Close Your Eyes

Nanami

The gallery was a converted warehouse in Shoreditch — exposed steel beams, twenty-foot ceilings, the kind of renovation that understood the building it was working with. The art was secondary to the architecture, and I suspected the curator knew it.

I was working. Scouting textures for the Whitaker project, phone in one hand, fabric swatch in the other, comparing the industrial gray of the bare concrete against a sample I’d pulled that morning. The light was good — late afternoon filtering through Victorian glazing, hitting the raw surfaces at an angle that made the grain visible — and I could work with this palette, could already see how the Whitaker flat would borrow from this temperature.

I felt him before I saw him.

A shift in the room’s geometry — someone standing at the wrong angle to the crowd, watching the walls instead of the paintings. He was tall and dark-haired and his hands were in his pockets with studied carelessness. He was studying the join where the original brickwork met the new plaster with an attention that nobody in this room was giving anything, not the wine, not the art, not each other.

Nobody studied that join.

I crossed to him before I’d made the decision to move.

“You’re looking at the seam,” I said.

He glanced at me. Grey eyes, something guarded behind them and something else — amused, maybe — the amusement sitting behind the guard like light behind frosted glass.

“It’s the most interesting thing in here.”

“More interesting than the art?”

“The art’s fine.” He tilted his chin toward the nearest installation. “But whoever renovated this space understood the building. They didn’t fight it. That seam — they left it visible on purpose. The crack is the feature.”

I looked at the seam again and he was right. The exposed join ran the full height of the wall, original mortar darkened with age against the fresh plaster, and the contrast was deliberate — most renovators would have plastered over it, made the surface uniform, erased the history. This one had framed it.

“Wabi-sabi,” I said, half to myself.

“Sorry?”

“Nothing. A concept. I’ll explain over a drink.”

He turned to face me properly and something shifted in his expression — not recognition, interest, the kind of interest with weight behind it, something I could feel settle in the air between us like a change in temperature.

“Interior designer. Nanami.” I held out my hand.

His handshake was firm, brief. “Edmund.”

“Just Edmund?”

“Just Edmund.” A half-smile. “What are you designing?”

“Scouting, actually. I’ve got a client who wants ‘raw industrial with warmth,’ which is code for ‘I saw a warehouse conversion on Instagram and I want that but with underfloor heating.’”

He laughed. Short, surprised — like he hadn’t expected to. The laugh broke something in his composure and made his face younger and I felt it land in my chest, that laugh, the unexpectedness of it.

“And what do you do, just Edmund?”

“Property.”

I waited for more. He didn’t offer any.

“Property,” I repeated. “That covers a lot of ground.”

“It does.”

Something closed behind his eyes for a fraction of a second — a door shutting, fast and practiced — and then the warmth returned, easy, and my gut caught the flicker and held it the way my hands held a fabric sample: felt it, registered the weight, set it aside.

“So you’re here for the art or the building?” he asked.

“The building. Always the building. You?”

A pause. “Needed to be somewhere that wasn’t where I was.”

I didn’t push. The honesty of it — needed to be somewhere — landed in my body differently from small talk, warm and heavy and real, and I let it sit there without picking it apart.

“Well, the building’s excellent company.”

“Better than most people tonight.”

“Harsh.”

“Present company excluded.”

“Smooth save.”

He grinned and it changed his whole face — broke the careful composure entirely, made him look like someone who’d forgotten to perform — and something shifted in my sternum. Not butterflies. Something deeper, something that rearranged the warmth in my chest.

We migrated toward the back of the gallery where the crowd thinned. The concrete floor was stained in places — coffee, wine, the archaeology of previous openings — and the stains gave the surface warmth the way age gave brick warmth. He asked about my work with questions that were too specific, too spatial. How do you decide the ceiling height for a space? and What’s the first material you choose for a room? Not the questions of someone in property. The questions of someone who thought architecturally.

“You know a lot about buildings for a property guy,” I said.

“I know a lot about buildings.” No further explanation.

“Did you study?”

“Once. A long time ago.” A tray passed and he picked up two glasses, then paused — glanced at me, checking, before he offered one. The pause was the thing. Not the automatic hosting reflex I’d seen a thousand times at events like this. A question. Do you want to stay? “Tell me about the Instagram client. What does she actually need?”

The deflection was graceful. I let it stand.

We talked about light — how it behaved in converted warehouses, how north-facing windows changed the temperature of a room — and he described a courtyard he’d seen in Lisbon where the builders had angled the walls to catch morning sun, and I could see it the way he talked, could feel the warmth on stone, could smell the herbs the residents had planted in the captured heat.

His hands moved when he described the angles — the first ungoverned thing about him.

“You should have been an architect,” I said.

He took a sip of wine. “Maybe.”

The word sat between us. Maybe. Loaded with something I couldn’t read.

We talked for two hours. The crowd drained away around us and the gallery assistant started pointedly stacking chairs and the warehouse light shifted from afternoon to evening, the steel beams casting longer shadows, the concrete cooling from warm gray to blue.

“I should go,” I said. “Camden’s a trek.”

“Camden.” He said it like he was storing the word. “Good area.”

“You sound like a property man.”

“Occupational hazard.”

A beat. The gallery assistant was stacking the last chairs. Edmund looked at me, and whatever composure he’d been maintaining all evening thinned — just for a second, just enough.

“I don’t want this to be the last time we talk about buildings.”

It came out rough, almost reluctant, as though the sentence had escaped before he could edit it.

I pulled out my phone. “Give me your number.”

He recited the digits and I typed them in, my thumb moving fast, the way it did when a decision had already been made in my body.

“I’ll text you,” I said.

“Please.”

Something in his voice — a roughness that hadn’t been there before. Like the admission cost him something.

I walked home through Camden and the night air was cold and my skin was buzzing. I replayed the conversation in pieces — the seam, the courtyard in Lisbon, the way he’d said maybe, the way he’d looked at me when I said wabi-sabi like I’d handed him a word he’d been missing.

My phone was warm in my pocket with his number in it.

I already knew this was different. I couldn’t have said how, or different from what — the knowing was in my body, a heat in my sternum, steady and certain, that had nothing to do with reason and everything to do with the way he’d looked at that wall.

I didn’t check for walls. I didn’t look for exits.

I just walked home, buzzing.