Four in the morning and the kitchen light is on, which means Ben can't sleep either. I am Amelie, twenty-three, an art student with paint on my forearms and a playlist too loud for the neighbours, and three months ago my mother married his father and handed us the same front door in Neukölln.
He is at the counter in a T-shirt and the grey trousers he sleeps in, eating cereal out of the box. Twenty-six, quiet, a man who folds his towels. My opposite in every way that used to annoy me.
“Couldn't sleep?” he says.
“Couldn't stop.” I hold up my hands, blue to the wrist. He looks at them a beat too long, then gets a second bowl down without asking and pushes the box toward me.
The flat has three rooms and a hallway we both pretend is wider than it is. Tonight I have to pass him to reach the sink, and I do, and his back is warm through the cotton when my shoulder brushes it, and neither of us says excuse me. We stopped saying it a few weeks ago. I noticed. I don't think he knows I noticed.
I wash the paint off. He watches me do it, leaning on the counter, and the tap is the only sound. When I turn around, he is closer than he was, or I am, and there is a smear of cobalt I've missed on my jaw and he reaches out with his thumb to wipe it, and stops, hand in the air, as if he's just remembered which family dinner we're both invited to on Sunday.
“Sorry,” he says.
He doesn't move his hand. I don't move my face. The cereal box is between us on the counter and the whole flat is asleep except this room, and one of us is going to have to decide what four in the morning is for.
