He should have left hours ago. Miriam had given him the manuscript that morning; first ten chapters of a debut novel. He'd meant to skim it, make preliminary notes, set it aside for the weekend. Instead he'd read the first page and then the second and then the tenth, and somewhere around chapter four he'd stopped pretending he was going anywhere.
It was the story. It had caught him the way stories sometimes did, the way they had since he was a child hiding in library corners. The prose was good, but it was more than that; there was something in it that felt like recognition, like the author hadreached into some quiet place and found words for things Adriel had never been able to say himself.
He liked the office after dark. No one around. No eyes to catch and hold, no conversations to navigate. Just him and a story and his pen moving across the page.
It felt like peace.
He finished the last note. Set his pen down. Looked at the manuscript for a long moment, the pages slightly rumpled from being handled, the margins filled with his small, neat script.
He packed up slowly. Jacket first, shrugged on over his sweater. Bag over one shoulder. The manuscript pages aligned and slid into their folder. Pen into his pocket. Notebook after. He straightened his desk, a final small ritual, and stood for a moment with his hand resting on the edge of it, looking out at the dark office.
The far corners were swallowed in shadow. The path to the elevator still lit, a narrow runway of light leading away.
He walked toward it.
Footsteps soft on the carpet, past the empty cubicles, past the glass-walled conference room, past the break room with its dark windows and its silence.
He pressed the button and waited. The doors opened.
The car was empty, the lights a soft gold, the air still and faintly warm.
He turned, his hand reaching for the button, and came face to chest with someone and froze.
Broad. Solid. A dark shirt, the top button undone, collar slightly loosened from a long day. He knew that shirt. Knew the shapeof the shoulders beneath it, the way the fabric fell, the particular warmth that radiated from the body inside it. The scent that came with it, clean and faintly expensive, familiar now in ways he'd stopped trying to forget.
Landen.
The elevator was small. He hadn't noticed it before, not really, not the way he noticed it now.
He felt stuck. His hand hung in the air between him and the panel, frozen mid-motion, his finger never reaching its target.
Landen reached past him and pressed the button for the ground floor. The doors closed and he moved to stand behind Adriel.
The silence was immediate.
They were standing close. Close enough that Adriel could feel the warmth of Landen's body behind him; a shift in atmosphere. Close enough that if either of them moved even slightly, they would connect.
Adriel didn't move.
He stared at the floor numbers above the door, watching them change in slow increments.
"You stayed late."
Landen's voice was quiet. Directed not at Adriel but at the mirror ahead of them, at the reflection of the two of them standing in this small gold-lit space.
Adriel nodded. "Yeah." His voice came out thin. He cleared his throat. "I needed to finish some things."
A pause.
"Adriel."
Something in the way Landen said his name made Adriel turn his head.
He hadn't meant to. He'd meant to keep staring at the numbers, to count them down, to survive this elevator ride without looking, without hoping.
Landen was already looking at him. Something open. Something raw. Something that looked, impossibly, like hunger.
Adriel's breath caught.
