Chapter 12 Tom
Chapter twelve
Tom
Sam has completely taken over the room.
She’s been here for hours before I arrive. I can tell by the coffee cups, two of them, both empty, rings on the table where she's shoved them aside to make room for the site plans.
The blueprints are spread edge to edge, her color-coded annotations running down every single margin. Her laptop is open at the far end of the long table, a high-resolution image glaring on the screen.
Her wall of printed frames is meticulously taped in sequence along the corkboard—east boundary, view corridor, waterfront pedestrian flow—and she has numbered every single one of them in the top right corner with a stark red marker.
Her system. Her room.
I set my camera bag down at the near end of the table. She glances up once, gives me a sharp, acknowledging nod, and immediately looks back at her screen.
"The connectivity sequence is off," she says. "The eastern boundary shot needs to come before the view corridor, not after."
I pull my laptop and tablet from my bag, waking them both up. "I know. I flagged it this afternoon."
"I'm restructuring from slide nine."
"Okay."
She's already back to typing.
I find slide nine on my tablet and start pulling alternate frames. I expect her to dictate what she wants, but she doesn't.
An hour in, Sam is building the complicated transition between slides eleven and twelve. She hasn't asked for the view corridor frame yet. I queue it up anyway, sliding the tablet slightly toward her.
She glances at my screen, then back at hers, and drags the frame into place without a word. She just keeps typing.
Neither of us says anything else about it. I go back to the frames.
That's how the next two hours go.
She drives design story, I sequence visuals. By hour two we've stopped explaining ourselves to each other. She'll be mid-sentence on a transition and I'll already have the frame queued. I'll be cross-referencing shot angles and she'll read the sequence back to me before I ask.
My stomach growls loud enough that Sam glances up.
I pick up my phone and order Thai food. I've watched her eat lunch twice. I know what she picks around and what she doesn't.
The food arrives forty minutes later. I set her container in front of her without a word and open mine.
She lifts the lid. Pad See Ew. Extra vegetables. No peanuts.
She looks at the container. Then at me.
I'm already eating, eyes on my tablet.
She doesn't say anything. She picks up her fork and eats.
The cleaning crew arrives at nine-thirty — vacuum running in the hall, cart rattling past the door, a knock and a nod when they come in to empty the trash. Sam moves her coffee cup two inches to the left without looking up. I shift my bag off the floor so they can get the bin.
The lights in the hallway go off at ten. The building is quiet.
By ten-forty-five we're on the final sequence.
Sam is mid-sentence, linking one shot to the next. Her left hand sketches the logic in the air while her right stays on the keyboard.
"The harbor entrance has to feel like part of the neighborhood,"she says. “So the order matters. Street view first so they understand where they are. Then the shot toward the water so they see the connection. And we finish with people moving through the space.”
I’m already lining the frames up on my tablet.
“What about the roof terrace shot? You had it after the water view.”
“Cut it. It makes the place look like a luxury add-on, not part of the neighborhood.”
“Agreed.” I pull it from the sequence. “What fills the gap?”
“The shot with people walking through the plaza moves up. Then we close with the harbor.”
“The wide shot or the close?”
She tilts her head. “Which do you think?”
I turn the tablet toward her. The wide frame fills the screen — the harbor mouth, the pedestrian bridge in the middle distance, the residential towers behind it, everything fitting together in one view.
She studies it for three seconds.
“Wide,” she says.
She types the final line on the slide. I flip through the sequence on my tablet. Start to finish. Forty-one slides.
It's done. Sam exhales quietly.
The room is quiet. Sam's hands are still on the keyboard but she's not typing. I set the tablet down. Neither of us reaches for anything.
Her screen goes black.
The battery icon blinks once in the corner — empty, red — and then the screen goes dark.
She stares at it. The specific expression of someone who is already tired and does not need this.
I close two windows on my laptop, rotate it ninety degrees, and slide it across the table toward her. I angle the screen so she can see it from her seat.
