Chapter 11 #2
“God,” I breathed, closing my eyes briefly. “That’s good.”
When I opened them, he was watching me.
Not casually, like the way you glance at someone across a room.
His eyes moved over my face, and they stayed there longer than they should have. The way he was looking at me made my stomach tighten unexpectedly, low and warm.
“Yeah,” he said.
His voice was quieter, softer around the edges.
“Good.”
But he didn’t sound like he was talking about the coffee.
The moment stretched. Neither of us moved.
I suddenly noticed everything. The way my hair was tangled and flattened on one side.
The dried tear tracks I could still feel tight on my skin.
That I was sitting here in yesterday’s clothes, drinking coffee at four or five in the morning with the one person who had spent the last six years making me feel like I didn’t belong anywhere near him.
I looked away first. My fingers tightened around the cup.
I had to be mistaken.
This was Callan.
Callan, who corrected everything I did. Who found fault in work I’d spent hours on and handed it back without a word of acknowledgment. Callan, who sighed audibly when I walked into a room, as if my presence alone was an inconvenience he hadn’t time for.
Callan, who had made every single day at this job a quiet, grinding, exhausting battle from the moment I started.
Years of tension and irritation and careful distance.
He didn’t look at me like that.
He didn’t see me like that.
I took another sip of coffee, focusing on the bitterness, letting it fill my mouth and give me something to distract myself.
“You look like hell,” he blurted.
There it was.
The Callan I knew.
I let out a tired laugh. “Wow. Thanks.”
He didn’t smile. Didn’t take it back.
He just leaned his hip against the counter and crossed his arms, watching me with that same steady, unreadable expression.
“You didn’t sleep,” he said.
It wasn’t a question.
“Neither did you.”
He shrugged. One shoulder. Barely a movement. “Didn’t plan on it.”
Which meant he’d stayed awake on purpose. Stayed awake watching that door with me curled against his chest, and he hadn’t moved. Hadn’t shoved me away. Hadn’t woken me up.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
Silence settled again between us, only it seemed different now. Not as hostile. Not comfortable exactly, but not adversarial either.
Just quiet.
Just two people sitting in an empty cafeteria at the end of something neither of them understood yet.
I picked at the plastic wrapper on the muffin, peeling it back. I wasn’t hungry. My stomach was too knotted for that. But my hands needed something to do, and it was the muffin or my own fingernails.
I was aware of him. His presence, his weight in the room, the sound of his breathing. Aware of it in a way I’d never let myself be before. Or maybe I had been all along, and I’d just called it something else—irritation, tension, dislike.
I didn’t know anymore.
Outside, the world was gone. Or going. Or already past the point of saving.
Inside, it was just us, and I didn’t know what that meant yet.
* * *
After eating and using the restroom—an experience that seemed absurdly normal, as if my body hadn’t gotten the message that the world was dying—Callan found me near the service corridor.
“I’ve got a way up,” he said.
He didn’t sound uncertain.
He sounded like himself again: focused, methodical, like this was just another maintenance issue that needed solving, and he’d already solved it.
“How?” I asked.
“There’s a service access panel on the top floor,” he said. “Leads to the lower maintenance section of the roof. It’s not the main exit, but it’ll get us up there.”
I nodded.
It made sense. Everything he did always made sense. That was the infuriating thing about Callan. Even when I wanted to argue with him, even when I wanted to push back, he was almost always right. He just was.
We walked together through the upper corridors—just stillness, only our breathing and our footsteps, and nothing else.
We reached the top floor. The air was slightly warmer up here, stifling in a way I could feel in my lungs.
Callan stopped in front of a narrow maintenance panel built flush into the wall. It was painted the same flat, institutional gray as everything around it, the thing you’d walked past a thousand times and never noticed unless someone pointed it out.
He crouched down, fingers working at the recessed latch with a practiced efficiency that told me he’d opened this panel before.
Probably dozens of times. The latch gave with a quiet click, and the panel swung open to reveal a narrow vertical shaft with a metal ladder bolted to the interior wall, disappearing up into the darkness.
He looked up into it. His body tensed.
“I’ll go first,” he said.
Of course he would. He paused and looked back at me.
“If it’s secure up top, I’ll call down,” he said. “Then you come up.”
I nodded. My heartbeat was louder than it should have been.
“Okay.”
He climbed without hesitation, his boots clanging against the metal rungs, the sound growing fainter as he moved higher. I watched him until the darkness swallowed him, with nothing left but the sound of his hands and feet on metal, growing smaller and smaller above me.
Then silence. I stood there alone, staring up into the opening.
My stomach tightened.
I hated this. The waiting. The not knowing. Being down here by myself with nothing but the sound of my breathing and the steady awareness that if anything went wrong up there, I would hear it happen and be able to do absolutely nothing.
A few seconds passed; in reality, it seemed longer.
Then his voice came down, steady and clear, bouncing off the walls of the shaft.
“It’s secure. Come up.”
The relief hit me harder than it should have. My hands were shaking slightly as I grabbed the ladder and started climbing. My muscles burned, everything still punishing me for the night on the floor. The metal was cold beneath my palms.
I climbed and tried not to look down.
When I reached the top, Callan was already standing on the other side of the hatch, holding it open with one hand. Daylight—gray and overcast—spilled in from somewhere beyond him.
His other hand hovered near my arm as I pulled myself through the opening and onto the roof. Not touching me, but close. Close enough that if my foot slipped, if my grip gave, he’d have me.
I found my footing and straightened up.
He let his hand drop.
I tried not to think about it, not to let it register as anything. This was Callan, and now he was making sure I didn’t fall.
I just stepped forward into the light and looked out at the world.