Hours pass. I don’t move unless I have to. I don’t speak unless spoken to.
When he asks if I want water, I say, “No, sir.”
When he asks if I need rest, I say, “No, sir.”
When his eyes catch on me and linger—searching for the man who looked at him like he mattered—I keep my face empty.
At some point he sets down his phone and crosses the room.
I track him the way I track any approach. Not fear. Not aggression.
Just awareness.
He stops close, close enough that his heat reaches me faintly through the air, close enough that my skin remembers his hand on my jaw.
He doesn’t touch me.
“Maksim,” he says quietly. “What happened?”
“Sir?”
“Something changed.” His voice goes careful, like he’s stepping around broken glass. “Between the office and now. Tell me.”
The honest answer would tear open the locked room inside me. It would spill everything onto the floor.
The honest answer would say:I saw it. I saw what you wrote. I saw what you did on purpose.
But I don’t give him that.
I give him what the version of me he built would give.
“Nothing changed, sir. I’m doing what you asked.”
His eyes sharpen.
“Last night,” he says, and there’s a rough edge to it now. “In the shower. That was real.”
Something behind my ribs stirs. The locked room shakes once, like someone inside it kicked the door.
I don’t let it show.
“If my behavior crossed a line,” I say, “it won’t happen again.”
His face shifts like he’s been struck.
“That’s not what I’m—” He stops, restarts. “I’m not asking for an apology. I’m asking if it was real. What you felt. What we almost?—”
“Sir,” I cut in, polite and final. “You have work. Your security needs my attention.”
A boundary, put back into place.
Professional.
He stands there for a long moment, staring at me like he’s trying to find the crack where he can get his fingers under the edge of what I’m doing.
Then he nods once and walks back to his chair.
He doesn’t try again.
