Chapter 18 #2
Landen laughed, quiet and warm. "Right. The manuscript." He took it from Adriel's hands, set it on his desk without looking at it. "We'll do that another time. Go. Before I change my mind about waiting until tonight."
Adriel went.
He grabbed for the door, opened it, stepped through. Paused in the doorway for just a second; looking back at Landen, who was watching him with that dark, intent gaze.
Then he fled. Back to his desk. Back to his cubicle. Back to the ordinary world where phones rang and manuscripts needed editing and no one knew that his entire body was still vibrating with the memory of Landen’s mouth on his.
∞∞∞
The subway was crowded.
Adriel stood in the middle of the carriage with one hand on the overhead bar and his bag against his hip and watched the tunnel wall slide past in the dark while trying to remember how to breathe normally.
He had changed clothes twice before leaving the apartment. Three times, if he counted the shirt he'd pulled on and immediately pulled off again before Jenna had appeared in the doorway with the coffee and the expression and said, simply, where are you going.
Landen's, he'd said.
Jenna had looked at him for a moment. Then she'd set her coffee down, come into the room, and picked the second sweater off the bed, the dark green one, the one she'd told him twice made his eyes look warm, and handed it to him without a word.
He was wearing it now.
It didn't help. He was still standing in a subway carriage at half past six on a Tuesday evening with his heart doing something loud and uncooperative and his free hand moving without permission; touching the strap of his bag, smoothing the front of his sweater, pressing flat against his thigh.
He couldn't keep it still. He'd been trying for three stops.
He replayed Landen's voice in his head.
The thumb at his lip.
Adriel pressed his palm flat against his thigh and held it there.
It's just dinner, he told himself.
Casual. Normal. Fine.
The train pulled into his stop and he moved with the current of bodies onto the platform, up the stairs, out into the evening air. The city was going gold at the edges, the sky darkening toward navy above the buildings. He checked the address on his phone.
And then moved.
∞∞∞
The building was exactly what he'd expected.
Clean stone facade, a uniformed doorman visible through the glass, the lobby beyond warm-lit and high-ceilinged.
He stopped on the pavement outside and looked up at it. Then he looked at his reflection in the glass of the lobby doors.
His hair, which he'd spent ten minutes on and which had immediately done exactly what it always did, the soft honey-blond of it resisting every instruction.
His face, which was slightly too flushed and would only get worse once he was inside somewhere warm.
He tugged at the hem of his sweater. Watched himself do it in the glass. Stopped.
Stop it, he told himself.
You look fine. You're fine. Go in.
The lobby was marble and low music and a Ficus in a pot that probably cost more than Adriel's monthly rent. The doorman nodded at him. Adriel nodded back and kept moving, found the lift, stepped in.
The doors closed.
Mirrored walls again. He stared at the floor numbers and did not look at himself.
The lift opened on the eighth floor.
He found the door. 8C, brushed steel numerals, a small potted plant to one side that was either real and meticulously tended or a fake.
He stood in front of it.
His hands were shaking. He pressed them together in front of him. Then at his sides. Then he took a slow breath in through his nose, held it for three counts the way the internet had once told him to, and let it out.
He knocked.
A beat. The soft sound of movement from inside. Then the door opened, and Landen was there. No jacket. Sleeves rolled. A dark shirt, untucked at the hem, the collar open two buttons. He looked… casual. At ease.
"Hey," he said and stepped back to let him in.
Adriel stepped over the threshold and stopped, just for a moment, and took it in.
It was large, larger than he'd let himself picture.
The ceilings were high, the floors dark hardwood, the walls a warm off-white.
Books everywhere, much like in his office at the Greyson House.
Shelves that had run out of room and resorted to stacking, piles on the coffee table, two on the kitchen counter.
A desk in the corner of the living space visible through a half-open door, buried under manuscripts and marked-up pages.
Art on the walls; pieces, small and varied, the kind of collection that happened over years rather than an afternoon in a gallery.
And the windows. Floor to ceiling along the far wall, the city laid out beyond them in the early dark, lights beginning to multiply across the skyline, the whole thing enormous and glittering and immediately the most beautiful thing in the room.
