Chapter Ten - Elias
They pulled the all-nighter on a Thursday because Hensley moved the internal review up again, because of course they did, because that was apparently just how this account worked now — every deadline a rumor until it wasn't.
By ten, the rest of the floor had cleared out entirely, leaving just the two of them and the hush a building got once the cleaning crew had come and gone and there was no one left to overhear anything.
He liked that hush more than he probably should have.
Liked the way the office stopped being an office after a certain hour and just became a room with good lighting and too much coffee, a room where the usual rules softened at the edges without anyone officially deciding they had.
Nora had kicked her shoes off two hours earlier without even the pretense of it being a decision now — automatic, unremarkable, the way some people rolled up their sleeves before a task.
She'd been at the table across from him since dinner, sleeves shoved past her elbows, muttering headline options out loud in a voice gone rough with fatigue.
He'd stopped actually hearing the words around midnight and started just listening to the rhythm of her voice instead, steady even when the ideas weren't, a sound he'd gotten unreasonably attached to over the last five weeks.
By one a.m. Nora had stopped pretending she wasn't exhausted.
She'd migrated fully onto the small couch against the back wall of Conference B, laptop balanced on her knees, still typing, still arguing with him across the room about a headline that wasn't working.
By one thirty the typing had slowed. By quarter to two it had stopped altogether, and when he looked over she was asleep — actually asleep, laptop slid half off her lap, head tipped against the arm of the couch, one leg drawn up and the other stretched the full length of the cushion, bare foot hanging off the edge into open air.
He should have woken her. He knew that even as he was getting up, walking over, meaning to.
He didn't wake her. He stood there instead, closer than he had any real reason to be, looking down at her foot hanging off that couch like it had been left there on purpose, an offering neither of them had agreed to.
The room was quiet enough that he could hear the building's HVAC cycling somewhere above the ceiling tiles, and under that, her breathing, slow and even, unguarded in a way she never let herself be awake.
His hand moved before he'd fully decided to let it. Not far. A few inches, no more, close enough that the heat coming off her skin registered against his palm before he touched anything at all.
He stopped there. Hand hovering, close enough to feel it, not touching.
She was asleep. That was the whole problem, laid out plain and ugly the second he let himself look at it straight on.
She hadn't given him this. She'd fallen asleep on a couch after eighteen hours upright, and her body had done what tired bodies did, and none of it — not one second of it — was consent, no matter how much his hand wanted to argue otherwise.
He'd built a life on knowing the difference between noticing and taking.
This was the difference, right here, an inch of air between his palm and her ankle, and he made himself hold that inch instead of closing it, even though every part of him low and old and certain was telling him she wouldn't even wake up, that he could, that nothing about this moment would go wrong if he just—
He pulled his hand back like the air had burned it.
Stepped away. Actually stepped, put real distance between them, three feet, four, until his back hit the whiteboard and the marker tray rattled. The sound was loud in the empty room. Nora stirred, didn't wake, resettled with a small sound against the couch arm.
He stood there a long minute, breathing harder than the situation should have warranted, disgusted with himself in a way he hadn't expected and didn't entirely understand — not because of what he wanted.
He'd made peace with what he wanted a long time ago, no apology owed to anyone for it.
Disgusted because of how close he'd come to taking something she hadn't offered, from someone who trusted him enough to fall asleep four feet away in an empty office at two in the morning.
That trust meant something. It meant more than the want did. He needed that to stay true, needed to be a person for whom that stayed true even at two a.m. with nobody watching, especially then, because who you were when nobody was watching was the only version of yourself that actually counted.
He grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair and draped it over her — over her shoulders, nowhere near her feet, an ordinary, unremarkable kindness that any coworker might do — and then he sat back down at his laptop on the far side of the room, put his headphones in, and worked until the sky outside the window went the color of weak tea, because sleep, tonight, was not going to be a thing that happened to him.