For a second, just one, he hesitates. Our eyes lock. Something passes between us, quick and unnameable. Curiosity. He has questions about me, I can tell. I quickly scan his hands where he is holding a large folder of mail and notice the ring on his finger. Married. Straight?
Without another word, he slips past me, his cologne trailing behind him. It’s very subtle but clean and unreasonably distracting. I stand there long after he’s gone, as my mind is already plotting.
This is new.
Attraction usually comes to me as an abstract thing, an assessment of basic sexual need where beauty iscataloged. Their usefulness weighed and desire is distant but manageable. But this… this is immediate. Physical and borderline feral.
Predatory.
I resume walking, but my mind doesn’t follow. It stays with the way Leo’s pulse jumped beneath my fingers. The way his voice dipped when he realized who I was. The way he looked at me like he was trying to decide something.
Normal people talk about crushes like they’re sweet, inconvenient aches. For me, it’s a narrowing of my thoughts. The world reduces itself to a single point of interest. Everything else fades into the background. Work, money, reputation, all the irrelevant background noise. What matters now is proximity. To have access and gain control.
I want him.
Not in the clumsy, emotional way people mean when they say that. I don’t want dates or confessions or emotions offered freely. I wanthim— his attention, his reactions, the way he’ll look at me when he realizes exactly how deep this goes. My thoughts get carried away, I want him to become obsessed with me. For me to have so much control over his life, I become his oxygen. Something has clicked inside of me, like a missing puzzle piece that’s activated stimulation of my mind. A purpose.
I retreat to my office, deciding against the coffee, close the door, and allow myself to sit with it.
The hunger.
Leo is a variable I didn’t anticipate. A flawin the system. I could eliminate it easily and distance myself, maybe transfer him, forget the way his name sounds in my head. Instead, I open his employee file on my computer. I’m impatient to know more.
Leo Jones. Photo. Basic information. Schedule.
I smile. I’m fixated on his picture, imagining all the ways I can consume him. When something stimulates me, or in this case when someone does, I don’t let go. I create a plan.
I’ll be careful. Of course I will, he does have a wife I need to think about, who I need to remove from the situation. But when I do claim him, he won’t feel trapped. He won’t feel hunted. He’ll feel chosen. Desired. Safe in a way he doesn’t understand.
By the time he realizes I’m the center of his orbit, it’ll feel natural. I close the file and lean back in my chair, my pulse steady, my thoughts razor-clear.
Leo isn’t just attractive.
He’s inevitable.
And I am very good at getting what I want.
CHAPTER 6 - LEO
I’m sitting on my sofa, my mind getting lost in what happened at work today. Ethan. I keep replaying it. Not the whole day, just that moment in the corridor, when all that mattered was to remember how to breathe.
I’d been carrying a stack of internal mail, thinking about nothing important. Lunch. The ache in my shoulders. Whether Sarah would be in a better mood tonight. The corridor was quiet, polished floors reflecting the ceiling lights like crystal clear water. Then I turned the corner too fast and walked straight into him. When I realized who it was I thought I would get fired on the spot. Ethan is hardly known as the chillest boss.
When he grabbed my arm to steady me, the world did something strange. It didn’t stop exactly, but it slowed enough to become unbearable. He was closer than anyone that powerful had ever been to me before, as a matter of fact, closer than any man has been to me before. Close enough that I could see the faint shadow at his jaw,the precise stillness of his mouth, the way his eyes didn’t widen in surprise like a normal person’s would.
They were just… focused. Locked. On me. Call me crazy, but he fascinates me and it’s concerning. I think it’s because he is not like anyone I’ve ever met. There is something that doesn’t sit right with me. I’m not sure if strange is the right word for him but he’s very different. I just can’t put my finger on it. I felt anxious being so close to him, like he was dangerous? I don’t know if that’s too dramatic, but something feels off about him and it’s a gut feeling that won’t shift. It should deter me away, but somehow it’s drawing me in.
When he spoke to me his voice wasn’t angry or shouty, but with the low tone of authority, he may as well have screamed at me.
As his eyes honed in on me I just froze. I’m nearly the same height as him but his presence is oppressive. Those dark eyes studied me like I was a problem he’d already begun solving. Something about his attention was wrong. Not aggressive. Not flirtatious. It was more clinical, like he wasn’t lookingatme so much as through me, filing away what he found useful, what he found fragile. It was unnerving to have somebody so openly trying to read me.
I stood there like an idiot, gripping the mail too tightly, pulse racing in my neck, while he just watched me. It went on too long for normal social boundaries, which is another thing I have noticed. The pause was long enough for my thoughts to unravel like a ball of wool. Long enough for awareness to bloom under my skin of how close he was, of how easily he occupied the spacearound him, of how small I felt standing there with ink-stained fingers and a borrowed confidence.
After his dismissal, I walked past him on jelly legs, while every nerve lit up like I’d brushed against something charged. I didn’t breathe properly again until I reached the mail room, safe within its four walls.
Now, hours later, I still feel it.
The way his eyes stripped me of flesh and bone. The way his presence pressed into me without touching. The humiliation of knowing I’d been clumsy in front of someone who looked like he’d never been clumsy in his life.
