"I could use another set of eyes on this tonight."You idiot."If you don't have somewhere to be."
Adriel's expression moved through several things rapidly. Surprise first. Something that might have been pleased, pressed flat almost immediately. Then the faint bloom of pink at his collar that Landen had also stopped pretending he didn't notice.
"I… no. I mean, I don't have somewhere to be." A pause. "I mean yes. I can stay. If that's… yes."
"Good. Tell Miriam to order food before she leaves."
Adriel nodded, tugged at his sweater again, and went to find Miriam.
Landen looked back down at the manuscript and allowed himself exactly three seconds of acknowledgement, that he had just invented a reason to keep his junior editor in the building for the next several hours, before closing the door on that line of thinking entirely and going back to work.
∞∞∞
Miriam left at half six with a takeout order placed. The food arrived twenty minutes later. Landen cleared space on the corner table, pulled the relevant pages over, and dragged his chair around to angle toward the reading lamp.
Adriel settled into the chair beside him with his notebook open and his pen uncapped, sitting with that slightly formal posture; spine straight, knees together, hands on the manuscript.
Landen pulled his chair a fraction closer to the lamp. Practical. The light was better this way. The fact that it also put him approximately fourteen inches from Adriel instead of two feet was simply a coincidence, and he was not going to spend any time thinking about it.
They ate while they worked, or Landen did; he noticed after a while that Adriel's container was still mostly full, pushed to the edge of the table, as he read with his bottom lip caught between his teeth, his pen moving in small, neat notations and had apparently forgotten the food existed. Landen watched him for a moment. Looked back at his own page.
They moved through the first act and into the second. The rain had started around five and hadn't let up, a steady hushing rush against the tall windows, the city lights beyond the glass blurring into each other in the wet dark.
The floor outside was fully dark now, only the lamp and the reading light holding their warm circle in the middle of all thatblack. It should have felt strange, the two of them alone in the building at this hour.
It didn't. That was, perhaps, its own kind of problem.
Adriel was tentative at first; voice soft, observations hedged, a reflexivesorrypreceding most of what he said as if his opinions required apology before delivery. Landen waited it out, asking questions and letting the silence sit until Adriel filled it, and gradually, over the first hour, the tentativeness receded. His voice steadied. His pen moved with more purpose. He stopped apologizing before every sentence and started just saying the thing, and when he said the thing it was usually right.
By eight o'clock Adriel had pushed his sleeves up to the elbow and was leaning slightly forward over the manuscript, and Landen was looking at his forearms on the table, the soft skin of his inner wrist, and had read the same paragraph four times without absorbing a word of it.
He made himself focus.
He read the next passage aloud, voice low and even.
"…and he understood then that the shape of his days had been determined not by desire but by the absence of it, a life constructed in the negative space of what he'd been too afraid to…"
"Claim." Adriel said quietly, almost to himself. The pink came in immediately, fast and vivid, sweeping from his collar to his hairline.
"Sorry… I'm sorry, that was… it was a reflex, I didn't mean to interrupt." He stopped himself. Pressed his lips together. Stared at the table. "Sorry."
Landen looked at him for a moment.
"You're right," he said.
Adriel looked up, still pink. "Oh."
"He's been circling it for three paragraphs. Couldn't land on it." Landen kept his voice neutral with some effort. "You heard it before I did."
Adriel made a small uncertain sound and looked back at the page, and there it was; the small involuntary movement at the corner of his mouth that he pressed flat almost immediately, like he wasn't sure he was allowed to be pleased with himself. It lasted less than a second.
Landen saw it anyway.
He looked back at the manuscript, made a notation in the margin, and did not say anything else about it because he didn't trust what else might come out.
They kept working. The rain kept falling. Landen was aware of Adriel's presence beside him with a constancy that was beginning to interfere with his ability to do his job.
The warmth of him in the cool office air. The smell of his soap, clean and faint, specific enough that Landen had been trying to stop noticing it since approximately seven o'clock and had not succeeded. The quiet sounds of his breathing, his pen moving, the small shifts of his body when something in the text caught his attention. The way his whole face changed when it did; the self-consciousness dropping away, something alive and unguarded in him that was entirely different from the careful version he carried through the office during the day.
