The apartment had never felt smaller.
Adriel moved through it restlessly. The book he'd been trying to read for an hour sat open on the coffee table, the same page it had been on since morning. His laptop was open on the desk, a manuscript pulled up, the cursor blinking at the end of a half-finished note he had no memory of starting.
Outside, the city was doing its Saturday things. He could hear it distantly; traffic, someone's music from a window above. It had been raining earlier. The light through the blinds was grey and flat and doing nothing to help.
He made tea he didn't drink. He stood at the kitchen window for a while, looking at nothing and then went back to the sofa.
His body kept remembering things without his permission.
The weight of Landen's hands on him. The warmth of his mouth. The low, unhurried voice close to his ear, the particular words in the particular tone,good boy, and the way those two words had done something to him he still didn't entirely have language for; something that had gone down into him like heat, like water finding its level.
He pressed his face into the sofa cushion.
He hadn't heard from Landen since yesterday. Their last interaction had been two minutes at his desk, the file changing hands, that fraction of a second of contact. And then nothing. No message. No call.
He knew what he was doing. He'd been here before, had stood at this exact threshold a hundred times, and he knew, heknew, that the next step was the one where he started to dismantle everything. Where he took what had happened and held it up to the light and found all the ways it could mean nothing.
He tried not to go there.
The thoughts arrived anyway, the way they always did. ]
He's had time to think.
That was it. Landen had gone home the other morning, and then he'd had a day and a half to think about it. To think about what he'd done. Who he'd done it with.
Plenty of time to realize it had been a mistake.
Adriel pressed the heel of his hand against his sternum.
He reached for the book. Read the same paragraph four times. Put it down.
He turned the television on. Found something on Netflix that required no attention whatsoever, a show he'd seen before, and pulled the blanket off the back of the sofa, wrapped it around himself and told himself that this was fine. That this was just a Saturday. That whatever had happened or hadn't happened or was about to stop happening was something he was not going to spend the entire day catastrophizing about.
He spent approximately forty minutes catastrophizing about it.
His phone buzzed in the early afternoon.
He was reaching for it before he'd consciously decided to. The movement was embarrassingly fast, his hand shooting out from under the blanket to snatch it off the coffee table with a speed that would have been humiliating if anyone had been there to see it.
Landen.
He stared at the name for a second. Long enough for his heart to do several things in rapid succession. Then he opened the message.
Are you free tonight?
Adriel's hands were shaking.
He was aware of this as he typed. His thumbs moved over the screen and he told himself to be to be cool, to take a breath before he responded and not reply with the immediate, unguardedyesthat was already forming…
He sent the immediate, unguardedyes.
Stared at it. Felt the flush climbing his neck. Cursed himself under his breath.
The response came back before he'd finished cursing.
I'll come around at 7.
Adriel read it. Read it again. Then he lowered the phone slowly onto his chest, tipped his head back into the sofa cushions, and made a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a laugh; something helpless and involuntary that came from somewhere in the vicinity of his solar plexus and echoed in the empty apartment.
