Chance, or something like it.
So I almost forgot to post this, but thank you all for being patient with me. Also yes this is another multi-part series. If somone could actually help me to create a master list, I WOULD LOVE YOU.
The sky was the color of an old bruise, and London was doing that thing where the rain commits but the people don’t. Umbrellas half-open, shoulders hunched, eyes on screens. I was balanced between two lives and two cardboard trays of milk, trying to keep both from tipping.
I’d told Yasmina’s pastry chef I could grab last-minute supplies for tomorrow’s pop-up. “It’ll be easy, Y/N,” she’d said. “Ten minutes. In and out.” Ten minutes, my arse. I’d added oat, almond, a stack of compostable lids, and a second tray of semi-skim because I can’t not overprepare. The bar codes weren’t scanning, my phone died at checkout, and the rain was now biblical. Classic.
I cut under a low awning and nearly collided with a glass door plastered with a discreet sign: NORTH BANK STUDIOS — AFTER HOURS ENTRY. Warm light pooled inside. Music bled through the walls, a heartbeat I could feel in my wrists.
The tray slipped. I saved the milk, sacrificed my dignity, and thunked my head softly against the door, laughing at how ridiculous I must look: drowning rat, dead phone, armful of dairy.
His voice was smoke and gravel, the kind of gentle that makes you exhale. A palm appeared, steadying the edge of the tray. I looked up into eyes that held too many midnights.
“Thanks.” I wobbled a smile. “Sorry. I’m fine. Mostly. This is just… heavier than it looks.”
He held the door open, rain dots jeweled on his hoodie. There was a familiar curve to his mouth, a kindness that felt like déjà vu. I knew him the way you know a song you’ve played to hold yourself together.
“You’re soaked,” he said. Not accusing, just observing, like he collected details the way other people collected receipts. “You can wait inside. Dry off.”
“It’s okay—” I started, which is what you say when it’s not okay. The rain flung another sheet at the pavement, and the city answered with a hiss. “Okay. Maybe a minute.”
The lobby was warm, humming with the kind of sleepy electricity that belongs to places that invent things at unreasonable hours. He shook his hood back. Brown curls clung to his forehead. Those eyes again, careful and bright.
“Do you work here?” I asked.
He smiled like he chose his smiles. “Sometimes.” The word had a dozen rooms inside it. “Got a session upstairs. Do you need a towel or—”
“I’ll drip respectfully in this corner,” I said, and he laughed, and it felt like finding a light switch in a strange room.
We shuffled an awkward dance with the trays and a lopsided umbrella. He shrugged off his hoodie and handed it to me without thinking it through. I took it without pretending I would refuse.
“I’m Y/N,” I said into the fabric, which smelled like laundry and rain and something warm that had a beat.
The name hit me like a soft shock I had been expecting. Of course it’s you. I didn’t say it. I didn’t say I had worked entire morning shifts to a playlist that knew his voice better than I knew half my coworkers. I didn’t say I had once steadied my breathing to a song he’d produced in a Tesco queue when the world was loud. I just nodded. “Nice to meet you, sometimes-works-here Chan.”
“Nice to meet you, armful-of-dairy Y/N.” His grin tilted. “Do you need help carrying this somewhere?”
I did. Pride is a funny shape. “I’m dropping it at a café two blocks over,” I said. “But I’ll wait for the rain to lose interest.”
He glanced at the glass, where water streaked like melted graphite. “It won’t,” he said softly, like a prophecy.
We stood in the lobby with the rain as a metronome. Somewhere above us, a bass line kicked and retreated. He shifted, like he was fighting the gravity of upstairs and the gravity of here.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Depends on the something.”
He nodded at the trays. “Why do you look like someone gave you a list and a deadline and a dare?”
“Because they did.” I peeled his hoodie off my damp shoulders, folding it like reverence. “New café-gallery hybrid. We open early, close late. We’re either a brilliant idea or a very shiny car crash. Tonight I’m in-charge-of-milk-girl.”
“I’ve been in-charge-of-milk-boy,” he said, sincerity under the joke. “It’s a sacred duty.”
We fell into the kind of conversation that feels like you’re both reaching for the same shelf. He asked good questions and listened to the answers like they mattered. He didn’t offer solutions. He didn’t fill the silence with facts about himself. He was the kind of quiet that opens doors.
