Chapter 8
Landen
The Calloway crisis started at half past four.
Landen was on his way out, coat on, keys in hand, when Miriam appeared in his doorway with the expression that was reserved for situations that were going to ruin his evening.
"Calloway pulled the book. All of it. Says it doesn't work, he's rewriting from scratch." A pause. "Press lock is in three weeks."
Landen put his keys back on the desk.
He had the manuscript pulled apart and spread across the table within twenty minutes, standing over it with a red pen, trying to locate exactly where it had gone wrong and why it had taken the author until now to notice.
The floor emptied around him gradually; coats grabbed, goodnights called across the pods, the overhead lights switching off in sections as the motion sensors lost interest. He didn't look up as he read and marked and read again, while the problem kept shifting every time he thought he'd found it.
He heard Adriel's desk chair push back sometime around six. The quiet sounds of packing up; papers gathered, the soft zip of a bag.
Landen looked up.
Adriel was standing beside his desk with his bag over his shoulder and his coat half on, one arm still searching for the sleeve.
He found it, tugged the coat straight, then pulled the hem of his sweater down over his stomach in that automatic, unconscious gesture he always made, the one Landen had stopped pretending he hadn't found endearing.
He should let him go. There was no reason to keep him. He had senior editors for exactly this kind of situation.
"Adriel."
Adriel looked up, across the pod and through the open office door, and found Landen looking back at him.
"I could use another set of eyes on this tonight." You idiot. "If you don't have somewhere to be."
Adriel's expression moved through several things rapidly. Surprise first. Something that might have been pleased, pressed flat almost immediately. Then the faint bloom of pink at his collar that Landen had also stopped pretending he didn't notice.
"I… no. I mean, I don't have somewhere to be." A pause. "I mean yes. I can stay. If that's… yes."
"Good. Tell Miriam to order food before she leaves."
Adriel nodded, tugged at his sweater again, and went to find Miriam.
Landen looked back down at the manuscript and allowed himself exactly three seconds of acknowledgement, that he had just invented a reason to keep his junior editor in the building for the next several hours, before closing the door on that line of thinking entirely and going back to work.
∞∞∞
Miriam left at half six with a takeout order placed. The food arrived twenty minutes later. Landen cleared space on the corner table, pulled the relevant pages over, and dragged his chair around to angle toward the reading lamp.
Adriel settled into the chair beside him with his notebook open and his pen uncapped, sitting with that slightly formal posture; spine straight, knees together, hands on the manuscript.
Landen pulled his chair a fraction closer to the lamp. Practical. The light was better this way. The fact that it also put him approximately fourteen inches from Adriel instead of two feet was simply a coincidence, and he was not going to spend any time thinking about it.
They ate while they worked, or Landen did; he noticed after a while that Adriel's container was still mostly full, pushed to the edge of the table, as he read with his bottom lip caught between his teeth, his pen moving in small, neat notations and had apparently forgotten the food existed.
Landen watched him for a moment. Looked back at his own page.
They moved through the first act and into the second. The rain had started around five and hadn't let up, a steady hushing rush against the tall windows, the city lights beyond the glass blurring into each other in the wet dark.
The floor outside was fully dark now, only the lamp and the reading light holding their warm circle in the middle of all that black. It should have felt strange, the two of them alone in the building at this hour.
It didn't. That was, perhaps, its own kind of problem.
Adriel was tentative at first; voice soft, observations hedged, a reflexive sorry preceding most of what he said as if his opinions required apology before delivery.
Landen waited it out, asking questions and letting the silence sit until Adriel filled it, and gradually, over the first hour, the tentativeness receded.
His voice steadied. His pen moved with more purpose.
He stopped apologizing before every sentence and started just saying the thing, and when he said the thing it was usually right.
By eight o'clock Adriel had pushed his sleeves up to the elbow and was leaning slightly forward over the manuscript, and Landen was looking at his forearms on the table, the soft skin of his inner wrist, and had read the same paragraph four times without absorbing a word of it.
He made himself focus.
He read the next passage aloud, voice low and even.
