The corner of his mouth does the thing it did in Gavin's office — not quite a smile, something drier, brief. His thumb swipes his nose.
I close the book. "Fine. I'm not reading it."
"I know."
"The bond is—" I stop. Start differently. "It's distracting. When you're close."
Silence. "Yeah," he says. "I know that too."
I hadn't expected that. It sits in my chest and I don't examine it.
"Does it bother you?" I ask.
He considers this. Actually considers it. "It complicates things," he says.
"Because of the reason you're actually here."
He looks at me. "Yes."
"Okay," I say.
I pick the book back up. He goes back to his notes. His coffee is definitely cold by now and he drinks it anyway.
We sit there for another hour. The bond runs quiet between us — not pulling, not insisting, just present the way it's always present when he's close. My shoulders drop at some point without my permission. I notice this and don't say anything about it.
***
I'm putting the book back on the shelf when it happens.
I turn from the shelf and he's there. Not across the room anymore. Close enough that I have to look up, close enough that I can feel the heat off him, and the bond goes from low hum to something that has weight and direction and I am very aware of the bookshelf at my back.
His hand comes up and finds the wall beside my head.
Neither of us moves.
His eyes are dark and the stillness is gone — not all of it, just the professional part — and what's underneath it is the same thing that was in his face for half a second in Gavin's office before he shut it down. It's not shut down now. It's right here.
My wrist is burning. One step between us. Less.
He doesn't take it.
I don't tell him to.
We stay exactly there — his hand on the wall, my back against the shelf, the bond doing what it does and both of us choosing, very deliberately, not to move — and I watch it cost him something. The jaw. The breath he takes that he needed before he took it.
He pulls back.
Not far. Enough.
His hand drops from the wall. He takes a step back and I watch the stillness reassemble — piece by piece, controlled, back into place — and I let him do it because it costs me something too and I am not going to say that out loud.
"Sorry," he says. Low.
"Don't be."
His eyes drill into me.
"I mean it," I say. "Don't apologize for that."