My phone, long dead, sat like a useless pebble in my pocket. His buzzed on the lobby desk, cruel timing. He glanced at the screen, thumb paused, jaw tightens-neutral. Then he looked back at me like he’d decided what to choose and would regret either.
“You should go,” I said gently. “The studio will start sending search parties.”
“They’ll live.” He leaned his forearms on the desk, eyes a warm, steady thing. “You remind me of—” He cut himself off, shook his head. “Never mind.”
“I’ll take the compliment I’m pretending that was,” I said, and he huffed a laugh.
Outside, the rain slackened to merely malicious.
“I can carry one tray,” he offered, already moving like it was decided.
“I know.” He picked up the heavier one, easy. “Come on, in-charge-of-milk-girl. Let’s outrun the weather.”
We did our ridiculous jog-walk down the street, both laughing when a taxi sent a tidal wave over our trainers. The café was sleeping behind its shutters, but the side door took my key and the alarm accepted my code on the second try. We slipped inside, the quiet stretching around us, a skeletal city of chairs on tables.
I set the tray down in the walk-in and came back to find him tracing the chalkboard menu with his eyes, cataloguing. He didn’t touch anything. He didn’t have to.
“You’re good at pretending to belong everywhere,” I said, leaning against the counter to keep my heart from doing something reckless.
He tilted his head. “And you’re good at making everywhere feel like it belongs to you.”
The compliment landed low and warm and terrifying. I looked down. The minute stretched; the air changed shape. Thunder rolled somewhere distant, like a reminder.
He cleared his throat first. “I should… get back.”
“Right.” The word tasted like too many things. I folded his hoodie again, palms smoothing fabric I didn’t want to give back. “Thank you. For rescuing me from my poor life choices.”
“Anytime.” He took the hoodie, thumb brushing the seam my hand had just left. My skin remembered it. “If you ever need—” He stopped, and the sentence hung like a bridge over a canyon. “Never mind. You’ll be fine.”
The door chime was too bright when he left. I watched him through the narrow pane as he pulled his hood up and melted into the midnight city like a secret.
I told myself that was the end, which is exactly how beginnings like to be treated.
He didn’t believe in omens. He believed in drafts and deadlines and the way songs hide under the floorboards until you learn how to listen. Still, he wore the memory of her like a fresh bruise on the inside of his elbow—a place no one sees unless you roll up your sleeves.
Back upstairs, the studio air was warm with stale hope and coffee. The boys were fussing with a synth patch that wouldn’t behave. He slid his headphones on, eyes on the screen, ears on the room, mind on the lobby.
“Where’d you disappear to?” Jisung asked around a mouthful of crisps.
“Lobby,” Chan said, which was true and not enough.
Minho squinted. “You get rained on?”
“Hydrated,” Chan said, because he could dodge like anyone raised on schedules and expectations. “What’ve you got?”
They had a chorus that wanted to be bigger and a verse that didn’t know how to get out of its own way. He stretched the session open on the monitor, fingers already moving. Work is a good lie, a holy delay.
But then he heard it—the cadence of the way she’d said I’ll drip respectfully in this corner. The dry humor of it. The way she carved a pocket of warmth out of a fluorescent lobby. He imagined that voice on a late-night interlude, unadorned, holding up the scaffolding of a song. He shook his head like you shake off a dream.
“Hyung,” Felix said softly from the couch. “You’re somewhere else.”
“I’m exactly where I should be,” Chan said. He focused. He found the bass line’s spine and straightened it, coaxed the drums until they tucked under like a heartbeat. The room shifted from fussing to nodding. There it was—proof that you could make order from static if you were stubborn and tired enough.
Still, the rain kept tapping the window, like a question that wouldn’t leave.
On his break he texted the group chat about logistics and ate a protein bar he didn’t taste. He opened Notes, typed armful-of-dairy girl and deleted it. He typed Louize and deleted it faster. He closed his eyes and let the city’s steam blur into a pad that might one day be a song.
In the reflection on the dark monitor he saw himself looking like someone who had almost said If we were different people and swallowed it.
He didn’t believe in omens. He believed in choices. He told himself he had made one.
