I Take Care of My Neighbor With Two Broken Hands: Unforeseen Entanglements, #50

He'd lived next to her for two years and still hadn't learned how to look at her without his whole body going stupid. Taylor was in her thirties and moved like she didn't owe the hallway an explanation. Kevin was twenty-one. He told himself neighbors notice things. That was the lie that let him stay on his side of the wall.

Then she fell. Both wrists. Splints. No gripping, no twisting a doorknob, no managing the ordinary humiliations of a body that had stopped cooperating. He offered a few days of help. She looked at him the way people look when they are trying not to want the only option in the room, and she said yes anyway.

What followed was not a fantasy arranged for either of them. It was tea he didn't know how to make, a bathroom door that should have stayed closed, and the kind of help you cannot take back once you have given it. She needed her clothes off. She needed to get clean. She needed hands that still worked. His had wanted her long before she asked for them.