Chapter Text
The apartment is empty when Noah first sees it properly.
Not views it — he’d done that weeks ago, walking through with the realtor while she talked about natural light and original hardwood floors and great bones, which Noah had nodded along to even though he’d mostly been looking at the slice of sky between the buildings across the street. He’d known by the second room. He hadn’t told anyone for two days after he signed.
Now it’s his, and it’s empty, and he’s standing in the middle of the main room at eleven in the morning with a set of keys in his hand and no furniture and the particular kind of silence that only exists in spaces that haven’t been lived in yet.
He takes a slow breath.
Okay, he thinks. Okay.
His phone buzzes.
finn 🌿
you’re there aren’t you
Noah looks around the empty room. Then back at his phone.
me
yeah
finn 🌿
how is it
me
quiet
finn 🌿
good quiet or weird quiet
Noah walks to the window. The street below is doing its usual New York thing — constant, indifferent, alive without his input. A cab honks. Someone laughs loudly enough to reach the third floor. A pigeon lands on the sill and immediately leaves, apparently unimpressed.
me
good quiet I think
it doesn’t feel real yet
finn 🌿
it will
give it like two weeks and you’ll wonder how you ever didn’t live there
me
that’s either reassuring or terrifying
finn 🌿
yes
okay I’m getting on the subway
don’t do anything without me
Noah stares at his phone.
me
I wasn’t planning on doing anything
I don’t have any furniture
finn 🌿
EXACTLY
don’t buy anything without me
I have opinions
me
that tracks
He puts his phone in his pocket and keeps standing in the middle of the room. The floors are good — wide planks, a little scuffed in places, the kind that look more honest for the wear. The walls are off-white, which he’s already decided he wants to change in the bedroom. The kitchen is small but has a real window over the sink, which had been quietly decisive when he was trying to talk himself into the price.
It’s not big. It’s not fancy. For New York it’s — reasonable, which means by anywhere-else standards it would be considered modest and slightly insane value for money, and by New York standards it had made him feel briefly faint when he agreed to the number.
But it’s his.
That still feels strange to sit with. Not bad-strange. The kind of strange that comes when something you’ve wanted quietly for a long time finally lands in your hands — slightly too real, slightly too possible.
He’s twenty-two years old and he’s never had a place that was just his. Hotels, his parents’ house in Scarsdale between projects, a sublet he’d shared briefly with two other people where his room had fit a bed and approximately one mood. He’d spent most of his life on sets or in transit between them, and somewhere in all of that he’d gotten used to not having walls he could choose to paint.
He walks through slowly. Kitchen. Living room. The short hallway. The bedroom, where the light is doing something genuinely lovely in the late morning — long pale rectangles across the floor. The bathroom, small and clean, with a deep tub he’d noticed immediately in the viewing. A small second room the listing had called a home office and that Noah is already privately thinking of as the room where stuff goes.
He goes back to the main room and sits on the floor.
This is the entire plan, currently. He doesn’t have a chair.
He’d wrapped his last project four weeks ago — a film, eight weeks on location in Georgia, the kind of shoot that’s exhausting in the specific way that good work is exhausting, where you give it everything and then suddenly it’s done and you’re standing in an airport at six in the morning with your bags and nowhere particular to be. He’d flown back to New York and spent a week at his parents’ place and then started quietly, determinedly looking at apartments.
He hadn’t told many people. He’d told his mom, obviously, and his sister, and —
His phone buzzes.
finn 🌿
also I stopped at that coffee place on your block
the one you showed me that one time
what do you want
Noah feels something warm and uncomplicated move through him.
me
the oat latte thing
you know the one
finn 🌿
the one that costs more than a subway monthly?
me
that’s the one
finn 🌿
on it
be there in like 10
Noah puts his phone down on the floor beside him and looks at the ceiling. It’s a good ceiling. High, with the original molding along the edges, a little uneven in places. He likes that it’s uneven. It makes it feel like something that’s been here a long time and isn’t going anywhere.
He’s thinking about what color he wants the bedroom walls when the buzzer goes.
Finn arrives with two coffees, a paper bag from the bakery two doors down that Noah had mentioned once in passing weeks ago, and the particular energy he carries when he’s excited about something he’s trying to present as casual. Noah has known him long enough to read it immediately — something in how he’s holding himself, a brightness in his eyes he’s slightly overworking to contain.
“Hi,” Noah says, stepping back from the door.
“Hi.” Finn walks past him into the apartment and stops. He does a slow turn, taking in the light, the floors, the windows. He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “It’s really great.”
“It’s empty.”
“It’s great,” Finn says, more firmly, as though Noah has said something mildly stupid. “Look at that light.”
“I know.”
“And the floors —”
“I know.”
“Okay you clearly know,” Finn says, turning to look at him with something that’s probably affection and probably exasperation and is, as is often the case with Finn, very much both. “You’ve got the face.”
“What face.”
“The I made a good decision and I’m trying not to be smug about it face.” He holds out Noah’s coffee. “Very subtle. Only people who know you would catch it.”
Noah takes the coffee. “Thank you.”
“The coffee or the compliment?”
“Both.”
Finn grins — open, easy, entirely himself — and Noah looks away. Looks at the room, the windows, the light doing its thing across the old floors. It’s a reflex, looking away first. He’s had it for a while now and mostly stopped trying to examine it too closely.
“Okay,” Finn says, dropping onto the floor with the ease of someone who has never once worried about sitting on an uncleaned surface. He crosses his legs, sets the bakery bag between them, opens it. Two pastries — the almond croissant from the place down the street, the one Noah had mentioned once, briefly, while they were walking past it together months ago.
Noah sits down across from him.
“Talk me through it,” Finn says. “What’s the plan for the space?”
“I don’t really have a plan.”
Finn looks deeply, personally offended. “You bought an apartment without a furniture plan.”
“I figured I’d… feel it out.”
“Noah.”
“Not everyone has to plan everything —”
“Your skincare routine is scheduled by time of day —”
“That’s completely different —”
“In a spreadsheet —”
“Finn.” Noah is trying not to laugh. He can feel it, the pull of it, the way Finn always manages to get there within about four minutes. “Do you have thoughts or not.”
“I have so many thoughts.” He’s already pulling out his phone, already scrolling. “I’ve been looking at stuff.”
“You’ve been — when did you start looking at stuff?”
Finn shrugs, not quite meeting his eyes. “When you told me you got it. I was on the train, I had time.” He turns the phone toward Noah. A saved collection of furniture screenshots. An extensive collection. “Okay so. The couch first, because the couch is the most important decision —”
“Is it?”
“Yes, obviously, everything else orbits the couch — and I think you want something with actual depth because you’re always horizontal when you’re not working, we both know this —”
“I’m not always —”
“— and color-wise I think warm tones, something that actually feels like a home and not a showroom —”
“Finn.”
He looks up.
Noah looks at him — the open phone, the half-eaten pastry, the very genuine enthusiasm currently being directed at Noah’s hypothetical couch — and something moves in his chest. Not a new feeling. Just a particular version of it that he gets sometimes, quietly, when he’s not braced for it.
“Thank you,” he says. “For coming.”
Finn blinks. Something crosses his face — quick and soft and gone before Noah can quite read it. “Yeah,” he says. “Of course.”
They sit on the floor of the empty apartment and drink their coffee and work through the pastries and Finn shows him approximately forty screenshots of sofas, and Noah vetoes most of them for reasons Finn considers completely inadequate, and they eventually agree on two serious contenders that they’ll argue about later. The whole time the light shifts slowly across the floor. The city keeps going outside the windows.
Okay, Noah thinks.
Yeah. This is going to be fine.