The air conditioner hummed its steady note against the quiet, a chill that raised the fine hair on her forearms and made the sheets feel like something she'd have to fight. Anna lay on her back with her phone face-down on the nightstand and her eyes open in the dark, the lamp off for an hour, sleep nowhere in her. She'd told herself she was reading. She'd told herself she was tired. She'd told herself the sound was nothing — the house settling, a pipe, the wind off the pool.

It wasn't nothing. Two doors down, through a wall she'd never once thought about until tonight, the bed creaked in a rhythm that was not sleep. And then the slap — soft, wet, unhurried — skin meeting skin with a patience that made her stomach tighten before her mind caught up.

Manika. That was Manika's breath. Muffled, like she had her face turned into something, biting down, but the pitch of it carried anyway — a high, helpless little sound that broke off and came back. Anna had heard Manika breathe a thousand times. Across the breakfast island. Over a textbook. She had never heard her breathe like that.

Anna turned onto her side, away from the wall, and pulled the sheet to her chin. She was not listening. She had a Contracts exam in eleven days and a reputation that did not include lying in the dark cataloguing the sounds of her roommate getting fucked, and she was not listening, and her hand was already flat on the mattress, fingers curled, doing nothing.

The bed creaked again. Slower. A long, dragging creak, and a wet sound underneath it, and Manika made a noise that wasn't muffled this time — a small, strangled thing that Anna felt in the soles of her feet.

She turned back toward the wall. Her body did it before she decided to. Her cheek found the pillow, her ear found the plaster, and the sounds arrived cleaner, closer, as if the wall had thinned to paper while she wasn't looking. The slap of it. The catch of breath. The low, easy murmur of a voice that was not Manika's, too quiet to make out, and somehow that was worse — the not-knowing. The shape of it. What he might be saying to her.

She knew what he looked like when he said things like that. Grey eyes half-lidded, that half-smile that he wore like he'd invented it, the way he tilted his head when he was about to say something that made you want to slap him and also not. She'd watched him do it a hundred times at the pool, water running off his shoulders, saying nothing at all and meaning everything.

Her hand drifted down her stomach. Slow. She told herself it was because of the chill, because the sheet was thin, because she was restless and there was nothing else to do with her body at two in the morning. Her fingers found the waistband of her shorts and stopped there, and her heart was going hard enough that she could feel it in her throat.

Another sound came through the wall. Manika, biting down again — Anna could hear the effort in it, the way it frayed at the edges and wouldn't hold. And under it, Liez's voice, low and even, the way he talked to everyone, like nothing in the world could rattle him.

"Don't," he said. Just that. And Manika's breath broke in half.

"Please—" Her voice, finally, words on the page of the night, thin and quick through the plaster. "Please, Liez."

"Don't what?" A pause. The creak of the bed. "Say it."

Anna pressed her teeth into her lower lip and slid her hand under the waistband.

She was wet. She'd been wet for longer than she wanted to admit to herself, slick and warm, and her fingers slid through it easy, too easy, a confession her body had already made without her. She dragged two fingers up through the folds and found her clit, and her hips lifted off the mattress an inch before she could stop them.

"Don't stop," Manika said, and it came out wrong — half a word, swallowed. "Don't—"

"I heard you the first time."

The rhythm next door changed. Faster now — the slap quickening, the bed creaking in short, sharp bursts, Manika's breath breaking into pieces. Anna's fingers moved to match it. She didn't decide to. Her hand just kept time, rolling small circles that tightened every time the wall carried a new sound, and her thighs fell open under the sheet like they'd been waiting.

"Is that what you wanted?" Liez, low, unhurried, the same voice he used at the pool asking if anyone needed a towel. "Tell me what you wanted."

"You know—" Manika's voice cracked and climbed. "You know what I wanted. You've known all week."

"All week." A soft laugh, almost kind. "You should have said something."

It wasn't her. That was the thing she couldn't get past, the thing that made her press harder. Two doors down, it was Manika — quiet, polite, sandalwood-and-ambition Manika — with her hands in his hair and her body doing whatever it was doing, and Anna was here, alone, in the dark, with her own fingers and a wall, and the unfairness of it burned somewhere behind her ribs.

She closed her eyes and let herself picture him. Not Manika. Him. The weight of him over her, that lean chest, the way his forearms would bracket her head, the way he'd look down at her with that half-smile and say something infuriating and then not wait for the answer. She pictured his mouth at her throat. She pictured his hand flat on her stomach, holding her down.

"Say my name," he said through the wall.

"Liez."

"Again."

"Liez—" And then a gasp that turned into something longer, a low, dragged-out sound Anna had never heard Manika make, and the slap of skin came faster, harder, wetter, and Anna's hips rolled against her hand, a slow grind that she couldn't stop once she'd started. Her heel dug into the mattress. The sheet had slid off her shoulder and the air conditioner laid its cold across her bare skin, and she was hot anyway, flushed from the inside out, her breath coming short through her nose because she would not open her mouth.

