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The two days that followed the meeting in the elevator were the longest Luca had ever experienced.

Not that time had stopped—university classes continued with their relentless routine, professors spoke of porticoes and intercolumniations, Luca handed in an axonometric perspective exercise and received another—but inside him, something had altered his perception of the flow. Every hour seemed dilated, every minute charged with an anticipation he couldn't name. He worked on his drawings with forced concentration, but the hand holding the Rapidograph trembled imperceptibly, and the lines he traced on the tracing paper seemed thinner than usual, more uncertain, as if the instruments themselves reflected the state of his nervous system.

His wrist, his left wrist, still burned. Not physically. The skin was intact, smooth, unmarked. But every time Luca looked at that precise spot, that inner area where the veins traced a bluish map beneath the surface, he felt the memory of touch reactivate. It had become a sensitive point, a switch that brought the elevator back to life, the heat, the scent of sweat and sandalwood, the low voice that had said: Dream of me.

And he had dreamed. For two consecutive nights, sleep had been a territory where Ethan treaded without permission. Dreams without plot, made only of proximity, of mingling breaths, of hands reaching out and withdrawing before contact. Dreams that left him awake in the middle of the night, with the sheet twisted between his legs and his heart beating in a rhythm that was no longer his alone.

But Ethan wasn't there. Not in the hallway, not on the stairs, not in front of the mailboxes. 3B seemed sealed off, a silent monolith that emitted only muffled sounds: the sound of the shower in the morning, the thud of a door, the solitary footstep on the floor. Luca had grown accustomed to reading those sounds, mapping them, constructing an image of Ethan through the wall like an archaeologist reconstructing a body from scattered bones. But the real body, the one he had seen, the one he had almost felt against him, remained absent.

Until Wednesday evening.

It was almost midnight. Luca was sitting at his desk, immersed in a project that refused to progress. The table lamp cast a cone of yellow light on the tracing paper, leaving the rest of the living room in darkness. Outside, the city was silent, that silence peculiar to September nights when summer refuses to surrender but no longer has the strength to dominate. Luca had placed his phone on the edge of the table, next to the ruler, screen-down. It wasn't a deliberate gesture, or perhaps it was and he didn't want to admit it.

When the phone vibrated, the sound was dull, muffled by the contact with the wood. But Luca heard it. He felt it deep in his sternum, like a second pulse.

He looked up from the tracing paper. The phone was flashing from the edge, a notification pulsing like a beacon on a starless night. His hand moved before his mind could decide. He grabbed the phone. Turned it over.

Instagram. A colorful, innocuous icon that shouldn't have caused that knot in my stomach. But there was a follow request.

Luca opened the app with a finger that slid lightly across the glass, leaving a trail of sweat. The notification screen displayed a profile he didn't recognize. No name. Just a series of random letters, or maybe not, a sequence that didn't form words, looking like code. And the profile picture, small, circular, compressed into the pixels of the thumbnail.

Luca touched the image to enlarge it. The world shrank. It was a back. Seen from behind, diagonally, as if the photographer were standing slightly above the subject. A broad, muscular back, with the spine forming a precise vertical line between the paravertebral muscles. The skin was shiny, wet, covered in a sheen of sweat that made it almost metallic under a light coming from the left. Drops ran down the curve of the sides, disappearing beyond the bottom edge of the photo. There was no face. There were no tattoos, no identifying marks. Yet Luca recognized it immediately.

The back he'd seen in the elevator, covered by the open jacket. The same muscular architecture, the same golden, shiny skin. The sweat, that sweat he'd smelled, that he'd breathed, that had filled the cabin until it suffocated the oxygen.

The profile had no name. Just that photo and a single post: the same image, repeated.

Luca felt his mouth go dry. His heart pounded in his temples, in his fingers, in his wrist—yes, in his wrist, where the memory of the touch reactivated with a force that made him flinch. He slid his thumb over the request. Accept. Confirm.

And the moment he did, another notification appeared.

A direct message.

The wording was simple, almost clinical: And he sent you a message.

Luca opened the chat. The phone screen illuminated his face in a cold, bluish light, making him feel alienated. He read.

The walls here are thin. I can hear you drawing late at night.

Below, a single letter. Signed like an official document, like a declaration of intent.

AND.

Luca remained still. The sound of the apartment's refrigerator came on at that precise moment, a mechanical hum that filled the silence too suddenly. He jumped, looked toward the wall that overlooked 3B. The walls are thin. Ethan could hear him drawing late at night. Did he hear the scrape of the chair on the floor? Did he hear the sound of the pen on the paper? Or did he hear something more, his breathing, his heartbeat, the tension seeping through the plaster like damp?

Luca's hand was shaking slightly. He had to answer. He had to find the right words, ones that wouldn't give him away, that wouldn't reveal too much, but that wouldn't close the door that was opening. He typed, deleted, typed again.

And you? What do you do at night?

He pressed send. The message appeared in the chat with a checkmark. Then two. Read.

The wait was tense. Luca didn't look away from the screen. The phone's beam of light was the only point of light in the room, and he was chained to that rectangle of glass and pixels like an observer chained to a telescope. The seconds ticked by, like drops of water falling into an empty bucket, and each drop seemed amplified.

Then the notification. And he's writing...

Luca held his breath.

No text message arrived. A photo did.

