I am not the kind of person who eavesdrops.

It’s rude, first of all—other people’s private conversations are not my business, and it isn’t my concern what people are saying when I’m not around.

But there is a point at which eavesdropping isn’t opportunistic, but instead is just inevitable. When I’m tasked to clean executive offices, and mop the marble floor outside of the conference room first thing in the morning, I’m bound to overhear things if the door is left open.

And this morning, especially. After a night spent enjoying the best time I’d ever had with Adrian followed by the worst disappointment. After seeing how my own fucked-up past with Cheetah came to bite Adrian in the ass, through no fault of his own. I hadn’t been able to sleep at all, between being so angry I could cry, and so sad I got furious.

I wanted to hate Adrian. I wanted to scream and rage and tell him how fucked up it was to leave, to run away from me at the party. But somewhere deep down, I understood. He did have to worry about what the public thought of him, and it was exceedingly stupid of us to have been acting that way in public. There was no denying it.

And so instead of being rageful at Adrian, my emotions slowly stewed into a vague, numb mash of sadness and hopelessness. I hadn’t been able to stop Cheetah from taking the photos, and when I went to his house after the party, he hadn’t been home. I had called him, leaving so many messages saying exactly how much money I’d pay him if he promised to delete the photos.

None of them made any difference. I didn’t hear a peep from Cheetah.

But as I worked my way down the executive wing of the hotel, mopping the floor that morning, I overheard far more than I ever should have.

“This is extortion,” an older woman was saying. “Whoever this ‘Cheetah’ person is, he’s asked for a ridiculous sum not to put these photos online. We all received the email early this morning.”

I paused in my tracks, right outside the open door.

Of course. I should have known. Cheetah knew exactly how little money I had, and exactly how rich the Terrance Hotel was. There was a reason he’d ignored me and gone straight to the source. Guilt flooded through me, hearing the hotel management talk about my own ex-friend—who should have been my problem, and mine alone, but now had made the lives of so many people much more difficult.

“What do we need to do to move forward from this?” Adrian was saying. “I’m willing to resign. I’m willing to do anything.”

“What?” another voice said.

I was positioned just outside the door, where no one could see me, and I had no idea what anyone’s voice sounded like other than Adrian’s.

“Oh, you won’t need to resign, Mr. Terrance,” someone else said. “The sum has already been transferred to… Cheetah. We couldn’t allow the slightest possibility of such explicit photos being leaked to the public. But we do need to ensure that this will not be happening again.”

“Jesus, of course not,” Adrian said. “It shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

“Good,” a woman’s voice said. “Adrian, your personal life, and… preferences, are none of our concern. But your public image very much is. Do you read between the lines, here?”

“I think I can,” Adrian said, his voice quieter.

“You being seen with a man like this is not part of the Terrance Hotel image,” she said. “Just to make that point abundantly clear.”

“And certainly not with another member of our staff,” a man’s voice said. “Christ’s sake, a member of housekeeping.”

I waited for Adrian to say something, anything, but he remained silent.

“Of course, it’s not a terribly huge problem, as the housekeeping staff will all be replaced in the new year,” the woman said.

It took me a few moments to process what I had just heard. I gripped my hands against my mop, turning the words over in my head.

Could they… possibly mean what I think they meant?

“Very true,” a man said. “That should be a good, clean blank slate. Adrian, I know we’ve had our disagreements about the housekeeping restructuring. Guys, if you can believe it, Adrian’s been in my office multiple times the past few weeks, trying to talk me out of it. I think we can see why, now, huh?”

A few laughs came from around the room, and my blood went cold.

They were laughing about it. Laughing about the fact that they’d discussed the imminent layoffs for the entire housekeeping team, and laughing about the awful photographs.

Laughing about how silly it was that Adrian would be caught with me.

“Adrian, you do know that we will be going forward with the housekeeping layoffs? Especially now, it is the only correct way forward for the hotel. You’ll be seeing to it next month?”

There was a silence in the room for a few moments, and after that, Adrian just spoke one word: “Yes.”

Many things fell into place for me at that moment. It was the same calm I felt when I once saw a curtain light up in flames from a candle—I should have panicked, should have been so mad at my mother for leaving it burning close to the cloth—but instead, I knew I just had to assess the situation calmly.

Because the only other option was to go up in flames.

And this felt sort of like that. I no longer cared about the eavesdropping, the fact that I “shouldn’t” have heard the conversation. I moved to the side a little, standing in the doorway of the room and looking in. Everyone was facing forward, toward a laptop with the photos of me and Adrian on it.