"You're so quiet," Liez said. "Every day. All that quiet, and this is what's under it."

"Don't—" Manika's voice pitched up, broke. "Don't be—"

"Don't be what?"

"Smug."

"I'm not smug. I'm right."

She pressed her thumb flat over her clit and worked it in tight, fast circles, and her free hand came up to grip the pillow beside her head. The wall gave her everything she needed — the wet slap, the creak, Manika's voice climbing and breaking and climbing again, and somewhere under it all Liez's low murmur, steady as a pulse, saying something she couldn't make out and wanted, suddenly, desperately, to hear.

The murmur sharpened. Two words, maybe. An order — she could hear the shape of an order in it, that flat downward cadence, and Manika's breath caught like a hand had closed around it.

"Turn over."

A pause. The mattress shifting. A small, helpless sound — not protest, not quite assent, something between the two that Anna felt in her own chest like a hand closing. Then Manika, muffled again, face down now, her voice flattened against the pillow but still carrying: "Like this?"

"Like that."

Anna's whole body clenched around nothing. Her fingers sped up, slipping in her own wet, and she turned her face into the pillow to muffle the sound she was making.

She held her breath. The room went very small — just the hum of the AC, the slap through the wall, her own blood in her ears. She was close, close enough that her toes curled and her calves went tight, and she kept her hand moving because stopping now would have been worse than anything.

"You're going to come for me," Liez said. Not a question. Flat. Easy. The way he'd say it was going to rain.

"I can't—"

"You can."

"I can't, I—"

"Yes." A creak, a shift, a sound of something pushing deeper, and Manika's voice tore loose from the pillow in a long, ragged cry that she tried to swallow and couldn't. "Now."

She came with a silent gasp, mouth open against the pillow, hips jerking up off the mattress once, twice, her thighs clamping shut around her own hand. The orgasm rolled through her in a long, tight wave that left her fingers frozen and her breath ragged in the pillowcase, and through all of it the sounds next door kept going, didn't pause, didn't notice her.

Her thighs trembled. She lay there with her hand still trapped between them, slick and pulsing, and stared at the dark ceiling while her heartbeat came down out of her throat. The air conditioner hummed. The sheet was twisted around one ankle. She felt, for a long moment, like someone she did not recognize.

Then Liez's voice came through the wall again — low, unhurried, a whole sentence this time, and she caught the rhythm of it without a single word.

"Good girl. There it is."

It landed into the quiet the way a stone lands in water. Manika answered with a sound Anna couldn't name — a soft, wrecked little thing, half a laugh, half a sob, and then her voice, thick and far away: "That's not fair."

"What isn't?"

"You know what."

"Tell me."

"You—" A breath. A shift of weight. "You know I can't think when you do that."

"Then don't think."

They hadn't stopped. She could hear that they hadn't stopped — the bed still creaking, the breath still catching, the whole thing still going on two doors down while she lay in her own cooling sweat with her hand between her legs and her lip sore where she'd bitten it. Anna pulled her hand free and wiped it on the sheet and did not move.

The room held still around her. The AC clicked over, cycled down, and the hum dropped half a note, and in the space it left the sounds from two doors down came through the plaster like they'd been waiting for the quiet. The bed creaked. Manika's breath caught and broke and caught again, and Anna lay flat on her back with her wrist across her forehead and her thighs still damp and did not reach for the sheet.

"Again," Liez said, low, and Manika's answer was a word Anna couldn't hear but felt anyway — the shape of yes, the shape of anything, the shape of a girl she'd shared a bathroom with for four months saying something she'd never say in daylight.

She hooked her thumb in the waistband of her shorts and worked them down over her hips, over her knees, and kicked them off the end of the bed into the dark where she couldn't see them. The tank top went after. Her skin met the cool air and rose into it, nipples tightening, and she lay there stripped and slick-thighed in a bed that was not supposed to have any of this in it.

She counted the creaks. Four, five, six — a rhythm with a hitch in it, like whoever was moving kept losing the beat and finding it again. And under the rhythm, that voice. Low. Even. Saying something she'd have given a month of her life to hear clearly, and she hated that she'd thought it the second it crossed her mind, and she thought it again anyway.

"Look at me," he said.

Manika's breath hitched. "I can't—"

"You can."

"Liez—"

"Look at me."

Whatever happened next, Anna couldn't parse it — only the sound of Manika's breath going thin and high and then breaking, only the slap of skin picking up speed again, only the low, steady rhythm of his voice under it, saying things she couldn't catch, saying her name, saying other things, saying whatever he wanted to say to a girl who'd stopped being quiet for him.

