Chapter 25
Samuel
The office on Monday was the same, and yet it was an entirely different planet.
The same hushed murmur of keyboards, the same scent of expensive coffee and lemon-scented cleaner, the same panoramic view of a city that seemed to operate on gears and pulleys Samuel understood perfectly.
But the air he moved through felt ionized, charged with a secret current that only he could feel.
Every step down the corridor toward his pod was a step across a fault line.
Every glance toward the corner office was a glance into the sun; blinding, dangerous, and the source of all warmth.
Their first weekend together; a phrase his mind still shied away from, had changed the gravity in the room.
Gael was no longer just a powerful, distant star exerting a passive pull.
He was a presence with a specific, intimate mass, and Samuel orbited him now in a new, elliptical pattern, one that felt both terrifyingly unstable and more right than anything ever had.
He saw it in the glances. Now, when Gael’s gaze found him across the open-plan sea of desks, it held a different weight.
It was a look that remembered. It remembered the taste of his mouth, the sound of his whimpers, the feel of his skin.
It was a look that stripped away the crisp dress shirt and tie and saw the man who had trembled and come apart in his bed.
Samuel felt its brand, a flush of awareness that started at the nape of his neck and traveled south every single time.
He tried to focus on the dense contract language glowing on his screen.
He tried to be the efficient, invisible Ruiz.
But his body was a traitor. His skin was hypersensitive, remembering the exact pressure of a hand.
His ears strained for the particular cadence of a certain footstep.
When Gael’s door opened and he emerged to speak with a paralegal, Samuel’s entire being went on alert.
He didn’t look up, but his peripheral vision tracked the man’s movement like a sunflower tracking the sun, absorbing the shift of his shoulders in the impeccable suit, the way his hair fell just so against his collar.
A single, murmured “Ruiz, the Henderson file,” delivered as Gael passed his pod without breaking stride, was enough to make Samuel’s fingers freeze over the keyboard, a jolt of pure electricity arcing down his spine.
The morning passed in this state of heightened, exquisite tension. By the time Alina appeared at the opening of his pod, a bright smile on her face, he felt both strung taut and oddly, deliriously alive.
“Lunch?” she asked, tilting her head. “I’m starving, and I need to vent about George’s latest attempt to claim credit for my research.”
The normalcy of it was an anchor. “Yeah,” Samuel said, his voice sounding almost normal. “Yeah, sounds good.”
They went to their usual spot, a quiet salad place around the corner. Over bowls of kale and quinoa, Alina launched into her tirade about George, her hands waving expressively. Samuel listened, nodding in the right places, offering a sympathetic grimace.
Then, as she speared a cherry tomato, her eyes sparkled with mischief. “So,” she said, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “Something’s different.”
Samuel’s fork stilled. “What?”
“You. There is something different.” She took a bite, chewing thoughtfully. “And I couldn't help but notice that a certain partner is looking at you a bit too much these days.”
The blood drained from Samuel’s face, leaving him cold and then instantly, scaldingly hot. The food in his mouth turned to ash.
She knows.
The thought was pure, undiluted terror.
Of course she knows.
Alina was sharp. She saw everything. She’d seen the looks. She’d put it together. He saw it unfolding in a dizzying rush: her teasing smile freezing, turning into a mask of disgust. The accusation; You’re sleeping with him to get ahead, aren’t you? I thought you were different.
The betrayal in her eyes. The loss of the only friendly face in the office. The scandal. The end of everything.
His heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. He couldn’t breathe. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
Alina’s expression shifted instantly. The teasing light vanished, replaced by wide-eyed concern. “Sam? Hey, whoa. Breathe.”
She reached across the small table, her hand hovering near his hand before closing gently around it. “Sam, I was just kidding. A bad joke. A really stupid, bad joke.”
He stared at her, his vision tunneling. He could see her lips moving, but the roaring in his ears drowned out the words for a second.
“...just me being an idiot,” she was saying, her voice soft now, earnest. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to... God, look at you. I’m so sorry.”
