Chapter 41: Roleplay?
Liam stood outside her door with his hand raised to knock.
He didn’t knock only because he noticed something.
The door was open. Not wide open — barely an inch, just enough that the latch hadn’t caught properly, a thin sliver of darkness visible along the frame. He lowered his hand slowly and stared at it.
"She left the door open? That’s dangerous."
In an apartment building, this late nonetheless. That was either complete carelessness or the kind of comfortable routine that develops when you’ve lived somewhere long enough to stop feeling like you need to be afraid or security conscious. Either way, it changed his options.
He could ring the bell. Straightforward, respectable but the more boring option out of the two. She’d come to the door in whatever she wore around the house and they’d do the whole "oh I was just in the neighbourhood" routine which was absurd given that he had specifically driven Darren home, come upstairs, and was now standing outside her door at midnight like a man with a plan he hadn’t fully committed to yet.
Or.
Liam looked at the gap in the door again.
"Don’t," said the reasonable part of his brain because this was actually a crime.
However, his intrusive thought won in this situation because his body moved before he could fully form that thought.
He pushed the door open with two fingers and stepped inside.
The living room was completely dark. Not dim — dark. The kind of dark that swallows shapes and turns furniture into obstacles with corners specifically designed to find your shins. Liam stood still for a moment just inside the threshold, letting his eyes adjust, pulling the door quietly shut behind him and luckily, it didn’t creak or do any of that extra nonsense.
He knew the layout. Darren’s apartment was directly below this one — same floor plan, same building, same developer cutting the same corners throughout. Living room straight ahead, kitchen to the left, hallway running right toward the bedroom. He had mentally mapped it the moment Darren confirmed the address back when he was arranging the dress delivery.
He moved slowly, one careful step at a time, arms slightly out at his sides like a man crossing a rope bridge.
"I wonder..." Liam thought, navigating around what he was fairly certain was the coffee table, "... if I should just commit to the bit."
He stopped and considered it for a second because it wasn’t too late to back down.
The idea was objectively stupid. It was also, he had to admit, very funny. And it would set a tone for the evening that no amount of knocking and polite small talk ever could. He was already inside. He was already in the dark. The infrastructure for the bit was essentially already in place.
Liam rolled his shoulders, loosened his jaw, and became a burglar.
He moved differently now — slower, more deliberate, with the exaggerated caution of a man in a heist film who has vastly overestimated the security system. He edged along the hallway wall, pausing at imaginary corners, scanning imaginary perimeters. At one point he pressed his back flat against the wall for no reason whatsoever and felt genuinely pleased with himself.
The bedroom door was ajar. A faint light bled through the gap — warm, amber, the kind that comes from a bedside lamp left on. Liam eased the door open with one finger and peered around the frame.
Empty.
Bed unmade on one side, a book left open face-down on the pillow, the bedside lamp casting a low glow across the room. He scanned quickly — wardrobe, dresser, a chair with clothes folded over the back.
Then he heard it.
The shower. Running steadily from behind the bathroom door on the far side of the room.
Liam straightened up.
"Oh."
He stood there for a moment and ran through the mathematics of his current situation. He had entered a woman’s apartment without invitation. He had crept through her living room in the dark. He had peered into her bedroom. And she was, at this precise moment, in the shower with no knowledge that any of this was happening.
"Hm," Liam thought. "Maybe this was a bad idea."
He began to back up.
One careful step at a time, heel to toe, slow and controlled, the same energy he’d entered with except now entirely motivated by self-preservation rather than entertainment.
His elbow caught something on the dresser.
He felt it go before he could stop it — a soft thud, something small hitting the floor and rolling, the sound arriving in the quiet bedroom like a gunshot.
"Fuck—"
He said it under his breath but in a silent apartment at midnight, under his breath was still very audible.
The shower stopped.
Instantly. Mid-flow, as if someone had pulled a plug. One second running water, the next — nothing. Just the settling quiet and the low amber glow of the bedside lamp and Liam standing in the middle of the bedroom in a three-piece suit holding completely still like that would somehow help.
"Who’s there?"
Rachel’s voice came through the bathroom door — sharp, alert, with zero trace of the softness it usually carried. She wasn’t panicked. She sounded like a woman who had already grabbed something heavy.
Liam pressed himself back against the wall beside the wardrobe and said absolutely nothing.
"This is fine," he told himself. "This is completely fine."
"I heard that." A beat of silence. "I have a phone."
"She has a phone," Liam thought. "Great. She’s going to call the police on me. I’m going to be arrested in Rachel’s bedroom wearing a suit I wore to a business dinner. Darren is going to laugh at me until the end of time."
He was well aware he could just reveal himself but it would be so awkward.
For someone who was so careful not to put a blemish on his record, this was one of those moments that happened in the spur.
He closed his eyes briefly.
"Yeah," he admitted to himself, with the quiet resignation of a man who had made a series of escalating decisions and arrived at their logical conclusion. "I really should have just gone home."
