He’s still there.
There’s a pressure that comes from being looked at by someone who doesn’t seem to need anything from you and is still looking. Being looked at is something I’ve spent years avoiding, for a lot of reasons. I’ve felt every kind of attention and learned how to manage all of it: the scanning kind that wants to know if you’re a threat, the absent kind that looks through you to the thing it actually wants, the practiced kind that performs interest without meaning it. I know how to deflect all of them.
This is none of those, and I don’t know what it is, and my body is doing something I never gave it permission to do. Mostly shaking.
I take an involuntary step back and bump into the shelving. And suddenly he’s looming overhead, pressed right up against me this time.
“What—?” I squawk, my heart going a mile a minute.
His bicep is over my head, my face against the chest I’d just been imagining myself nuzzling into.
God, he’s warm.
I look up in time to see him push a box back onto the shelf where it had been about to tip off.
“Don’t want that falling on you,” he says, and steps away.
Something in me moves.
Not away from him. That’s the part that makes no sense. I’ve spent two years keeping careful distance from every person I meet, and what happens in my chest when he’s that close is not distance. It’s a pull, low under my ribs, animal and certain, there before I can stop it. It frightens me more than a raised hand would, because I don’t know what to do with it.
“You okay?” he says.
“Yes. Thanks,” I manage
I look at the clipboard where I’ve dropped it. I stoop and pick it up.
He’s quiet a moment. Then: “Clean count?”
I look up.
“The list,” he says. “You’ve started over twice.”
My hand doesn’t tighten on the board. “I found a discrepancy.”
He nods once, slow, like that answers something that wasn’t the question he asked.
I understand, with the cold clarity of a woman who’s spent too many months being careful, that this man did not come in here for an airway kit.
I don’t change my face. I’ve had a lot of practice.
“Long week,” I say, which isn’t a lie.
He holds the case at his side and looks at me with that unnerving intensity again.
“Thanks for the help,” he says finally. “Grace.”
He says my name the way you say a thing you mean to keep track of.
Then he goes.
The door swings shut. The room comes back to its right size.
I stand there a full minute. The glamour’s still loose around me; I can feel it, sitting unset, the way it does when something’s gotten too close to the surface for the trick to cover.
I put the clipboard on the cart and start the count again from the top.
He came in for something ordinary, or he didn’t. He saw me, which nobody does. He stood close enough that I felt the heat coming off him, and something in me answered before I could stop it, and that—that animal pull—is the part I can’t put down.
