Chapter 3
Adriel
By Thursday, Adriel had developed a system.
It wasn't sophisticated. It wasn't something he was proud of. But it was functional, and functional was what he needed.
The system was this: he kept his eyes on his work.
He answered questions when asked, delivered his notes on time, said good morning to the people in his pod and thank you to the woman who refilled the coffee station and excuse me when he needed to pass someone in the corridor.
He did his job, and he did it well, and he did not, under any circumstances, let his attention drift to the office at the end of the west corridor.
He was managing it. Mostly.
The problem was that Landen Waters was not a man who stayed contained to the end of the west corridor.
He moved through the floor with a loose, unhurried authority that managed to be everywhere at once; a conversation at the copy station, a brief stop at the editorial pod, a low-voiced exchange with Miriam.
He didn't announce himself. The room just knew he was in it.
And Adriel's body, traitorous and apparently incapable of learning, knew too.
He'd become mortifyingly attuned to the sound of Landen's voice. Not the words, he was rarely close enough for words, just the register of it. That low, unhurried baritone, smooth as a good bourbon, carrying authority in every syllable without ever needing to raise itself.
He heard it through the office wall when the door was cracked. He heard it at the far end of the floor and felt it land somewhere at the base of his sternum before he'd consciously registered where it was coming from.
It was embarrassing.
He was a professional. He had a degree. He had opinions about narrative structure and a reader's report due by end of day and absolutely no business developing what amounted to a Pavlovian response to his employer's voice 2 weeks into his employment.
He'd said as much to Jenna the night before, in considerably less eloquent terms, face pressed into the sofa cushion.
She'd told him, in the no-nonsense voice she'd been deploying since first grade, that he was being dramatic and should drink some water.
He was drinking water. It wasn't helping.
Thursday morning had started the same as the others; coffee from the cart on the corner, the familiar purgatory of the mirrored lift, the tenth floor opening up around him like an exhale.
He'd settled at his desk, arranged his notes, opened his manuscript, and spent approximately eleven minutes reading the same paragraph before Landen's door opened and the man himself crossed the floor to speak to someone at the far end of the pod.
Adriel had stared at the paragraph. The paragraph stared back.
This was the state Miriam found him in when she stopped at his desk at half past ten, brisk as ever, and set a reference slip beside his keyboard.
"Archive retrieval." Her finger tapped the slip once. "Harmon manuscript, bound copy, reference GH-1184. Two floors down. The lift takes you directly. The room is coded; your key card will work." Already turning away. "Priority, please."
"Of course. I'll go now."
She was gone before he finished the sentence.
He looked at the slip. Then at his monitor, where the paragraph he'd read a hundred times glowed patiently. Then at the slip again.
He reached for his lanyard.
The relief that moved through him was immediate and slightly shameful.
A concrete task. Something with a clear objective and a clear end point, requiring him to go somewhere that was not here, not this floor, not within auditory range of that particular voice.
He was almost grateful to Miriam, which said something about the state he was in.
He gathered the slip, straightened his sweater out of habit, he was beginning to suspect he'd be doing it on his deathbed, and stood.
The lift took him down two floors to a corridor noticeably different from the tenth floor.
Narrower here, the ceiling lower, the lighting cooler.
The air changed too; expensive perfume and new print giving way to something older and stiller.
Paper that had been sitting in the same place for years.
Dust and ink and the faint, not unpleasant ghost of stories shelved and waiting.
Adriel breathed it in. Felt his shoulders drop a fraction of an inch.
The archive door was the third on the left. He held his key card to the reader, heard the soft click, saw the green light blink on, and pushed the door inward.
The room was exactly what the corridor had promised. Tall, metal shelving units ran in close parallel rows from floor to ceiling, packed with bound manuscripts, boxed documents, labelled spines in varying states of legibility.
The overhead lights were fluorescent, but only two of the three panels were working, giving the space a low, uneven quality; pools of yellow-white light and soft shadow in the gaps between. The shelves were close together. Narrow enough that two people passing would have to turn sideways.
Quiet. The only sound was the faint hum of ventilation and Adriel's own footsteps against bare concrete.
He exhaled. Properly, this time.
The tight vigilance of the morning loosened its grip on him by small degrees as he moved into the rows, reference slip in hand, trailing his fingers lightly along the spines.
The familiar comfort of books worked on him the way it always had; the way it had since he was a child pressed into library corners with a story that didn't ask anything of him.
Cloth binding, cracked leather, smooth laminate.
GH-1155. GH-1170.
GH-1181. GH-1182. GH-1183.
There.
GH-1184. The Harmon manuscript. Bound in faded burgundy cloth, thick, shelved spine-out on the second shelf from the top.
The second shelf from the top, which was, he registered with a sinking feeling, approximately eight inches above his comfortable reach.
He rose onto his toes. His fingertips brushed the spine. Not enough purchase. He strained higher, the shelf edge pressing into his palm, fingers scrabbling uselessly against the binding. Dropped back down. Looked around for something to stand on. Found nothing.
Looked up at the manuscript with the particular expression of a man who has just realized the universe is mildly but specifically against him.
He tried again. Higher this time, the effort pulling a soft, frustrated sound from him, fingers catching the very edge of the spine…
He didn't hear the door. He didn't hear the footsteps either.
