She could step back. Give me room. Let me through. That’s the efficient move, the civil move, consistent with the careful withdrawal she’s been running for four days.
Only she doesn’t yield.
Neither do I.
We’re close. Close enough that I can smell her hair, which is clean. She must have washed it this morning, and the soap they stock in the residential section has a specific scent, mild, slightly herbal, that I’ve never paid attention to on anyone else. We’re close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off her skin in the narrow space between us. Close enough that her exhale reaches me.
Somewhere down the corridor, two Runts are arguing about a shift assignment. A door opens and closes and boots clang on the walkway overhead. The Rot does what it does, carrying on, indifferent to two people standing in a doorframe in a standoff.
Vi looks up at me. The polite mask is gone.
What’s underneath isn’t anger. I was ready for anger. I’ve been braced for it, waiting for the moment she’d stop being civil and start kicking my ass with her words and attitude. This isn’t that.
This is knowledge. Steady, certain, unblinking knowledge. Her eyes on mine saying, without a word:You pulled away from me.
She’s not asking. She’s not challenging. She’s just… seeing me. Looking straight through the operational logic and the controlled, measured exterior I maintain because maintaining it is the thing I’m most comfortable with.
Like I say, my bad.
And for those three or four seconds, I let her stare me down.
I don’t know why. I should redirect. Should break eye contact, angle my body, say something functional likeexcuse meorgo aheador anything forcing us into civility. Instead, I standin a doorframe eight inches from a woman I refused to kiss four days ago and let her glare at me. Really glare, like how she used to during arguments, that close-range negotiation gaze, except this isn’t a negotiation. It’s an acknowledgment.
The moment drags, accompanied by a heat along my forearms, an awareness of every point where her proximity registers on my body. The edge of the crate against my arm. Her breath on my skin. The inches between her mouth and my throat, which isn’t anything I should be measuring, but here we are. She’s so fucking beautiful.
Vi breaks first.
She angles the crate to the side and takes one step past me through the doorframe, and as she does, her shoulder brushes me. Not an accident, but not quite deliberate either. The contact point is small, maybe two inches of her body against mine, lasting less than a second, sending a current through me that goes right to my gut.
Then she’s past me, in the supply closet. Her back to me, setting the crate down, reaching for the shelf where the fabric is stacked, moving on. Done.
I take a step into the corridor. Then another. My legs work. My posture is correct. Anyone looking at me from a distance would see a man walking down a hallway at a normal pace with a normal expression doing nothing worth noticing.
Except my hand shakes for a quick second.
I register it with a kind of clinical observation, as if it’s happening to someone else. A fine tremor, the kind that comes from adrenaline, not fear, the body’s response to sustained proximity and denied contact. Physiological, manageable, but not meaningful.
Yeah, right.
I stop walking, put my back against the wall, and press my hands flat against my thighs. Breathe in. Hold. Release.
The tremor slows, then stops.
I give it another ten seconds. Then I push off the wall and keep moving.
It takes longer than it should.
Everything with Vi takes longer than it should. The arguments I should shut down in thirty seconds that stretch into five minutes because she finds angles I didn’t anticipate. The things I should forget that stay pinned to the front of my mind for hours. The controlled distance I should be able to maintain that keeps collapsing to eight inches in a doorframe because neither of us will yield.
I think about what I saw in her eyes. That steady, knowing look. There’s no heat in it, or rather, heat held in reserve, banked behind the knowledge, kept low and controlled because she’s learned to play the long game and the long game doesn’t show its cards in a supply closet.
She’s not going to make this easy.
Good. Easy is a variable I’d distrust anyway.
I reach the central concourse and fall back into the current of foot traffic and routine and the reliable, unambiguous demands of operational life. There are tasks to do. Schedules to check. People to manage. Safety to maintain.
I attend to all of it. Efficiently. Precisely. Correctly.