"…and he understood then that the shape of his days had been determined not by desire but by the absence of it, a life constructed in the negative space of what he'd been too afraid to…"
"Claim." Adriel said quietly, almost to himself. The pink came in immediately, fast and vivid, sweeping from his collar to his hairline.
"Sorry… I'm sorry, that was… it was a reflex, I didn't mean to interrupt." He stopped himself. Pressed his lips together. Stared at the table. "Sorry."
Landen looked at him for a moment.
"You're right," he said.
Adriel looked up, still pink. "Oh."
"He's been circling it for three paragraphs. Couldn't land on it." Landen kept his voice neutral with some effort. "You heard it before I did."
Adriel made a small uncertain sound and looked back at the page, and there it was; the small involuntary movement at the corner of his mouth that he pressed flat almost immediately, like he wasn't sure he was allowed to be pleased with himself. It lasted less than a second.
Landen saw it anyway.
He looked back at the manuscript, made a notation in the margin, and did not say anything else about it because he didn't trust what else might come out.
They kept working. The rain kept falling. Landen was aware of Adriel's presence beside him with a constancy that was beginning to interfere with his ability to do his job.
The warmth of him in the cool office air.
The smell of his soap, clean and faint, specific enough that Landen had been trying to stop noticing it since approximately seven o'clock and had not succeeded.
The quiet sounds of his breathing, his pen moving, the small shifts of his body when something in the text caught his attention.
The way his whole face changed when it did; the self-consciousness dropping away, something alive and unguarded in him that was entirely different from the careful version he carried through the office during the day.
Landen had been watching for those moments without meaning to. Collecting them.
He was aware that this was not a good habit and couldn't seem to stop.
Then the love scene came. It was the first real one in the manuscript, the moment the two protagonists finally crossed the line they'd been circling for two hundred pages. The prose was spare. Clinical, almost.
He placed his hand on the small of his back. He leaned in. Their mouths met.
Landen had marked it effective on his initial read.
Adriel frowned at it. A slight pull at the corners of his mouth, a furrow between his brows.
"You hate it," Landen said.
"I don't hate it." The pen tapped once, twice against the edge of the manuscript. "It just doesn't… it doesn't feel like it belongs to them."
"Meaning?"
Adriel gestured at the paragraph. "These two have spent the whole book being terrified of each other.
He doesn't trust people. He's been hurt before.
And then he just…" A slightly helpless motion toward the text.
"He just does it. Like it's simple. Like there's no moment where he almost doesn't." He paused, glanced at Landen sideways.
"I mean, that's just my read. You marked it effective so maybe I'm wrong, maybe… "
"You're not wrong," Landen said. "Keep going."
Adriel blinked. "He needs to hesitate. Without it, it's just…" He trailed off, searching. "Just them getting from one place to another. The payoff isn't the kiss; the payoff is that he nearly didn't. That's what makes it mean something. If you skip that you've..."
Landen was quiet for a moment, watching him.
"Show me where you'd put it," he said.
"What?"
"The hesitation. Find me the exact line."
Adriel looked back at the page. His hand lifted and hovered, and then he leaned forward to look more closely, the movement bringing him closer, their knees connecting under the table, and the sound he made was barely anything.
A tiny, involuntary catch of breath, almost inaudible. He went very still.
Landen waited.
Adriel didn't pull back. He kept his eyes on the page and his finger found the paragraph.
"Here." His voice had dropped. "His hand should come up, and then stop.
Just for a second. Just long enough for him to think I shouldn't.
" His finger was still on the line. "And then he does it anyway.
That second changes what the whole thing means.
It's not just physical anymore. It's him choosing something he's convinced himself he can't have. "
The room was very quiet.
Landen looked at Adriel's finger on the page.
At the bare skin of his forearm on the table.
At the pulse going at his throat, just slightly too fast. He looked at the color in his cheeks and the careful way he was holding himself, and his breath gone shallow, and felt the want move through him so strongly it almost stole his breath.
"You're right," Landen said. The words came out lower than intended. He reached for his pen, made a note. "I'll talk to the author."
"Yeah," Adriel whispered, still looking at the page. "Okay."
Neither of them moved their knees.