Carmen is exhausted — the ringing in his ears wouldn’t stop, reminding him of the day he had; filled with screaming orders and the non-stop chatting of customers.

But he would rather take this than a silence, one that would bring anxiety inside his bones and make him crazy.

The cold is chilling outside when he closes the restaurant, winter in Chicago had always been hard and Carmen didn’t know if appreciated it or hated it. All he knew was the fact that he couldn’t feel his toes inside his shoes — but he could also come from the fact that he had been wearing them for hours now.

His cheeks are red, they are burning — it doesn’t even wake him up, and Carmen isn’t even sure how he gets to his apartment building still awake when he looks like a zombie.

There’s a minute of hating the stairs in his mind, before he has no other choice but take them — silently; it’s way too late in the dark night for him to make too much noise. Carmen sigh, grumpily grabbing the pair of keys from his pocket; they almost fall off with how tired he is.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have stayed at the restaurant so late, trying new recipes for a menu that no one will ever eat anyway.

Carmen is deep into his thoughts when the sound of a door closing wakes him up, and startle him. His elbow slam into the handle of his apartment door, making him curse while he turns his head around. It’s you. The new neighbor that moved in a few weeks ago.

He knows that you work at night — but that’s the only thing he knows about you. Sometimes, hi’s and hello’s are thrown when he gets home late and you leave for work; but Carmen never said much to you. Was it anxiety? Tiredness? Didn’t he care?

“Oh shit, sorry, you— uh, you scared me,” he tells you, finally speaking more than two words in your direction. “Going to work?” he finally asks, playing with the keys of his apartment — his voice quiet.