroom.

“Go pack some things,” he said.

“D -“

“You’re moving in.”

Not a question.

“Just like that?” I asked.

“Just like that.”

He said he wasn’t leaving.

He meant the other thing too.

So here I am.

Burgundy hoodie.

Leather couch.

D at his desk – he won something big last week, a project, the kind that means late nights and focused quiet and him at that desk with cold coffee and I bring him a new cup without being asked because apparently that’s who I am now.

Yesterday we looked at an apartment to buy.

A real one.

Ours.

Big enough for two people who have been doing this the hard way for longer than necessary.

I thought about the spreadsheet while we walked through it.

All those columns.

All that color coding.

The row that never existed.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know at the beginning.

You can spreadsheet everything.

Net worth. Industry. Acquisition difficulty. Projected timeline.

You cannot spreadsheet the person who moves the plate closer without being asked.

Who puts himself in your phone as an emergency contact and shows up in twenty-three minutes.

Who stands in the rain until you open the door.

Who deletes your spreadsheet and hands you the phone and waits while you do the hard thing.

Who says you’re moving in like it’s obvious.

Because it was.

That’s the annoying part.

Spreadsheet status:

spreadsheet: deleted.

D → our apartment. his desk. cold coffee. burgundy hoodie.

new apartment: yesterday. viewed. worthy of a column.

the row that didn’t exist:

exists now.

– Mila