What he heard was a voice. Close and deep, from somewhere behind him.
"Which one?"
He spun around, his shoulder catching the edge of the shelf with a dull rattling sound, heart slamming so hard against his ribs that for a disoriented moment he couldn't locate any other sensation.
His hand flew out and gripped the shelf, steadying himself, and he stood there breathing too fast, staring at the end of the row.
Landen stood at its mouth.
Jacket off. That was the first thing Adriel registered, stupidly, because it was wrong, a detail that didn't match the version of Landen that existed in his head.
He was in his shirtsleeves, cuffs folded back to the forearm, collar open one button.
He held a folder loosely at his side and was looking at Adriel with an expression of such unhurried calm it seemed almost unreasonable given that Adriel's heart was currently attempting to exit his body through his sternum.
His eyes moved, once, from Adriel's face to the shelf above him. Waiting.
"I…" Adriel's voice came out thin. The color was already rising up his face, he could feel it, the familiar tide of heat that started at his collar and climbed without mercy.
"Sorry. I didn't hear you." He gestured vaguely, helplessly, upward.
"The Harmon manuscript. It's just… I can reach it, I just… "
Landen moved before he finished the sentence. He stepped into the row and the world shrank.
It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't anything Adriel could point to and say there, that's what happened.
It was just that one moment the space between the shelves had felt like enough, enough room to breathe, to reach, to exist, and the next it didn't. Because Landen was in it.
Close enough that the air itself seemed to rearrange around his presence.
Close enough that Adriel could feel the warmth of him before they'd even touched.
He reached up, his arm brushing Adriel's shoulder as he stretched. Just the lightest pressure. But Adriel felt it everywhere.
Then the manuscript was coming down. Landen was holding it, checking the label, and he wasn't stepping back.
The space between them was nothing, inches, less than inches, and Adriel could smell him, something clean and warm, soap and skin and the faint ghost of coffee, and his heart was doing something loud and obvious that Landen had to be able to hear in all this quiet.
"Here." Landen held the manuscript out.
Adriel took it. Their fingers touched.
The briefest brush, the side of Landen's finger against the pad of Adriel's thumb, and it was over before Adriel could register that it had happened.
But his body registered. His body lit up like a struck match, like every nerve ending in his hand had been waiting for exactly this, like they'd been holding their breath his whole life just to feel the heat of someone else's skin for half a second.
He stopped breathing.
Landen's eyes lifted. Found Adriel's face. Stayed there.
He didn't move. Didn't pull back into the careful distance that should have existed between an editor and his junior staff.
He just looked, in the dim flickering light of the archive, with an expression Adriel couldn't name.
Something quiet, soft at the edges, like he'd forgotten for a moment who they were supposed to be to each other.
Adriel's hand tightened on the manuscript. The burgundy binding pressed against his chest. Something solid to hold onto.
Then Landen blinked. Stepped back. The moment broke like a glass dropped on concrete; shattered into pieces too small to gather up, too sharp to touch.
"Anything else you need while you're down here?" His voice was even. Perfectly controlled.
Yes, Adriel wanted to say. Yes. No. I don't know. What was that. What was that look. Please don't go.
"No," he said instead. "Thank you."
Landen nodded and went to move past him. The space was too narrow. Adriel pressed himself against the shelves to let him pass, and Landen's body slid by, close, so close, the brush of his sleeve against Adriel's arm, the heat of him briefly, impossibly present, and then he was gone.
The quiet settled back in, but it was different now. It hummed.
He could still feel where their fingers had touched. A small, insistent point of heat on his thumb that had no business still existing, that should have faded seconds ago, that was instead growing warmer the longer he stood there thinking about it.
He pressed his thumb into the spine of the manuscript. Hard. Tried to erase the sensation with pressure
It didn't work.
He should move. Should go back upstairs, give the manuscript to Miriam, finish the reader report, stop standing here like a fool.
He should.
He stood there another minute anyway.
∞∞∞
The lift ride was a blur. His desk waited, patient and indifferent, the reader report still glowing on his monitor.
He sat down. Placed the manuscript beside his keyboard. Looked at the first paragraph.
He read it.
Then he read it again.
Then a third time, the words sliding past his attention like water, because beneath the desk, hidden in his lap, his fingers were still tracing the spot where Landen's finger had touched him.
He'd told his hand to stop, clearly and firmly, and his hand had simply ignored him. His finger moved in small, absent circles over the same patch of skin, searching for something that wasn't there anymore.
It was nothing.
He'd said it to himself in the lift. He'd say it again now. He'd keep saying it until it stuck, until his body believed it, until the heat faded and he could look at a paragraph and see words instead of the shape of Landen's face in dim light.
It was nothing.
His finger kept moving.
He was just being polite. The look meant nothing; you probably imagined it, you always imagine it, you build castles out of nothing and then wonder why you're left standing in rubble.
He knew this about himself. Had known it for years, had the scars to prove it.
Somewhere deep inside him there was a hunger so vast it would drink up any scrap of warmth and call it a feast. Any accidental touch.
Any moment of attention held a beat too long.
He took those scraps and built whole worlds around them, every time, always, and then stood in the wreckage afterward and told himself he should have known better.
He knew better.
He read the paragraph a fourth time.
Under the desk, hidden in the loose fabric of his sleeve, his fingers found each other anyway.