Chapter 2
Adriel
The morning light in Adriel's bedroom was unforgiving.
It slanted through the blinds in hard, flat stripes, carving his reflection in the full-length mirror into pieces. He stood frozen, shirt half-tugged off his shoulders, the collar digging into his neck like a chokehold.
Ten minutes. Maybe twenty. He didn't know anymore.
Everything felt wrong on his body.
The charcoal trousers were new. A hopeful purchase.
Slim-fit, the tag had said, which turned out to be a lie so profound it felt like a personal betrayal.
They clung across his hips, the swell of his thighs, and gaped mockingly at the waist. The button-down was soft blue, professional, he'd thought.
Now it just seemed wrong. Fabric straining across his chest, pulling taut across his stomach.
He'd tried tucking it in. The resulting bulge made him look like a stuffed pastry. Untucked, it hung like a shapeless tent that somehow still managed to outline every curve he wanted to disappear.
He pulled the cardigan over it all. Thick wool. Yanked the hem down hard over his stomach.
He stared.
The soft wool did nothing to disguise the curve of his belly. Just softened its outline. He tugged at it again, frantic, useless, like he could smooth himself out the way you smoothed a wrinkled sheet.
It didn't work.
His reflection was a collage of failures.
His hair, dark blond, too soft, exactly like his mother's, refused to obey.
No matter how much he wet it, smoothed it, begged it, fine strands escaped.
Stuck up at his temples. Curled against his neck.
Made him look tousled and unkempt instead of polished.
His cheeks were already flushed, blotchy and hot pink.
He looked short. He looked pudgy. The cardigan made him look frumpy.
He looked, in the cruel flat light of morning, like too much.
Too much body. Too much anxiety. Too much effort, poured into a result that screamed, in every possible language…
Not enough.
He thought about the name on his contract. Landen Waters, Editor-in-Chief. He'd looked him up, because he was incapable of walking into anything unprepared. The photographs had not helped. Sharp jaw, wheat-gold hair, the kind of face that existed in a different taxonomy entirely from Adriel's own.
The kind of man who would look at Adriel and see exactly what he was.
He yanked at his cardigan again.
A sharp knock sounded on his bedroom door. It opened before he could answer.
Jenna leaned against the frame, coffee steaming in her mug. She took him in with one swift, comprehensive glance, the panicked eyes, the death-grip on his sweater hem, the closet vomited onto his bed in desperate heaps, and snorted.
"Wow." Dry as toast. "You look like shit."
Adriel's hands fell to his sides. The fight drained out of him all at once, a puppet with cut strings.
"I hate this." His voice came out wrecked. "I hate all of this."
"I know."
She stepped into the room, set her coffee on the dresser. Her hands were swift as she pushed his fumbling fingers aside, gripped the sides of the cardigan, and pulled it off him in one clean motion.
"This is a no." Tossed onto the discard pile. "It's giving 'grandpa.'"
He watched it land. Didn't argue.
She tossed him a cream sweater. Once he'd pulled it on, she grabbed the hem, gave it a firm downward tug, then smoothed her palms over his shoulders and back.
"Stand up straight."
He tried.
"No, don't suck in. You'll pass out by ten." Her hands pressed against his shoulder blades. "Just stand. Breathe."
He took a shallow breath. Shaky.
"From your diaphragm, you weirdo."
She stepped back. Head tilted, gaze critical but not cruel.
The same look she'd given him since first grade, since the day Tommy Haskins had pushed him into the mud for his lunch money and Jenna, a tiny furious tornado in pigtails, had shoved Tommy back twice as hard and declared Adriel under her protection.
She'd been managing his spirals ever since.
"You look nice." Said like she was commenting on the weather. An objective fact, immutable as gravity. "Your body is just... your body. It carries you around. It's fine." She met his eyes in the mirror and held them. "Today, it's carrying you to work. That's all this is."
He didn't look convinced.
He felt like a raw nerve. A bundle of exposed wiring about to short-circuit.
Jenna picked up his leather satchel, the one nice thing he owned, a graduation gift from her, and shoved it against his chest.
"Go. You'll be late." She steered him toward the door, her hand pressing against the small of his back. "And wipe that look off your face. You are going to work. Not an execution."
He clutched the satchel like a lifeline and let her usher him through the apartment, past the kitchen, toward the front door.
With every step, something in his gut pulled tighter.
The clothes Jenna had approved felt like a costume.