Slowly, the roaring subsided. He dragged in a shaky breath. The cold terror began to recede, leaving behind a shaky, embarrassed relief. She didn’t know. She was just… teasing. Playing with fire she didn’t understand was a live inferno.
“It’s… it’s okay,” he managed, his voice thin. “I’m just… tired. Jumpy.”
Alina studied him, her intelligent eyes missing nothing of his residual pallor, the fine tremor in his hands. The concern didn’t leave her face, but it softened. She leaned in a little.
“Sam,” she said, her tone quieter than he’d ever heard it.
“We’re friends, okay? I know we don’t talk about the…
deep stuff. Office rules and all that. But we are friends.
And I just want you to know… if there ever was something?
Anything you wanted to talk about? I’m a vault. No judgment. Just… ears.”
The sincerity in her voice was a balm. It was simple. It was kind. It was a hand offered in the dark without any demand.
The last of the panic dissolved, leaving a warm, fragile feeling in its wake. “Thank you, Alina,” he said, and he meant it with every aching part of him. “Really.”
She gave him a small, reassuring smile and nudged his bowl with her fork. “Eat your rabbit food before it gets soggy.”
They finished their lunch, the conversation drifting back to safer waters; upcoming cases, a new restaurant she wanted to try, a funny story about her cat.
After, as they walked back to the office, the spring sun warm on their shoulders, Samuel felt something shift inside him, a small, quiet settling.
He realized, with a clarity that was both simple and profound, that he had two friends.
Penny, who understood the shadows because she carried her own. And Alina, who stood in the sun and was willing to acknowledge the shade without needing to drag him into the glare.
He didn’t tell her about Gael. The secret was a living thing curled next to his heart, too complex, too terrifying, too precious to expose to the daylight. But her offer, her kindness, had created a space around the secret. It didn’t feel so suffocating anymore.
∞∞∞
Curled on his sofa, Samuel held the book Penny had given him.
The cover was soft, a muted watercolor of a breaking wave.
He’d kept it in his bag for a week, too afraid to touch it.
Now, with the weekend’s intensity a fresh, humming scar on his soul and Alina’s kindness a new, warm weight in his chest, he dared to open it.
He read slowly, the words not sinking in at first, skimming over his consciousness like stones on deep water.
Then, a sentence would hook him. “The first lie you must unlearn is that your core self is flawed.” His breath hitched.
He read a paragraph about the internalized voice of condemnation, the “inner critic” forged in the fires of dogma and fear.
His eyes scanned the description of somatic responses to trauma; the tightening in the chest, the shallowing breath, the instinct to fold inwards.
He finished a chapter. It didn’t offer solutions. It simply asked the reader to acknowledge, with compassion, what systems of belief or communities of origin had taken from them: safety, autonomy, the right to desire, the capacity for simple joy.
Samuel leaned back against the cushions, the book falling closed in his lap.
The apartment was very still. For the first time in a very long time, years, maybe, he didn’t immediately reach for a distraction.
He didn’t turn on the TV, or pick up his phone, or start neurotically cleaning.
He just sat in the quiet, and he thought.
He thought about his childhood, not the sanitized version with Christmas trees and obedient smiles, but the real one.
The constant, low-grade anxiety of measuring up.
The way his father’s approval was a distant, frosty peak.
His mother’s love, a nervous, conditional thing, always tied to him being good.
He thought about the first, confusing stirrings for Michael, the boy in his class.
The electric joy of a shared glance, followed by the instant, freezing plunge of guilt.
The first kiss. Then the few that followed.
Then, the landslide. His father’s face. The word abomination hanging in the air of his bedroom, more solid than any piece of furniture. His mother’s weeping prayers. The silent, terrifying bus ride.
The Hills.
The name alone was a cold knot in his stomach.
He let himself remember. Not just the fear, but the specifics he usually kept locked away.
The “welcome sermon” in the cold chapel.
The feel of his favorite paperback, a romance novel, being taken from his hands.
The endless, echoing silence of the bunkroom at night.
The hollow-eyed boys, all mirrors of his own shame.
Elias.