It loaded slowly, the pixels assembling from top to bottom, like an image emerging from photosensitive liquid. The resolution was low, deliberately blurry, as if shot while moving or with a shaky hand, or perhaps—and this thought sparked something deeper—as if the photographer didn't want to reveal too much, but only suggest.

Sheets. White, or perhaps cream, the blurring made even the color uncertain. Messy. Not simply undone, but used. Wrapped chaotically, with deep folds that suggested movement, that told of a body that had turned, twisted, left footprints. In one corner, barely visible, a crushed pillow. And on top of the sheets, a hand, just the fingers, blurred, that seemed to have just let go.

On the photo, superimposed in white, semi-transparent characters, the writing:

I imagine.

Luca felt the phone slip slightly in his hand. He gripped it tighter. He looked at that image and felt something give way in his chest, a dam that had been holding for too long.

I imagine. Ethan imagined. And what did he imagine? Luca looked at the unmade sheets and saw, couldn't help but see, the body that had been stretched out there. The naked, sweaty torso of the elevator boy, stretched out on those folds of cotton. The hands moving beneath the fabric. The breathing becoming deeper, faster, more urgent.

And the word "imagine," so ambiguous, so charged, wasn't an answer. It was an opening. It was an invitation to complete the circuit, to provide the other half of the image, to share the mental space that the physical wall prevented.

Luca stood up. His phone remained on the table, screen on, that photo staring back at him like an unblinking eye. He walked over to the wall dividing 3A from 3B. He rested his forehead against the cold, rough plaster. He closed his eyes.

The walls are thin.

On the other side, in 3B, he heard a noise. A step. Then another. Someone was moving, and the movement seemed synchronized with his heartbeat. Luca remained there, motionless, his forehead pressed against the wall, as if he could walk through it with will alone, as if the pressure of his desire could melt reinforced concrete like butter.

When he returned to his desk, the phone's light had gone out. But the notification remained. And he knew, with a certainty that came not from logic but from something older, more visceral, that Ethan was there, on the other side of the wall, phone in hand, waiting.

The night grew deeper.

Luca couldn't draw. He couldn't read. He couldn't do anything but check his phone, wait, hope for another message, another photo, another spark to fuel the fire burning inside him. And when, around one o'clock, the phone vibrated again, his body reacted before his mind.

Another photo.

This time there were no sheets. There was only one detail. A forearm, resting on a wooden edge, perhaps a table, perhaps the back of a chair. The light was warm, yellowish, from a bedside lamp. The skin was covered with dark hair, and the muscles of the arm were slightly tense, as if the photographer were holding something, or someone. There was no writing. There was no need for writing.

Luca looked at that forearm and thought of the hand that had touched his wrist. The same hand, perhaps, that now held the phone, that took that photo, that sent it to him through the ether, through the cables, through electromagnetic waves that knew no boundaries, that respected no walls.

Her hand moved on its own. She picked up the phone. She activated the front-facing camera. She looked at herself, her hair disheveled, her eyes too shiny, her cheeks slightly flushed, and she snapped the shot. She didn't look at the result. She didn't want to see her own expression, she didn't want to gauge her vulnerability. She sent it. No filters, no captions, no defenses.

The wait was an instant, or an eternity.

The answer came in the form of an emoji. An eye. 👁

Then a message: I'm watching you too.

Luca dropped the phone to his chest, where his heart was pounding so hard he could feel it through the fabric of his T-shirt. He closed his eyes. In his head, the image of Ethan's eye, the intense green one that had stared at him in the elevator, overlapped with the emoji on the screen. The observation had become mutual. The game had changed scope, but not its nature. First they had been bodies in a confined space, now they were images in a dimensionless space. And in both cases, the boundary, that concrete wall, that phone glass, had become permeable.

Luca stood up. He went to the kitchen window. The inner courtyard was bathed in a light that was neither night nor yet day, that blue hour when the world seems suspended. And in the window of 3B, for the first time, he saw a figure.

Ethan was there. Shirtless, like the first night, his pants hanging low. He stood still, motionless, phone in hand, the light from the screen illuminating his face from above, casting deep shadows under his cheekbones, under his jaw. And even though he couldn't see his eyes from that distance, Luca felt his gaze on him. Steady. Intense. Unmistakable.

He raised his hand. Not the one with the phone. The other. His left wrist. He exposed it, offered it, displayed it like a map, like a text, like a declaration.

Across the way, in the darkness of 3B, Ethan did the same. He raised his left wrist. And with his right hand, slowly, in a movement that Luca could follow even though it was only a shadow against the light, he traced a line with his index finger. Precisely where, two days earlier, he had brushed Luca in the elevator.

Luca felt his wrist burn. And he understood that the message had never been merely digital. It had always been physical. It had been an extension of that finger, of that touch, through space and time. And that the wall, that evening, was thinner than ever. So thin that a gesture, an image, a shared breath across the darkness of the courtyard was enough to feel touched.

He returned to the living room. His phone was still on, the chat open. Under Ethan's last message, "I'm watching you too," he typed a reply. One word.

You come.

He pressed send. And then, because his courage couldn't stop halfway, he added another sentence.

The walls are thin. But the door is thinner.

He turned off the desk light. He stood in the darkness, clutching the phone, his heart pounding, and his ears straining toward the hallway. Toward the sound of a door that, at any moment, might open.