I scoot my chair to give her better access to the keyboard.
She moves her chair closer to see the screen.
Now we're shoulder to shoulder.
She's scrolling through the slide deck, picking up where she left off.
I look at my tablet.
"The transition copy on slide eleven is too long," she says.
"Cut the second sentence. The image carries it."
She highlights, deletes. "Better?"
I lean slightly to read the slide. "Yeah."
She keeps typing.
I pull up the image file to check the harbor shot placement and there it is — the connectivity shot from the week we started. The one I waited three days to capture because the afternoon light hit that specific angle for exactly thirty-five minutes.
I turn the tablet so she can see where it sits in the sequence.
"This is still my favorite," I say.
She stops typing. Looks at the frame.
"Mine too." Her voice is quieter than it's been all night. "I didn't see it until you showed me."
She’s looking at the frame.
I look at the frame for another second.
"You see a lot more than you think you do," I say softly.
The pulse in her neck beats steadily. The stray piece of hair that came loose hours ago, rests against her jaw. My fingers twitch with the urge to tuck it behind her ear.
Focus, Tom.
I force my gaze down to the table. My left hand is resting on the wood, barely two inches from hers. Heat radiates from her shoulder. She smells like something incredibly clean. Not perfume. Just soap and warm skin.
She turns her head toward me to say something else.
The words never happen.
My eyes drop.
Her mouth.
Half a second—less—and then I'm looking at her eyes again. But her eyes haven't moved. She isn't looking at the screen anymore. She is looking right at me.
The room is suffocatingly quiet.
Neither of us moves. Neither of us takes a breath.
Six inches.
If I leaned forward just six inches, I could kiss her.
I want to.
I shift my weight toward her. My body is moving on pure instinct, long before my brain has evaluated the collateral damage. The distance closes by an inch. Then two.
Her eyes don't dart away. She doesn't pull back. Instead, her chin tilts up the tiniest fraction, and her lips part slightly. She is letting me do this. She wants me to do this.
I lean in—
A blinding flashlight beam swings violently through the glass door.
Sam jerks back so fast her shoulder hits the back of her chair. I freeze, my heart hammering a frantic, violent rhythm against my ribs as the beam sweeps across the table—site plans, takeout containers, two laptops.
The security guard steps in, one hand on the door frame, dropping the flashlight to his side.
"You two know it's almost midnight?" He sounds tired, not suspicious
"Building's supposed to be locked by eleven."
Sam is already closing the laptop.
"Sorry. We lost track of time."
"No problem. Just need to get you out." He pulls the door wider, waits.
I cap my marker and stack the takeout containers, sliding the site plans into the tube. Sam unplugs her charger, folds it into her bag, zips it. She picks up her coffee cup, puts it down, leaves it.
We walk out.
The hallway is quiet, except for our footsteps on the tile floor, the guard's keys jingling on his belt as he walks, and the distant sound of the elevator.
I sneak a quick peek at Sam. She is looking straight ahead, her bag on her shoulder between us.
I adjust the shoulder strap on mine.
We don't talk.
Not hostile. Not comfortable. Just things neither of us is going to say at midnight with a security guard twelve feet behind us.
Sam’s ride share is at the curb, hazards blinking orange against the concrete.
She stops at the door. I stop half a step back. The professional distance reestablishes itself — both of us holding the shape of it carefully.
"See you tomorrow." I look at her, refusing to let her look past me. "You're ready."
She has her hand on the door handle. She pauses, and looks at me.
"We're ready."
She gets in. The door closes. I step back.
The taillights move down the ramp. Left turn. Gone.
I stand there, watching the empty street long after the taillights disappear. I wanted to kiss her. I still want to kiss her. But stepping across that line wouldn't just be a risk. It would change absolutely everything.
I put my bag on my other shoulder and head for the subway.
The presentation is tomorrow at ten AM.
One thing at a time.