The V-tuber Who Became Obsessed With Me

Chapter 105: One way or another

( Raina’s pov... continuation of the previous Chapter)

By the time I had showered and changed my decision had not weakened.

If anything it had settled into something harder and clearer than it had felt when I first woke up.

I could not ignore what I had overheard. Maybe my grandfather had not been talking about Ethan. Maybe I was pulling connections out of things that had no connection. But I had spent the last month watching what happened when I dismissed instincts because I wanted them to be wrong, and I was not doing that again.

One of the bodyguards was waiting beside the car when I stepped outside.

He opened the rear door. "Good morning, Miss Takahashi."

I got in without a word.

The drive was quiet. Buildings moved past the tinted windows, people walking to work with coffee cups and earphones, cafés already filling up, the city going about its morning without any awareness that some of the people moving through it were carrying things that had no ordinary shape. I used to move through it the same way. Head down, earphones in, thinking about my schedule and my streams and what I was going to eat for dinner.

That version of me felt like someone I had read about rather than been.

Forty minutes later the car pulled into Ethan’s apartment complex.

The bodyguards got out with me.

"I’d like a few minutes alone," I said.

The oldest of the three looked at the others briefly, then back at me. "We’ll wait downstairs."

I had expected more resistance. I thanked them and went inside before the offer could be reconsidered.

The stairwell was exactly as I remembered it. Faded paint on the walls. The worn patch on the third step. A faint smell of someone’s laundry detergent from the floor below. Every familiar detail sitting in the same place it had always occupied, completely indifferent to the fact that everything surrounding it had changed.

The last time I had been here Ethan had opened the door looking like someone who had not slept in days and had asked me, quietly and without cruelty, to leave his life. I had stood in this corridor and said things I meant and heard the lock close behind me and told myself I understood.

I stopped outside his door.

My pulse was loud enough to hear.

I knocked.

Nothing.

Waited and knocked again.

Still nothing.

I pulled out my phone and called him.

The ringtone came back through the door.

From inside.

Not from far inside. Close. He was standing near the entrance.

I lowered the phone.

"Ethan." I moved closer to the door. "I know you’re there. I can hear your phone."

The ringing stopped. Voicemail.

I knocked again, harder. "Please. Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking."

Silence.

Then the quietest sound. Barely anything. Footsteps moving toward the door and then stopping.

He had come to stand on the other side.

I pressed one hand flat against the wood.

"I know you’re angry. You have every right to be. I’m not here to argue about any of it." I stopped and started again because that was not what I had come to say. "I heard something this morning. Something my grandfather said. I don’t know who he was talking about but it scared me and the only place I wanted to be after that was here." I paused. "I know I don’t have the right to say that anymore. I know I’m the reason I don’t have that right. But I’m telling you anyway."

Nothing from the other side.

I closed my eyes.

"You told me once that carrying everything alone would eventually break me." A quiet exhale. "You were right. I just wish I had understood that before I hurt you."

A click.

The lock.

I took a step back as the handle turned, and the relief that went through me was immediate and complete.

The door opened.

Susan stood in the frame.

I stared at her.

My brain took a moment to catch up with what my eyes were telling it.

"What are you doing here?" The question came out before I had considered how it sounded.

She looked at me with an expression I could not immediately classify. Not hostile. Something more composed than that. More settled.

"Raina," she said.

"I’m sorry." The apology came out smooth and entirely unconvincing. "Ethan doesn’t want to see you."

I looked past her into the apartment. "I’d like to hear that from him."

"He’s resting."

Too quickly.

"Then I’ll wait."

"You can’t."

She shifted slightly in the frame, not blocking the door exactly but making her position in it very clear.

I looked at her properly then. She was comfortable. Not nervous, not uncertain, not the posture of someone standing in a doorway that did not belong to them. She was at ease in a way that told me she had been here before. Not once. Multiple times.

A memory arrived without being invited.

Grace opening the front door of this same apartment building with a bright smile and pulling me into a hug before I had finished saying hello. Nathan’s laugh from somewhere inside. Jonathan running across the living room floor in socks to show me a drawing he had made that afternoon. Grace insisting I stay for dinner because she had made too much and someone needed to help her finish it.

The ease of it. The completely uncomplicated ease of being somewhere and being wanted there.

I had not had that before Grace Cruxs opened a door and decided I belonged on the other side of it.

And now another woman was standing in that same building’s doorway with the settled ease of someone who had been let in.

I looked at Susan.

"Please," I said. "Five minutes."

"He asked not to see anyone." She held my gaze. "Especially you."

The word landed precisely. Especially. Not a blanket instruction. A specific one with my name attached to it.

I kept my face still.

"I’ll let him know you came," she said.

She began closing the door.

I pulled out my phone and called his number one more time.

The ringtone came through the door.

Close.

The same place it had come from before. Right there, on the other side of the wood.

He was standing there.

Listening to his phone ring.

And still not answering.

The call went to voicemail.

I stood in the corridor with the phone in my hand and the silence settling back around me and something moving in my chest that was not grief exactly and was not anger exactly but was somewhere in the space where the two of them overlapped.

I put the phone in my pocket.

Turned and went back down the stairs.

The bodyguard opened the car door. I got in. The door closed and we pulled out into traffic and I sat looking at the city moving past without seeing any of it.

Susan was in his apartment.

He had heard my voice through the door and not moved.

I had asked. I had waited. I had stood in a corridor and said the true things and none of it had been enough to make him open a door.

I pressed my forehead against the cool window glass.

At some point between leaving the apartment building and reaching the next set of traffic lights a thought arrived.

Not a dramatic thought. Not one that announced itself. Just a quiet observation that appeared and stayed.

Asking was not working.

Waiting was not working.

And somewhere in the particular quality of Susan’s ease in that doorway was a variable I had not accounted for, one that had not existed the last time I had stood in this corridor and which changed the shape of the situation considerably.

I lifted my head from the glass.

If the door would not open from the outside, I was going to have to think differently about how to reach what was on the other side of it.

The thought should have frightened me.

It did not.

I’ll find a way to get to Ethan no matter what ....