"Neither was I."
Landen's voice was even. But lower than usual, rough at the edges. And he still hadn't let go of Adriel's arm.
A beat. Two.
Then he released him. His fingers uncurling one at a time, like it cost him something to do it.
He stepped back. The space between them opened up; cold and sudden and wrong.
Adriel crouched to gather the manuscript pages from the steps. His hands were unsteady. They reached for the scattered pages and missed, fumbled, tried again. He gathered them one by one, edges crumpled where they'd landed badly, and tried to breathe normally.
When he risked a glance up through his lashes, Landen's gaze was on the folder in his hands.
"You should use the elevator." Perfectly ordinary. Level. "These steps are slippery."
It was so absurd, so wildly, fundamentally absurd, that Adriel almost laughed.
He didn't.
"Right," he said instead. Steady. He was proud of that, distantly. "I will."
Landen nodded once. Moved past him down the stairs.
His shoulder didn't quite brush Adriel's as he passed. Close enough that Adriel could feel the displaced air, catch another breath of that scent. Almost worse that it didn't touch. Almost worse that there was that inch of space.
Adriel pressed himself slightly aside to make room. Pages clutched to his chest. Heart still slamming.
Landen's footsteps descended. One flight. Two. The heavy thud of the door below, then silence.
Adriel looked down at the manuscript in his hands. Pages crumpled, out of order. He straightened them mechanically.
He told himself it was an accident. He told himself the look meant nothing. The grip meant nothing. The way neither of them had moved for those few suspended seconds meant nothing at all.
He told himself. He told himself again.
Then he pushed off the wall and climbed back to the tenth floor. He made it to his desk before he noticed.
The manuscript pages were completely out of order. Page forty-seven on top of page twelve. Page eighty-three migrated to the middle.
He sat with his hands in his lap and did nothing for a long, long time. The floor hummed around him; phones, keyboards, murmured conversations, the ordinary sounds of an ordinary afternoon.
He heard none of them.
Chapter 7
Adriel
The evening light in Adriel's bedroom was the color of weak tea, washing the walls in a pale, gloomy yellow. He lay on his back on the unmade bed, phone pressed to his ear. The ceiling above him was a blank slate, marred by a single old water stain.
His father's voice boomed through the speaker. Familiar and sprawling.
He'd been staring at this same stain since he'd gotten home. Come through the front door, dropped his bag in the hallway, sat on the edge of the bed, and simply, stopped. Hadn't changed. Hadn't eaten. Hadn't done any of the ordinary functional things a person did at the end of a working day. Just sat, then lay back, and stared at the water stain, and replayed the scene from the stairwell for what felt like the hundredth time.
His mouth. Landen had looked at his mouth.
He'd been turning it over all day like a stone he couldn't put down, examining it from every angle, and every angle kept producing the same result; he didn't know what it meant and couldn't trust himself to know.
His phone had rung at seven and he'd answered on autopilot, because it was his father and not answering required more energy than he currently had.