Adriel stood in the middle of it and felt the full weight of where he was.
This was Landen's. All of it; the books with their cracked spines, the art chosen by his eye, the space shaped by years of his living in it.
And Landen had said come over like it was simple, like bringing someone here was something he did all the time, and Adriel was standing in the middle of it in his green sweater with his slightly stupid hair and his hands that wouldn't stop shaking and he had absolutely no framework for this.
He thought, briefly and unhelpfully, of his own apartment. The slightly temperamental radiator. Jenna's sketches tacked to the walls with blu-tack. The rickety sofa that had never quite recovered from the time they'd moved it to reach the router.
"Do you want a tour?" Landen asked from somewhere behind him.
"Yes," Adriel said. "Please."
The study first. The door opened onto a room that smelled of paper and old ink, bookshelves floor to ceiling on three walls, a reading chair in the corner worn and soft-looking. Manuscripts stacked on the desk in piles that looked chaotic but probably weren't. More art.
Adriel stood in the doorway and looked at it and felt something almost unbearably intimate about being shown this.
The kitchen came next. Clean and functional, a good knife block, a well used stovetop. Something on the hob that smelled extraordinary; garlic and wine and something underneath that Adriel's stomach responded to before his brain had fully caught up.
"You cook?" Adriel said.
Landen looked faintly amused. "Did you think I survive on take out?"
"I didn't think about it," Adriel said, which was a lie, and Landen looked at him in a way that suggested he knew it. Adriel looked at the stovetop and said, "It smells incredible."
"Fifteen minutes," Landen said. "Come on."
The rest of the apartment was the same; large, full of the evidence of a life lived. A bedroom door he didn't open. A bathroom Adriel clocked in passing, white tile and a large mirror and a bathtub the size of Adriel’s entire bathroom.
And everywhere, the windows.
They ran along the outer wall of the living space in a long, unbroken sweep, the city beyond them darkening as he watched, the whole thing spread out at distance like something from a different world.
Adriel stopped in front of them.
"How long have you lived here?" he asked.
"Seven years," Landen said, from the kitchen. "I looked at it and didn't make an offer and then thought about it for three days and called the agent back."
Adriel nodded. He could understand that. The kind of thing you didn't realize you wanted until the possibility of not having it made your chest tight.
They ate at the kitchen table, the city beyond the windows going dark as the evening settled in around them.
The table was small. A candle burned in a simple glass holder near the window, its flame small and steady against the growing dark.
The food was good. Better than good. Adriel had taken his first bite and made a sound he hadn't meant to make, and Landen had looked at him with that faint amusement that was becoming familiar.
Adriel had flushed, "Sorry, it's just… really good," and Landen had said, "Don't apologize for enjoying food," like it was the simplest thing in the world.
The conversation was easy.
That surprised him. Or maybe it didn't, anymore. Maybe he was starting to learn that this was just how it was with Landen, that the ease wasn't a fluke, that it kept happening because it was real.
They talked about books and about the manuscript Adriel had been reading.
They talked about a novel Landen had acquired last year, the one that had won the prize, the one Adriel had read twice and still thought about at odd moments.
They talked about the difference between a story that ended sadly and a story that ended badly, and Adriel found himself saying things he hadn't known he thought, shaping arguments he hadn't known he had, and Landen listened.
That was the thing. He listened. Not the way people listened when they were waiting for their turn to speak, but the way they did when they actually wanted to know what you thought.
Adriel felt himself loosen. Degree by degree.
The tightness he'd carried through the door slowly releasing its grip.
His shoulders dropped from where they'd been hovering near his ears.
His hand stopped finding things to fidget with.
He laughed at something Landen said, a dry comment about an author they both found difficult, and looked up, and caught Landen watching him whit that particular expression. The one with nothing careful in it.
Adriel looked away, cheeks warm. He reached for his water, took a sip, set it down.
"The Harlow ending," Landen said, settling back in his chair. "What did you think?"
Adriel looked up. "It doesn't work."
"No." Landen picked up his fork, turned it over once. "Why not?"
Adriel considered the question.