Her hand was on the nightstand before she knew it, fingers closed around her phone, screen lighting her face blue. 2:14. She set it face-down again. The door was four feet away and shut, and she looked at it for a long time — at the thin strip of hallway light under it, at the deadbolt she had not thrown — and she did not get up.

She got up. Not for the door — the door stayed shut, four feet away, the deadbolt still unthrown — but for the glass of water she'd carried up hours ago and left sweating on the dresser. She drank it standing, naked, the water gone warm and flat, and watched herself in the black window: a shape, a gleam of hip, nothing she'd recognize in daylight. The glass went back down on the wood with a click that sounded loud as a knock. She waited for the house to answer. It didn't.

Behind the wall, Manika said something — a low, quick word, eaten by the plaster — and Liez answered, the same unhurried register, but closer to the wall now, or turned toward it, because she caught the tail of it.

"—come here."

Not the words, exactly. The shape. A question with a rise at the end, and then something that might have been come here, or might have been nothing, might have been her own blood deciding what she wanted to hear. Her fingers tightened on the glass until the pads went white.

"Where do you want me?" Manika, quiet, sandalwood-soft, and Anna could hear her smiling, could hear the whole of her in those four words — the politeness turned inside out, the trap sprung.

"On your back."

"And then?"

"And then I'll tell you."

She set the glass down and got back on the bed. The sheets had gone cold where she'd left them and she didn't care; she lay on top of them, on her back, arms at her sides like a body laid out, and let the chill take her skin. Her nipples ached with it. Her thighs were still tacky and she could smell herself on the air — salt and something faintly sweet, the smell of what she'd done, sitting in the room with her like a third person.

The bed next door started again. Slower than before. Deliberate. Each creak spaced out, a measured drag that she could follow with her eyes closed, and under it a new wetness — not the slap now but a long, slow slide, the sound of something moving through something slick, patient as a hand through water.

"Oh," Manika said. Just that. A small, round sound, surprised out of her.

"Yeah," Liez said. "There."

"There—" Her voice broke on the word, came back thinner. "There, there, there—"

Anna's stomach dropped. She knew what that sound was. She'd made it herself, minutes ago, in this bed, with her own fingers, and hearing it come from the other side of the wall was like hearing her own voice played back in a stranger's mouth.

Her hands stayed flat on the mattress. She would not. That was the line, and she'd already crossed it once, and she lay there with her jaw set and her eyes on the ceiling and her hands very deliberately not moving, not going anywhere, and the sounds came through anyway, patient and obscene, and her hips shifted once against the sheet without her permission and she pressed them flat again. The sheet was cool. Her skin was not.

Liez said something else. A whole low run of it, unhurried, the cadence of a man explaining something he already knew, and Manika made a sound that was almost a laugh — almost, half-swallowed, and then not a laugh at all. Anna's throat closed. She could picture the half-smile, the tilt of the head, the way he'd say a thing like that without ever raising his voice, and she hated him for it, and she hated that she could picture it so easily, and she hated most of all that she was lying here stripped and cold and listening like it was a lecture she'd paid for.

The strip of light under her door flickered. Someone had moved in the hall — a shadow crossing, quick, the light interrupted for half a second and then steady again. Anna's whole body went rigid. She stared at the door and did the math: Ruthi's room was across the hall, Emily's at the end, and whoever it was had walked past her door and kept going, or stopped, or turned back, and the light was steady now and she couldn't tell. She held still. She did not breathe. The floorboard creaked somewhere out there, once, and then nothing.

She waited a full minute with her heart in her ears. The hall stayed quiet. The sounds next door went on, oblivious, the slow slide and the measured creak and Manika's breath climbing in small steps, and Anna lay there under the weight of two separate secrets — the one in her own body and the one on the other side of her door — and could not decide which one she was more afraid of.

She reached down and pulled the sheet up over herself at last, to her chin, the way she'd started the night. It was cold and thin and it did nothing. Her hand stayed on the hem, gripping it, knuckles white, and she turned her face toward the wall — not her ear this time, just her face, her cheek on the pillow, eyes open, watching the dark plaster as if it might go transparent if she stared hard enough.

Tomorrow there would be breakfast. That was the thought that arrived, unwelcome, fully formed: the island, the coffee, the four of them and him, Manika pouring juice with steady hands and saying nothing, and Anna would have to sit across from her and not look at her mouth and not think about the sounds, and Liez would come down late with his hair wet and say something lazy and infuriating, and she would have to look at him with her own face on, the face she used in mock trial, the face that gave nothing away. She practiced it now, in the dark, jaw loose, eyes flat. It felt like a mask that didn't fit yet.

The voice came through the wall one more time. Low. Even. A sentence with a shape she could almost hold — and then Manika's breath broke high and thin and the bed gave a single sharp creak, and Anna closed her eyes and pressed her face into the pillow and let the words go by, unintelligible, unanswered, landing in the dark of her room like something dropped through a window she hadn't known was open.