Distance did not make Ethan smaller. It only made him harder to read cleanly.
By Tuesday evening, I had collected three separate versions of him from other people's mouths, and none of them made me feel better.
Version one came from a girl in communications who said he had turned down a recruitment dinner because he was "weirdly bad at normal networking."
Version two came from someone in engineering who said he had been sleeping in the lab twice a week because the incubator team was behind and one of the senior members had pulled out at the worst possible time.
Version three came from Mina, who stirred too much sugar into her coffee and said, "He looks like the kind of man whose calendar would file a restraining order if you tried to flirt with it."
That one, unfortunately, felt closest to true.
I told myself I did not care. That was useful. That was adult. That was what a woman did after she realized she had mistranslated a man once already.
Then Professor Guo reassigned the group presentation schedule and put me in the same project cluster as engineering communications support.
Of course.
By six o'clock I was standing outside the media lab with a borrowed camera battery in one hand and a project brief in the other, waiting for someone from engineering to confirm which team materials we were actually allowed to use in the final presentation archive.
The hallway smelled like dust, overheated plastic, and instant noodles. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead with the quiet hostility specific to university buildings after dark. Most of campus had already thinned into dinner traffic, but this corridor was still alive with the people graduation season never really released.
A printer whirred somewhere behind a closed office door. Somebody laughed too hard at something probably unfunny. A vending machine gave off one long mechanical sigh.
Then Ethan came out of the stairwell carrying two laptops, a roll of taped-up wiring, and a face that looked as if sleep had become a rumor.
He saw me and stopped just enough to register surprise.
Not pleasure. Not discomfort either. Just the brief recalculation of a man whose entire life now seemed divided into things that could be absorbed and things that would cost time.
"What happened?" he asked.
Always damage first. Always problem shape before anything resembling softness.
"Professor Guo moved the presentation blocks," I said. "Communications needs the engineering archive tags before tomorrow morning or the final files won't sync correctly."
He shifted the laptops higher against his arm and said, "Who told you tomorrow morning?"
"Guo."
"That means tonight."
I blinked. "What?"
"He says tomorrow morning when he means he wants to wake up and find it already solved."
That irritated me because it was useful.
"Can you send the tags?" I asked.
"Yes."
No hesitation. No performance. Just yes.
Then he added, "Not in the next ten minutes."
There it was. The gap again. The exact place where wanting collided with capacity.
He must have seen something move in my face, because he adjusted one of the laptops down onto the floor, straightened, and said, flatter than comfort but less flat than usual, "We're behind on two deliverables. Leo rewrote the investor deck. Zhao wants revised testing notes. The archive tags are easy. Time isn't."
The explanation should not have mattered. It did.
Not because it made him more available. Because it made him more legible.
He was not withholding in order to protect mystery. He was drowning in sequence.
A student from the lab opened the door behind me and squeezed out with a carton of milk in one hand and a stack of forms in the other. "Hayes, your simulation froze again," he said. "Also your phone's been vibrating for like five minutes."
Ethan closed his eyes for half a second. Not dramatically. Just long enough to show the cost of being interrupted in three directions at once.
"Tell Lin to restart from checkpoint B," he said. "And if my phone stops, let it stay stopped."
The student looked at me, then at him, then made the universally intelligent choice not to ask anything further.
When the door shut again, the corridor felt narrower.
"You don't have to explain," I said.
"Yes, I do," Ethan said.
That landed harder than I expected.
Not because it was tender. Because it wasn't. Because he said it like a correction he had reached unwillingly.
He shifted the wiring roll under one arm. "You're making the same face you made yesterday."
"What face?"
"The one where you decide what something means before the timeline finishes happening."
I stared at him.
The worst part was that he wasn't wrong. The second worst part was that he had noticed.
"I didn't decide anything," I said.
He looked at me for one beat too long. Not accusing. Just tired in a way that had no room left for decorative lies.
"Fine," he said. "Then don't."
That should have annoyed me. Instead it unsettled me.
Because he was not inviting closeness. He was asking for accuracy. And for some reason that felt more intimate than reassurance would have.
He set one laptop on the windowsill, opened it with one hand, and scanned something on the screen while he spoke. "Email me the exact file names. I'll send the tags by nine-thirty if nothing else catches fire first."
"If?"
He gave me a look that might have been humor in a less exhausted man. "You've seen this building."
I almost smiled. Didn't.
Because now that I was actually looking, I could see the details I might once have translated as indifference. The shadow under his eyes. The slight stiffness in the shoulder holding too much weight. The cold cup of coffee on the windowsill beside him with a skin forming across the top. The fact that he had memorized three other people's failures well enough to compensate for them in real time.
He was not free. That was the thing.
Not emotionally unavailable in some glamorous, romanticized way. Not withholding as a performance of masculine depth.
Just not free.
Free time, free attention, free softness—none of it seemed to exist in him as surplus. Whatever he had, he had already assigned to pressure.
And somehow that made him both easier and harder to understand.
Because capacity and care were not the same thing. Because competence and availability were not the same thing. Because a man could be worth leaning toward and still have nothing left with which to catch you.
His phone started vibrating again on the windowsill. He glanced at the screen and his mouth flattened. Not fear. Not irritation exactly. Recognition. The kind people had when a problem belonged to them long before it appeared.
He silenced it without reading the message.
I should have left then. Instead I heard myself ask, "Do you ever stop?"
The question seemed to catch him more off guard than anything else I had said.
He looked up from the laptop at last. "Stop what?"
"Carrying things that should have been divided before they got to you."
For one second, his expression emptied. Not blankness. Exposure. Then it was gone.
"No," he said.
Just that. No self-pity. No speech. No polishing.
No.
A laugh rose in my throat and died there, because suddenly I understood something that did not comfort me in the slightest: understanding him more was not making him easier to reach. It was only making his distance feel earned.
"Send me the file names," he said again, already turning back to the laptop. "Before I forget your entire department exists."
That was almost rude. Almost funny. Almost care.
I tightened my fingers around the battery in my hand. Then nodded.
"Fine," I said.
And as I walked back down the corridor with the project brief tucked under my arm, one ugly realization kept pace with me: seeing the burden did not reduce the pull. It only removed the fantasy that the burden would move for me.