He was a trespasser preparing to enter a world he didn't belong to. His pulse thudded in his throat.
The door clicked open. He stepped into the hallway. Behind him, it clicked shut.
And the words began. Old. Familiar. Tuned to the rhythm of his quickening heartbeat and the tightness already gathering in his chest.
I am fine. I will be fine. Everything is fine.
His footsteps echoed. The elevator dinged. Doors slid open, then shut.
In the quiet hum of the descending car, Adriel closed his eyes and tried, desperately, to believe it.
∞∞∞
The lobby of Grayson House Publishing was breathtaking; walls of glass letting the pale morning light flood across vast expanses of polished marble, turning the whole space into something unreal.
People moved through it with a purpose that looked innate.
A woman in a tailored sheath dress clicked past without glancing up.
A man with salt-and-pepper hair and a cashmere scarf looped just so spoke in low, measured tones into a headset, collecting a file from the reception desk without breaking stride, his shoes polished to a mirror shine.
Adriel stood just inside the towering glass doors, the coffee carrier growing damp in his hands.
I am fine. I will be fine. Everything is fine.
The mantra pulsed in time with his heartbeat, and his heartbeat pulsed in time with his fear.
His steps toward the reception desk were too loud in his ears, each footfall echoing off marble and glass.
The receptionist looked up, impeccably groomed beard, a headset curved behind his ear like modern jewelry, and offered a smile that had been workshopped and perfected and deployed a thousand times.
"Adriel Alvarez." His voice came out thinner than he wanted. "I have a nine o'clock. With Mr. Waters."
Fingers danced over a sleek tablet. "Ah, yes. Tenth floor. West corridor, last door on the right."
"Th… thank you." He turned, and his elbow caught the carrier.
A coffee cup lurched, the lid popping free, brown liquid sloshing dangerously close to the rim.
He fumbled, face burning, muttering apologies to the cup, to the air, to the receptionist who was already looking past him at someone more important.
Heart hammering, he made for the elevators, grip white-knuckled, palms sweating, the sweater suddenly too warm against his skin.
The elevator was empty, its walls mirrored. He stared at the numbers and refused to meet his own eyes. 4. 5. 6. Each floor a tick of the countdown. 10.
The doors slid open onto a different kind of quiet.
The corridor was wide, carpeted in dense grey wool that swallowed sound.
One wall was glass, the city sprawling below in a breathtaking, dizzying sweep.
The other was lined with doors, each bearing a discreet nameplate in brushed steel.
The air held the scent of old books and ink, expensive perfume, the ghosts of a thousand stories shelved and waiting.
He followed the signs for the west corridor, footsteps utterly silent on the carpet, acutely aware of his own body; the way his sweater brushed his arms, the slight pinch of his shoes, the soft sound of his own breathing.
He felt colossal and invisible all at once.
A giant made of glass. A ghost made of flesh.
Then he saw it. The last door on the right.
LANDEN WATERS
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF.
Adriel stopped.
He straightened his sweater with a jerky, useless pull. Took a breath that did nothing to fill his tight chest. Raised his hand.
It trembled.
His knuckles met the wood. The sound was too loud.
A pause. A heartbeat. Then a voice, low and smooth, from the other side.
"Come in."
He pushed the door open.
The office was not what he had pictured.
Not the sterile aggressive modernity of the lobby, nor the hushed bookish gloom he'd imagined. It was spacious, bathed in clear morning light, one entire wall a sheet of glass offering a panoramic, dizzying view of the city skyline.
The other walls were lined with bookshelves, but not the uniform leather-bound sets of a film set.
These were alive, crammed with a chaotic, beautiful mix of hardcovers and paperbacks, spines a rainbow of faded colors, many stacked horizontally atop the vertical rows because there simply wasn't enough room.
Manuscripts occupied every flat surface that wasn't already claimed by art books or small, strange sculptures.
It felt like the mind of someone brilliant and voracious, made physical.
And behind a wide desk of reclaimed oak, scarred and stained with decades of use, sat Landen Waters.
He looked up from a spread of photographs, and Adriel's breath simply left him.
Blond. That was the first, staggering thought.
But not like Adriel's own dark honey; this was sharp, wheat-gold hair swept back from a high forehead in a way that seemed effortless.
The face beneath it was all clean, elegant lines: a straight nose, a firm jaw dusted with just enough stubble to avoid looking like a statue, lips surprisingly full for a face so severe.