She first noticed him because he was stealing her thoughts—not metaphorically. Every morning at 7:43, as she stood in line at the café, fragments of her internal monologue would appear as text messages from an unknown number. Yesterday’s fragment: „Wonder if parallel lives ever develop the same coffee addiction.“ The day before: „That couple shares one nervous system now.“

She’d tested it. Thought deliberately about extinct butterflies while waiting. The message came: „Morpho cypris. Last seen 1972.“

Today she thought: „I know you’re listening.“

The man three places ahead turned around. Not all the way—just enough for her to see his profile freeze mid-rotation, like a video buffering. His hand held a phone displaying her thought, cursor still blinking.

„I can explain,“ he said, but his lips didn’t move. The words appeared as subtitles in her peripheral vision, that space where migraines begin.

She felt her boundaries shimmer, that sensation when you’re about to sneeze but translated into consciousness itself. Her early warning system screamed. Her curiosity won.

„Don’t explain,“ she thought to him. „Show me.“

He walked toward her, each step dissolving the café’s ambient noise until only their shared frequency remained. When he stopped—precisely two feet away, she noticed—her phone buzzed.

„This is the safe distance. One inch closer and we start sharing memories.“

„How?“ she asked aloud.

„You know how your skin ends and the world begins?“ He extended his hand, stopping just before touching hers. „I was born without that certainty. My boundaries leak. Usually one-directional—I receive. But with you—“

The air between their almost-touching hands turned visible, shimmering like heat mirages. She felt her thoughts bifurcate: one stream staying hers, another flowing toward him.

„—it’s bidirectional,“ she heard/felt/knew.

Her early warning system wasn’t screaming anymore. It was singing.

„The past is forever,“ she said, remembering something about predetermined futures. „But what we’re creating—“

„Doesn’t exist in any timeline yet.“ His hand remained suspended, waiting. „Touch me and we become a closed circuit. Don’t, and we stay parallel. Both are transformations.“

She felt herself at the precision point—that perfect tension between holding on to herself and letting go into whatever they might become.

She didn’t move. Neither did he. The space between their hands became its own character in the story—dense with possibility, terrifying in its potential.

„I’m hesitating,“ she said.

„I know. I can feel it.“ He smiled, but it was sad. „Your hesitation tastes like copper and rain. Mine tastes like ash.“

The café reformed around them—sounds bleeding back in, the espresso machine’s hiss, someone laughing too loud at their phone. The ordinary world asserting itself against whatever they were creating.

„What if we lose ourselves?“ she asked. „What if the boundary doesn’t hold?“

„Then we become something else. Or nothing. I don’t know.“ His hand began to lower, slowly. „But I can keep stealing your thoughts from a safe distance, if you prefer. Little fragments. Never enough to matter.“

She watched his hand descend, calculating: the half-life of this moment, the trajectory of two lives that had briefly intersected at an impossible angle.

„Wait,“ she said. Not touching, but not letting him withdraw completely. „What thought of mine did you hear first? Before the coffee shop. What made you start coming here?“

He looked at her directly for the first time. His eyes were different colors—one brown, one green—like his body couldn’t even agree on a single way of seeing.

„Three weeks ago, you thought: ‚Loneliness isn’t the absence of people. It’s the absence of echo.‘ And I—“ he paused, „I’d been an echo without a source for so long, I had to find you.“

The hesitation shifted, became something else. Not disappearing, but transforming into a different kind of pause—the kind that happens before a song changes key.

„If we do this,“ she said, „we need rules. Boundaries. Times when the circuit opens, times when it closes.“

„Like a heartbeat,“ he said. „Systole, diastole. Together, apart. Together, apart.“

She raised her hand again, matching his position. The shimmer returned.

„On three?“ she asked.

„Or never. Both are valid.“

The space between them hummed with potential, waiting for decision or decay, transformation or retreat. Her early warning system had gone quiet—not absent, just watching. Curious, perhaps, about what she’d choose.

„Three,“ she said, and reached forward.

The moment their hands should have touched, he became transparent—not gradually, but in waves, like someone was erasing him with an unsteady hand.

„No—“ she gasped, hand passing through where his had been.

His voice came from everywhere and nowhere: „I forgot to tell you. I don’t fully exist. I’m made of borrowed boundaries, stolen thoughts. The moment you chose to merge, to dissolve your boundary with me, there was nothing left to push against. I need your resistance to maintain form.“

She understood with crushing clarity: he was a frequency without a source, a parasite of consciousness who needed her boundaries to define himself. When she opened completely, he had nothing left to steal, nothing to echo against.

„But if I close myself off—“

„I’ll return. Condensing from the periphery. Forever stealing fragments, never whole.“ His voice was fading. „This is my curse—I can only exist in the space between connection and separation. Touch me and I dissolve. Ignore me and I disappear. I exist only in your hesitation.“

The café was ordinary again. Her phone buzzed with one last message:

„Some transformations require two. Others destroy one to complete the other. I’m sorry I didn’t know which we were.“