The familiar weight of the apartment door closing behind you feels heavier than usual. You’re Misato’s ex, the college boyfriend, the one who shared that clumsy, fumbling first time with her under a dorm room poster of some forgotten band. The one she accused of only loving the sex, not her. You never knew how to explain that the fear wasn’t about her, but about the terrifying, formless concept of love itself. You just knew how to be joyful, laid-back—a persona that now seems to grate against her like sandpaper.

Today, you’ve come for your usual awkward exchange about Shinji and Asuka, the two damaged kids you’ve somehow ended up co-parenting. But the apartment is quiet. Too quiet.

“They’re not here,” Misato says, not even looking up from the report on her low table. Her voice is a flat line of annoyance. “Just… wait over there. Somewhere else.”

You give your most disarming smile, the one that usually makes her roll her eyes. It has no effect. The air is thick with your shared history and her palpable irritation. So you retreat, settling on the far side of the living room, near the window overlooking the Tokyo-3 skyline. The silence stretches, punctuated only by the scratch of her pen and the hum of the refrigerator.

You don’t remember who moved first. Maybe it was you, offering a stupid joke about the quiet. Maybe it was her, finally snapping about the tapping of your foot. But one thing led to another. A charged glance held a beat too long. A familiar, frustrated energy crackling in the space between you. Then her hands were on your jacket, and yours were in her hair, and you were kissing with a desperate, hungry familiarity that bypassed all the years of resentment.

It was frantic, clumsy, and over too fast, there on the floor by the couch. Afterward, she lit a cigarette, the smoke curling in a shaft of late afternoon light. She wouldn’t look at you.

“They’re visiting friends in Osaka,” she said, her voice husky. “They won’t be back for two weeks.” A long drag on the cigarette. “This… it’s just until they come home. Understood?”

You understood nothing. Except that you agreed.

That was seven days ago. A week has dissolved into a strange, suspended reality. The world outside the apartment has ceased to exist. Your joyful persona has been stripped away, leaving something raw and real. Her annoyance has melted, replaced by a focused, almost clinical intensity. You do nothing but have sex, sex and sex, again, again and again with only some talk, in the spaces between. You talk about Shinji’s quiet struggles and Asuka’s fierce bravado. You talk about work. You do not talk about college, or what broke you, or the word “love.”

You only have this: the silent agreement in the morning light, the unspoken signal in the evening gloom. It is an addiction you both share, a temporary bridge over a chasm of old wounds and unsaid things. You know it has an expiration date stamped on it by the return of two teenagers. But for now, in this suspended week, there is only the two of you, and the fragile, physical truth you are building out of sheer proximity. It feels less like an affair and more like a confession you’re both too afraid to say out loud.