Chapter Twelve - Elias
He gave himself the weekend to talk himself out of it, which was mostly a formality, because he already knew by Friday afternoon that he wasn't going to be talked out of anything.
The near-miss had done something to the math.
Before, this had been a thing he could keep filed — private, patient, no rush, a want he was comfortable carrying around indefinitely without acting on it.
After Thursday night, carrying it around felt different.
Riskier, not because the want had gotten bigger, but because he'd gotten close enough to the edge of it to feel exactly how thin the edge was.
He didn't trust himself to keep standing that close to it forever and never once slip.
Better to say it. Say it plainly, the way he'd said it to the two women before her who'd mattered enough to bother, and let her do whatever she needed to do with the information — laugh it off, get uncomfortable, ask him to keep his distance on the account, whatever.
He'd survive any of those outcomes. He'd built a whole life surviving worse.
What he wasn't willing to do was keep standing four feet from a sleeping woman at two in the morning, wanting something he hadn't told her he wanted, and calling that restraint. That wasn't restraint. That was just a longer runway to the same mistake.
He spent Saturday running the conversation in his head anyway, despite the no-rehearsal rule he'd set for the actual moment — not the words, exactly, but the shape of the risk.
Best case, she took it easy, curious even, and something opened up between them that had been trying to open for weeks.
Worst case, she got uncomfortable, asked Priya to shuffle the pairing, and he lost not just the possibility of her but the version of their working relationship he'd genuinely come to depend on.
The banter, the trust, the ease of a person who made twelve-hour days feel shorter than they were.
He weighed that loss seriously, turned it over more than once, and decided, each time, that the alternative — saying nothing, watching himself get closer to another near-miss, letting the whole thing curdle into something he'd have to be ashamed of instead of honest about — was worse.
Sunday he went for a run he didn't need, called his mother back after three missed calls he'd been avoiding for other, unrelated reasons, and generally behaved like a man trying to burn off nervous energy without admitting that's what he was doing.
By Sunday night he'd stopped rehearsing entirely.
There was nothing left to rehearse. He knew what he wanted to say. The only question left was when.
Monday he waited until the office thinned out, same as always, because some habits made sense to keep even when everything else was about to change. Nora was folded into her chair, flats still on, marking up a printout with a red pen like it had personally wronged her.
"Can I say something," he said, "and you don't have to do anything with it. I just want to say it."
She looked up, red pen stilling. "That's an ominous way to start a sentence."
"It's not bad. Or — I don't think it's bad. You'll tell me."
"Okay." She set the pen down fully now, gave him the whole of her attention, which was somehow worse than if she'd kept working. "Go."
He'd stopped rehearsing this days ago, on principle — rehearsed honesty always came out sounding like a pitch, and he didn't want this to land like a pitch. He wanted it to land like the truth, unpolished, whatever shape it came out in.
"I like feet," he said.
It sat there. Flat and stupid and exactly as bad as he'd expected.
"Yours. Specifically." He heard how that landed and kept going, because stopping now would be worse than any of it.
"Not in a small way. It's been — a few weeks.
I didn't say anything because I didn't want you watching yourself around me, and then I worked out that not saying it was doing that anyway. Just quieter."
He ran out of sentence.
"So. That's the thing."
The room went very still. Somewhere down the hall the vending machine cycled its compressor, an ordinary sound doing an unfair amount of work to fill the silence.
Nora didn't say anything for three full seconds, which by his count was the longest three seconds of the entire project, longer than the six weeks, longer than the review dates moving twice, longer than anything Hensley had put them through.
"Okay," she said finally.
"Okay?"
"I need a second. That's not a no. It's a — I need a second."
"Take as long as you need." He meant it. He'd meant every word of the last minute, and he stood there, hands loose at his sides, steady in the way he'd always been steady, and let her have the second, and the one after that, without filling it with anything else.