Landen had been watching for those moments without meaning to. Collecting them.
He was aware that this was not a good habit and couldn't seem to stop.
Then the love scene came. It was the first real one in the manuscript, the moment the two protagonists finally crossed the line they'd been circling for two hundred pages. The prose was spare. Clinical, almost.
He placed his hand on the small of his back. He leaned in. Their mouths met.
Landen had marked iteffectiveon his initial read.
Adriel frowned at it. A slight pull at the corners of his mouth, a furrow between his brows.
"You hate it," Landen said.
"I don't hate it." The pen tapped once, twice against the edge of the manuscript. "It just doesn't… it doesn't feel like it belongs to them."
"Meaning?"
Adriel gestured at the paragraph. "These two have spent the whole book being terrified of each other. He doesn't trust people. He's been hurt before. And then he just…" A slightly helpless motion toward the text. "He just does it. Like it's simple. Like there's no moment where he almost doesn't." He paused, glanced at Landen sideways. "I mean, that's just my read. You marked it effective so maybe I'm wrong, maybe…"
"You're not wrong," Landen said. "Keep going."
Adriel blinked. "He needs to hesitate. Without it, it's just…" He trailed off, searching. "Just them getting from one place to another. The payoff isn't the kiss; the payoff is that he nearlydidn't. That's what makes it mean something. If you skip that you've..."
Landen was quiet for a moment, watching him.
"Show me where you'd put it," he said.
"What?"
"The hesitation. Find me the exact line."
Adriel looked back at the page. His hand lifted and hovered, and then he leaned forward to look more closely, the movement bringing him closer, their knees connecting under the table, and the sound he made was barely anything. A tiny, involuntary catch of breath, almost inaudible. He went very still.
Landen waited.
Adriel didn't pull back. He kept his eyes on the page and his finger found the paragraph.
"Here." His voice had dropped. "His hand should come up, and then stop. Just for a second. Just long enough for him to thinkI shouldn't." His finger was still on the line. "And then he does it anyway. That second changes what the whole thing means. It's not just physical anymore. It's him choosing something he's convinced himself he can't have."
The room was very quiet.
Landen looked at Adriel's finger on the page. At the bare skin of his forearm on the table. At the pulse going at his throat, just slightly too fast. He looked at the color in his cheeks and the careful way he was holding himself, and his breath gone shallow, and felt the want move through him so strongly it almost stole his breath.
"You're right," Landen said. The words came out lower than intended. He reached for his pen, made a note. "I'll talk to the author."
"Yeah," Adriel whispered, still looking at the page. "Okay."
Neither of them moved their knees.
It became a fact of the evening after that.
They worked deeper into the third act. Adriel found problems Landen had missed. Twice. He apologized both times before pointing them out and Landen told him twice that he didn't need to apologize for being right. Adriel nodded both times in the way that meant he'd heard the words and hadn't believed them, and Landen filed this away with everything else he was filing away tonight in the category of things he was not going to examine too closely.
Some time later they hit another snag a scene late in the third act where the protagonist, alone in his apartment, spiraled through a page of interior monologue.
"It's too much," Landen said. "We've established his insecurity three times already. This is repetitive. It's wallowing."
Adriel was quiet. He read it through once, then again, the furrow back between his brows.
