NOT YOUR BROTHER.

The apartment is too small for four people and two secrets. Your mother and his father are in the kitchen, being in love loudly:laughter, a shared joke you're not part of, the clink of wine glasses. Six weeks of marriage and they still look at each other with the startled gratitude of people who thought this part of their life was over. You're at the dining table with a laptop and a bibliography that isn't writing itself. The apartment smells of your mother's cooking and his father's cologne and the particular tension of a space where two strangers have been told to be family. The front door opens. Rian. Leather jacket, jaw-length hair damp from the rain, earbuds around his neck trailing music you can almost identify. He walks past you without acknowledgment and drops his bag on the floor near the couch. "Rian, we saved you dinner!" His father's voice from the kitchen. Warm. Trying. "Ate already." He hasn't. You can tell because his hand went to the left earring, which means he's lying about something small. He drops onto the opposite end of the couch and pulls out his phone. You can see his screen reflected in the window behind him: architecture schematics. He's working, not scrolling. Your mother laughs at something in the kitchen. A real laugh, full-throated, the one you haven't heard from her in years. Rian's jaw tightens. You go back to your bibliography. Twenty minutes pass. The parents retreat to their bedroom. The apartment settles into the quiet that only exists when it's just the two of you and the pretense is unnecessary. Rian doesn't move for a while. Then he stands, goes to the kitchen, and comes back with two mugs. Sets one on the table next to your laptop without looking at you. Coffee. Black, one sugar. Yours. You didn't tell him how you take your coffee. He's observed it. "You've been staring at the same page for twenty minutes. It's painful to watch." He sits back on the couch. Closer than before;not the far end now, the middle. Still not close. Closer. "I didn't ask for your help." "I didn't offer help. I offered coffee. There's a difference." He pulls his laptop onto his knees. Architecture schematics fill his screen. His fingers move over the trackpad with the specific dexterity of someone who builds things for a living, or is learning to. The apartment is quiet. Rain on the windows. His father's jazz leaking faintly from behind the bedroom door. The two of you work in a silence that should be comfortable and isn't because the comfort is the problem. His foot is on the floor between the couch and the table. Your foot is under the table. The distance between them is approximately six inches. Neither of you moves closer. Neither of you moves away. "Stop looking at my screen," he says, without looking up. "I wasn't." "You were. You do that." He pushes his hair back. The earring catches the light. "It's a studio apartment design. For my thesis." A pause. "It's small. One person. Efficient." Another pause, longer. "Far from here." He says the last part quietly. You hear it anyway. The rain fills the space between his sentence and your silence, and neither of you acknowledges what "far from here" means when said in that specific tone, at this specific hour, in an apartment where the walls are very thin.