I should’ve been watching the road. And Iwaswatching the road. Mostly.
But my peripheral vision was doing things I hadn’t authorized. Tracking the way the light hit her skin, the warm olive tone turning golden where the sun touched her cheekbone. The curve of her mouth when she was concentrating, her lower lip caught between her teeth. The line of her collarbone where her blouse sat, the way it disappeared into shadow.
I'd never noticed how someone's breathing changed when they were concentrating. Never tracked the small movements of a person's hands or noticed their shoulders settle when they forgot they were being watched. I could build entire worlds around the fall of light across a digital surface, spend hours perfecting a shadow to make a landscape feel alive. I had never once felt that same pull toward a real person.
What was I doing? Why was I even noticing every little detail about her?
This was not a professional observation. I was aware of that. But the awareness didn’t stop it.
Back at the office, my Rubik’s cube sat untouched on my desk for the first time in months. I couldn’t pick it up because my hands wanted to do something else. My brain was stuck in a loop: the corridor, her voice.
I pulled up the security system on my laptop. Badge-in logs. Her record. Today: seven forty-two a.m. I scrolled back. Monday: seven thirty-eight. Tuesday: seven forty-one. Wednesday: seven fifty-four.
I stared at Wednesday. Fourteen minutes later than average. What happened on Wednesday?
Thursday: seven forty. Friday: seven forty-two.
I couldn't explain to myself why I was tracking my assistant's arrival times down to the minute. I was aware this wasn't normal. Aware that if Dr. Adler could see my screen right now, we'd be having a very different conversation on Thursday.
I closed the tab. Straightened my pen against the desk's edge. Aligned my phone parallel to the laptop. My hand was back on the trackpad before I'd made a conscious decision to move it, and her badge log was open again.
This wasn’t me. I didn’t fixate on people. People were variables I managed, accounted for, and kept at a distance. I didn’t memorize their schedules or study their profiles or recall the sound of their voices defending me in an empty corridor.
I picked up the cube. Solved it in nineteen seconds. Put it down. Picked it up and solved it again. Seventeen. Faster, and it didn't matter. The click of the final face snapping into place usually quieted something in my head. Tonight it was just noise.
I opened the Meridian file. Read the same paragraph three times without absorbing a single word. Closed it. Pulled up theenvironmental design specs for Act III instead and got halfway through a lighting note before I realized I was thinking about the sun catching her cheekbone in the car.
I put the cube down. Lined it up with the corner of my desk. My thoughts kept circling back to her anyway, persistent and impossible to shut off.
The next morning, I noticed her desk before I entered my office.
Her workspace was different. The surface gleamed. Someone had gone beyond the usual office wipe-down, scrubbed it with a thoroughness that took real time and real intention. And there, beside her monitor, was a bottle of hand sanitizer. My brand. The green label. The unscented formula I ordered from a supplier in London because every American brand had fragrance in it.
Her keyboard had been wiped down. I could see the faint streak marks from the cloth. Under her desk, her outdoor shoes were tucked neatly to the side. She was wearing different ones. Indoor flats. Clean soles. Shoes that hadn't touched the pavement.
I walked into my office and went straight for the coffee machine. I made my own coffee. Always had. My machine, my beans, my process. A roaster in Bath who’d been supplying my grandfather’s household for decades. Nobody touched it. Nobody poured from it. Some things are non-negotiable.
I was measuring the beans when she appeared in the doorway.
"Mr. Hunter, your nine-thirty confirmed and the Meridian revision notes are on your desk."
I turned around.
Her curls were down today. Loose around her shoulders, dark brown shot through with copper where the sun from the window behind me caught them. The light fell across her faceand brought out the warmth in her skin, golden and clean, and her eyes were that shade of brown I'd been noticing against my will since the elevator. She was wearing a simple blouse, nothing remarkable, and yet I was standing there with a coffee scoop in my hand forgetting how numbers worked.
Beautiful.
She wasbeautiful.
I’d known that since the market, since the half second between her crashing into me and the coffee ruining my shirt. But knowing it from across a desk was one thing. Knowing it at six feet in a doorway with morning light on her face was a different problem entirely. The kind of problem I didn’t have a protocol for.
"New shoes," I said, because my mouth needed something to do that wasn’t making it obvious I’d been staring.
She looked down at her feet. Back up at me. "Yeah. I brought indoor ones."
"You changed them."
"The ones I walked in with are under my desk." She said it like it was nothing.
