Chapter 6
Adriel
The stairwell was cold.
It hummed with the distant vibration of the building's mechanicals, a low steady thrum you could feel in your teeth if you listened too long.
Adriel sat on the landing between the fifth and sixth floors, back pressed against the concrete wall, a manuscript open in his lap that he hadn't looked at in twenty minutes. The steps were hard and unforgiving beneath him.
It was quiet here. He'd discovered this place by accident his first week. A wrong turn, a door that hadn't been locked, and suddenly; this. A pocket of silence. He'd been coming back ever since.
Three days since what he had started referring to as the break room incident.
He tried not to think about it in those terms, counting days, but his body was counting anyway. Three days since Landen had looked at with an expression he still couldn't parse, and said, you're not in my way, in a voice that had made something in his chest pull tight and strange.
He'd been holding himself carefully ever since. Shoulders drawn in at his desk. Movements small and deliberate.
It was exhausting, how much it cost, hour after hour, to keep yourself contained. To monitor your own body like a stranger you couldn't trust. To absorb it all and keep moving and never once let your face show that you'd noticed.
What tired him wasn't the cruelty itself but the relentlessness of it. The way it never stopped. The way he could have a good morning, a decent afternoon, a moment of forgetting, and then someone would open their mouth and the whole thing would come rushing back, fresh as the first time.
He let his head fall back against the wall, and closed his eyes.
The red glow of the exit sign pressed against his lids. The hum vibrated up through the steps and through his bones. He breathed in the cold, still air. Let it out slow.
He heard it before he saw it; the heavy thud of a door above, the rapid slap of footsteps on concrete, coming fast.
He was already scrambling to his feet, manuscript clutched to his chest, heart slamming into his throat when he registered two things in the half-second before impact: dark suit jacket, and nowhere to go.
The collision drove the breath from his lungs.
His back hit the wall, cold and unforgiving through his sweater.
The manuscript flew from his hands, pages exploding into the air like startled birds, fluttering and swooping down the steps in a white cascade.
His shoulder connected with something solid; chest, the shock of contact radiating through him, and then there was a hand gripping his arm and another hand slamming against the wall beside his head, and the motion stopped.
Dead silence.
Neither of them moved.
For a long suspended moment, Adriel couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Couldn't do anything except exist in the sudden, overwhelming reality of Landen Waters pressed against him.
He was everywhere. The warmth seeping into Adriel's chest, his shoulder, his hip where their bodies had tangled in the collision.
The solid weight of him; not the distant figure from the end of the corridor but a man, here, in this narrow space, close enough that Adriel could feel the rise and fall of his chest. The scent of him, something clean and cold, mingled with the faint warmth of his skin, filled Adriel's lungs with every desperate breath.
His hand was still wrapped around Adriel’s arm. Fingers curved around the soft give of his bicep.
Adriel's own hand had flown up on instinct, pressed flat against Landen's chest, directly over his heart.
He could feel it beating.
Fast. An urgent rhythm that matched the one slamming against his own ribs.
They were close enough that he had to tilt his head back slightly to see Landen's face.
The red glow of the exit sign washed over them both, painting everything in dull crimson. It caught the sharp lines of Landen's jaw, the dark of his eyes, the slight dishevelment of his hair. He was breathing harder than usual, his chest rising and falling beneath Adriel's hand, and his eyes…
His eyes were dark. Pupils blown wide in the low light, fixed on Adriel's face with an intensity that made something in Adriel's stomach drop away entirely.
For a suspended, impossible moment, Landen didn't move. Didn't step back. Didn't do anything except look at him; completely unguarded, the composed mask gone, something raw and hungry showing through underneath.
His gaze moved across Adriel’s face. Tracing the line of his jaw, the flush rising in his cheeks, the shape of him in this narrow space. It lingered on his mouth for just a heartbeat…
Then dropped.
A fraction lower. To the hand still pressed flat against his chest.
Something shifted in his expression. Hot and quick and unmistakable; there and gone, but not fast enough. Not nearly fast enough.
Adriel's face flooded with heat.
It came up from his chest in a wave, uncontrollable; the pink rising in his cheeks, spreading to his ears, creeping down his throat.
He pulled his hand back as if burned.
"Sorry." Barely above a whisper. "I didn't… I wasn't watching…"
"Neither was I."
Landen's voice was even. But lower than usual, rough at the edges. And he still hadn't let go of Adriel's arm.
A beat. Two.
Then he released him. His fingers uncurling one at a time, like it cost him something to do it.
He stepped back. The space between them opened up; cold and sudden and wrong.
Adriel crouched to gather the manuscript pages from the steps. His hands were unsteady. They reached for the scattered pages and missed, fumbled, tried again. He gathered them one by one, edges crumpled where they'd landed badly, and tried to breathe normally.
When he risked a glance up through his lashes, Landen's gaze was on the folder in his hands.
"You should use the elevator." Perfectly ordinary. Level. "These steps are slippery."
It was so absurd, so wildly, fundamentally absurd, that Adriel almost laughed.
He didn't.
"Right," he said instead. Steady. He was proud of that, distantly. "I will."
Landen nodded once. Moved past him down the stairs.
His shoulder didn't quite brush Adriel's as he passed. Close enough that Adriel could feel the displaced air, catch another breath of that scent. Almost worse that it didn't touch. Almost worse that there was that inch of space.
Adriel pressed himself slightly aside to make room. Pages clutched to his chest. Heart still slamming.
Landen's footsteps descended. One flight. Two. The heavy thud of the door below, then silence.
Adriel looked down at the manuscript in his hands. Pages crumpled, out of order. He straightened them mechanically.
He told himself it was an accident. He told himself the look meant nothing. The grip meant nothing. The way neither of them had moved for those few suspended seconds meant nothing at all.
He told himself. He told himself again.
Then he pushed off the wall and climbed back to the tenth floor. He made it to his desk before he noticed.
The manuscript pages were completely out of order. Page forty-seven on top of page twelve. Page eighty-three migrated to the middle.
He sat with his hands in his lap and did nothing for a long, long time. The floor hummed around him; phones, keyboards, murmured conversations, the ordinary sounds of an ordinary afternoon.
He heard none of them.