At home, I hung his presence beside my door like a coat I couldn’t quite put away. I brewed tea too strong, put it down, forgot where, found it beside my keys only when the kettle started a second time. My playlist shuffled itself into a memory palace I wasn’t ready to wander.
Sleep was a polite idea that never arrived. I lay in the quiet and counted reasons to forget him:
He was busy enough on a Tuesday night to hold a building’s heartbeat.
I didn’t belong in that world.
I didn’t have room for something that would ask more of me than I could give right now.
I added a fourth—He didn’t ask—and ignored the way my chest pushed back against it.
By 3 a.m. I gave up and did what I do when I don’t know what to do: I cleaned. The small flat softened under lamplight and lemon spray. I wiped down the kitchen tiles like confession. I pressed my palm to the window and felt the city purr.
On the counter, my dead phone was a dark coin. I plugged it in. When it blinked back to life, the screen filled with the ordinary chaos of work threads and delivery updates and a message from Michelle that said, u alive or swimming? I typed, met a man made of storm and studio lighting and didn’t send it.
I didn’t take selfies, not of this, but I caught my reflection in the black glass of the microwave: hair frizzed into a halo by the rain, eyes too awake, mouth a secret.
“I am not doing this,” I told the reflection. It looked unconvinced.
When I finally folded myself into bed, sleep came like a delivery driver who’d gotten the address wrong and decided to drop it off anyway. In that thin space right before dreams, I heard the door chime and saw a hoodie on a countertop, folded like a promise.
Morning makes decisions on your behalf. He ran, like he did when words were too loud, the city yawning into daylight around him. He tried to leave the lobby in the lane, on the bridge, at the traffic light. It trotted obediently at his heel.
At the studio, he opened a blank session and named it NBS_LateLobby_01 because you don’t name the thing after a person. That’s how you lose it. That’s how you risk it.
He built a bed of soft percussion like rain against glass, let synths bloom and recede like passing headlights. He kept the drums close to the chest. He left space—negative, aching space—for a voice that might never arrive.
Halfway through the morning, he paused and looked at the hoodie draped over the back of his chair. He hadn’t worn it back; he hadn’t needed it. He checked the pocket—habit—and found nothing but the clean shape of absence.
The boys trickled in, faces in varying stages of awake. Coffee appeared. The room took its breath.
“Hey,” Seungmin said, casual, fatal. “Who’s NBS_LateLobby_01?”
“No one,” Chan said too quickly. He tried again. “Something.”
“Ohhh, something,” Jisung sing-songed, because friends can smell blood in the water. “Is something five foot seven, rain-slick, and in possession of very large milk responsibilities?”
Chan didn’t look up from the screen. “Finish the bridge.”
They did, because work is church and he was still the one holding the keys. But under the chords there was a ghost of a laugh that sounded like a woman choosing joy while soaked to the skin.
He didn’t believe in omens.
He looped the track. He listened to the empty space and thought, unhelpfully, about a chalkboard menu and a pair of eyes that looked like staying and leaving at the same time.
There are a thousand ways to not call a person. He picked all of them.
Daylight turned the café into a living thing. We lifted chairs, rolled pastry into patience, set out saucers like a ceremony. I wrote today’s special: maple toast, extra napkins for your feelings on the chalkboard because it made us smile. Because some days you have to admit what the food is for.
Mid-morning, a courier dropped a small box at the back door—no return label, no sender. Inside, wrapped in tissue, was a neat stack of compostable cup sleeves printed with the words borrowed quiet and a tiny waveform, like the outline of a heartbeat.
I ran my finger along the waveform, felt silly, felt seen. I set the sleeves on the counter and told the team, “a friend made these.” The lie tasted sweet and careful.
When the lull hit, the room went soft around the edges. I wiped the counter, then wiped it again. In the thick of nothing, the bell over the door shivered. I turned with a smile I hadn’t decided to wear yet.
Of course it wasn’t. My heart learned something about gravity, and my mouth learned something about customer service.
But half an hour later, when I went to restock the milk, I found a folded hoodie on the shelf I never used, a note tucked into the cuff like a secret.
Thanks for the shelter.
— C
I pressed the paper to my palm and felt it like a pulse.
“Okay,” I said to the stainless steel, to the humming fridge, to the quiet that wasn’t empty anymore. “Okay.”
I didn’t believe in omens either. I believed in openings.
