I stopped pretending it was only physical somewhere around the second week.

Julian never said the words out loud, but the way he reached for me every time I walked through his door made the truth impossible to ignore. We had fallen into a rhythm that felt dangerously close to a relationship neither of us was supposed to want. He texted when his last meeting ended. I showed up. We barely made it past the entryway most nights. Then we talked—really talked—in the quiet afterward, my head on his chest, his fingers tracing idle patterns along my spine while the city glowed beyond the windows.

I learned the sound of...