Chapter 8 #2
It became a fact of the evening after that.
They worked deeper into the third act. Adriel found problems Landen had missed.
Twice. He apologized both times before pointing them out and Landen told him twice that he didn't need to apologize for being right.
Adriel nodded both times in the way that meant he'd heard the words and hadn't believed them, and Landen filed this away with everything else he was filing away tonight in the category of things he was not going to examine too closely.
Some time later they hit another snag a scene late in the third act where the protagonist, alone in his apartment, spiraled through a page of interior monologue.
"It's too much," Landen said. "We've established his insecurity three times already. This is repetitive. It's wallowing."
Adriel was quiet. He read it through once, then again, the furrow back between his brows.
"I don't think it's wallowing," he said carefully.
"No?"
"He's not doing it for the reader." Adriel's finger moved along the margin, tracing the lines without touching them.
"This is just what he does. Every night, probably.
This is the voice in his head that doesn't switch off.
" He paused. "It's supposed to be uncomfortable.
You're supposed to feel stuck in there with him. "
Landen sat back slightly. He'd been uncomfortable reading it and had assumed that was a fault in the prose. He was no longer sure.
"People yearn to be chosen," he said slowly, working it through. "Completely. That's what he's really saying, underneath all of it. And his partner had chosen him. Shown him, multiple times. The matter should be solved by then, right?”
The rain beat against the glass. The lamp hummed. Adriel's pen had gone still and he was looking at the page but not reading it. Landen waited.
"Some people don't believe they're worthy of it," Adriel said finally.
The careful tone had gone out of his voice, leaving something quieter underneath.
"Even when someone tells them. Even when the proof is right there.
The voice saying they're not has been there a lot longer.
It's louder. It doesn't just stop because someone was kind to them once or twice. "
Landen turned and looked at him.
The lamplight was warm on the curve of Adriel's cheek, the soft line of his jaw.
Color had come back into his face, not the vivid startled flush but something slower and deeper, spreading down his throat and disappearing beneath his collar.
Adriel's lashes were dark against his skin.
His pulse going at his throat, rapid and visible. His eyes fixed on the manuscript.
He's not talking about the book.
Landen knew it immediately, the way you knew certain things.
He looked back at the manuscript.
"Maybe he can add a specific memory instead of the general spiral," he said. His voice came out lower than he'd have liked. "One concrete thing instead of the catalogue. It'll hit harder."
"Yeah." Adriel's voice was not entirely steady. "I think so."
They kept working.
Another hour passed. Landen turned pages, asked questions, made notes, kept his voice even and professional, and was, beneath all of it, running on fumes.
The warmth of Adriel's body in the close air.
The smell of his skin. The way he chewed the end of his pen when he was thinking hard and then caught himself doing it and put it back on the page with a small, slightly embarrassed motion.
The way he forgot himself entirely when the text caught him, his hands moving as he talked, something open and unguarded in him that Landen suspected very few people got to see.
The knee still pressed against his under the table.
Around ten, Adriel found another problem. He leaned forward to point it out, reaching across the manuscript, and his shoulder came to rest against Landen's, warm and solid through the fabric of his sweater.
"Here, and then here. He sets this thread up in the second act and then it's just gone. It never pays off. The whole resolution in the final chapter depends on it and it's just… missing."
He was very close. Landen could feel the warmth of him along his whole left side, could smell his soap clearly now, mixed with something he was starting to realize was just Adriel.
His hair had fallen forward over his brow.
His finger moved across the page, tracing the text, his voice carrying that focused, slightly urgent quality it got when he'd found something real.
Landen looked at the lines he was indicating.
He also looked, for just a moment, at the side of Adriel's face. The pink tip of his ear. The soft curve of his cheek. The slightly parted lips.
"You're right," Landen said. Level. It cost him more than it should have. "Flag it."
Adriel leaned back. The loss of contact was immediate and Landen did not react to it in any visible way, which was, at this point in the evening, a minor personal achievement.
Adriel uncapped his pen. Made the notation in his small, elegant script. His hand was not quite steady, Landen noticed, and looked away before he could spend any more time noticing it.