The elevator doors sealed behind him with a soft pneumatic sigh, but the image of that pale finger—the way it had curled, almost delicately, like a pianist reaching for a key—stayed burned behind David’s eyelids.
Focus. He needed to focus.
The 6th floor hallway was a cathedral of quiet luxury. Thick Persian carpet absorbed the sound of his footsteps. Recessed wall sconces cast pools of warm amber light along the corridor. The air smelled of sandalwood and money—two things David had only ever experienced secondhand.
His yellow delivery jacket felt obscene here, like a syntax error in an elegant function. He tugged at the collar self-consciously, then caught himself doing it and stopped. No. He wasn’t ashamed. He was here because he worked harder than anyone he knew. That was a feature, not a bug.
Room 602 was at the end of the hall. The Presidential Suite, according to the gold placard on the wall. David reached into his backpack and felt the sharp corners of the iPhone box. It was the only thing that felt real right now—the only anchor point in a world that had decided to start glitching.
He pressed the doorbell. A muted three-note chime echoed from inside. No answer.
David pressed it again, harder, as if force would help. Ten seconds. Twenty. He shifted his weight, feeling the ache in his calves from twelve hours on his feet. All he wanted was a signature on the delivery slip, then home, then four hours of dreamless sleep before his 8 AM tutorial on compiler theory.
Heavy footsteps. A voice cursing in Cantonese—the specific, guttural profanity of a man whose pleasure had been interrupted. The heavy wooden door swung open.
The man who stood there looked like he’d been assembled from a catalog of things David could never afford. Broad shoulders, slick with sweat. A bare, sculpted chest. On his wrist, a diamond-encrusted Patek Philippe that caught the hallway light and threw tiny rainbows across the wall.
But it was the man’s face that David registered most: handsome in a sharp, privileged way, and twisted with the kind of irritation reserved for people who had never been told ‘no’ in their lives.
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“Are you deaf? I said leave the food at the door and get lost!” The man—Kelvin—roared, looking at David the way you’d look at a pop-up ad that had somehow materialized in your physical space.
David’s jaw tightened. A small muscle in his cheek jumped. But his voice stayed level: “The order required a signature for the premium delivery, sir.”
A beat. Then Kelvin laughed—a harsh, percussive sound with no warmth in it. “Signature? You think I’m going to touch the same pen as a delivery rat? Do you even know who I am?”
A retort formed on David’s tongue. Something sharp, something that would cost him his delivery rating and was therefore not worth saying. He swallowed it. The math didn’t support it.
Then a voice came from inside the suite.
It was soft, and sweet, and it destroyed him.
“Darling... who is it? Is the food here yet?”
A woman stepped into the light behind Kelvin. She was wearing a pure white hotel bathrobe, her hair damp from a recent shower. She wrapped her arms around Kelvin’s waist—casually, possessively—and rested her cheek against the warm skin of his back.
The iPhone box in David’s backpack suddenly weighed a thousand kilograms.
It was Nicole.
For three full seconds, David’s brain refused to compile the scene in front of him. It was the cognitive equivalent of a null pointer exception—his mind reaching for a variable that should have held a value and finding nothing. Her face, Kelvin’s bare chest, the bathrobe, the damp hair—the data was all there, but his interpreter refused to execute the obvious conclusion.
Then it executed.
The feeling wasn’t anger. Not yet. It was something quieter and infinitely worse: the sensation of a load-bearing wall being removed from a building that was already structurally compromised. Five years of memories—the drool stain on the hoodie, the late-night study sessions, the 247 ringgit in skipped meals, the four-hour sleep cycles—all of it suddenly hanging in the air without support, waiting to crash.
Nicole’s eyes met David’s. He watched her expression cycle through three states in under two seconds: recognition, terror, and then—this was the part that would replay in his nightmares for months—calculation. A rapid, cold reboot. Her face reset into something composed and distant, like a customer service chatbot reverting to its default prompt.
“David?” she said. Her voice contained no warmth. It contained no guilt. It contained the precise, flat inflection of someone who had already decided this conversation was someone else’s problem. “What are you doing here?”