But Adrian was turned to the side. And when I moved, he saw me—he looked over and caught my eyes.

Instantly I realized that he knew. He knew that I had been there, that I’d heard everything. It was all contained in that one look, that probably only lasted a few seconds but felt like minutes.

And then I turned and made my way back down the hallway. I pushed out into the lobby, where it was still relatively empty, and stopped over by the big windows that led out back.

Everything I’d worked for was going to be gone. The promotion I’d wanted, the one I’d basically been guaranteed, was going to evaporate. All thanks to a room full of management who laughed about things like this, who probably would go home and laugh about it to their spouses while looking out at the city from their high-rise, penthouse view. Laugh about it over their lobster dinners eaten with silver forks, and never for a minute think again about the lives they’d changed, just in the name of “restructuring.”

“Josh,” I heard from behind me, but I didn’t turn around. I looked out at the back lawn, watching a bird hop by. It was a European Starling, just like the one tattooed on my arm, the one my mom loved so much.

And that was what finally made me break down. Without the promotion, I was definitely not going to be able to get Mom a hearing aid. I could survive, scraping by, trying to make my rent by getting some other shitty job. But the fact that I wouldn’t be able to get Mom her gift was enough to make my eyes sting, and big, salty tears start to roll down my cheeks.

“Josh, I’m so sorry,” Adrian said, walking up to my side.

“You knew about this,” was all I could say. “You knew, and you said nothing to me.”

He was silent for a moment. “I knew,” he said, “for a few weeks.”

I shook my head, wishing I could scream, but really only feeling numb. My tears had stopped, now that Adrian was near me.

“I wanted to tell you. I thought about it every day. And I fought with Arnie, I fought so much. My parents laughed at me, and Arnie treated me like a child. He still does. Josh, I tried everything.”

"I can—I can help you,” he said, desperate. “We can show your art here at the hotel. There are so many wealthy buyers—for God’s sake, if you sell one painting here, it’ll be more than a year’s salary that housekeeping could have made you—”

“It’s not about the money, Adrian,” I said, furrowing my brow at him. “I mean, of course it is, because right now I’m wondering how the fuck I’m going to pay my rent in two months, and if my mom is going to be able to hear me speak, and how I’m ever going to finally fucking pay off Cheetah so he is out of my life,” I said, my voice growing tense. “But really, it’s just about the fact that for the first time in my life, I felt in control.”

I felt my voice begin to crack, and I paused for a moment. I couldn’t be this way around Adrian. Not now, not ever again.

I started walking away, leaving the mop and bucket behind. I made my way to the elevator and pushed the button down, headed toward the basement. I took my name tag off, and began unbuttoning the shirt of my uniform.

“Josh—” Adrian said, following after me. “I can make this right. Please trust me—”

“I don’t know how,” I whispered, shaking my head.

The elevator doors opened, and I walked in. Adrian positioned himself between the doors, not letting them close.

“Please, Josh. You’re… you’re the only good thing in my life,” he said, his voice desperate and raw.

I shook my head. “I can’t see you again, Adrian.”

He stood there in the doorway for another few moments, the elevator doors trying and failing to close, bumping off his shoulder. His eyes were tired with dark circles underneath, and his skin pale. I had a flash of memory from the previous night: kissing him, his lips so full and berry red, as he whispered my name in pleasure.

It felt a million miles away, now.

“Josh—” Adrian started, but then a sound came from down the hall, and he turned to look away.

“Adrian,” came the sound of his mother’s terse voice, and soon she was at his side, grabbing his arm. “Lynn just called me and told me to come to the hotel at once—what on Earth is going on?”

Adrian looked back to me, then to his mother again. She looked into the elevator, glaring at me, clearly having no clue what was going on.

Just for that moment, I made the mistake of having hope again. I made the mistake of thinking, for one second, that Adrian could change—that he would tell his mom the truth, that he would finally fight for me, that he would care.

But instead, he just moved backward, stepping out of the way of the elevator doors. “It’s nothing,” he said calmly, giving me one last look before walking away, down the hall with his mom.

The worst thing about it was that I wasn’t even surprised. It was what I expected, what I had learned to expect from Adrian and from everything else in my life.

I wished that this job had been enough. Wished that my art had been enough, wished that my desire to be a better person had been enough.

None of it had been, though. It didn’t matter if Adrian’s heart was with me while he was dating Maxine, or when he was arguing with the hotel management, or when he was doing everything to make his parents proud.

His heart wasn’t truly with me if all of him wasn’t with me.

And I just wished I had realized that sooner.