He had changed clothes twice before leaving the apartment. Three times, if he counted the shirt he'd pulled on and immediately pulled off again before Jenna had appeared in the doorway with the coffee andthe expressionand said, simply,where are you going.
Landen's, he'd said.
Jenna had looked at him for a moment. Then she'd set her coffee down, come into the room, and picked the second sweater off the bed, the dark green one, the one she'd told him twice made his eyes look warm, and handed it to him without a word.
He was wearing it now.
It didn't help. He was still standing in a subway carriage at half past six on a Tuesday evening with his heart doing something loud and uncooperative and his free hand moving without permission; touching the strap of his bag, smoothing the front of his sweater, pressing flat against his thigh. He couldn't keep it still. He'd been trying for three stops.
He replayed Landen's voice in his head.
The thumb at his lip.
Adriel pressed his palm flat against his thigh and held it there.
It's just dinner, he told himself.
Casual. Normal. Fine.
The train pulled into his stop and he moved with the current of bodies onto the platform, up the stairs, out into the evening air. The city was going gold at the edges, the sky darkening toward navy above the buildings. He checked the address on his phone.
And then moved.
∞∞∞
The building was exactly what he'd expected.
Clean stone facade, a uniformed doorman visible through the glass, the lobby beyond warm-lit and high-ceilinged.
He stopped on the pavement outside and looked up at it. Then he looked at his reflection in the glass of the lobby doors.
His hair, which he'd spent ten minutes on and which had immediately done exactly what it always did, the soft honey-blond of it resisting every instruction. His face, which was slightly too flushed and would only get worse once he was inside somewhere warm. He tugged at the hem of his sweater. Watched himself do it in the glass. Stopped.
Stop it, he told himself.
You look fine. You're fine. Go in.
The lobby was marble and low music and a Ficus in a pot that probably cost more than Adriel's monthly rent. The doormannodded at him. Adriel nodded back and kept moving, found the lift, stepped in.
The doors closed.
Mirrored walls again. He stared at the floor numbers and did not look at himself.
The lift opened on the eighth floor.
He found the door.8C, brushed steel numerals, a small potted plant to one side that was either real and meticulously tended or a fake.
He stood in front of it.
His hands were shaking. He pressed them together in front of him. Then at his sides. Then he took a slow breath in through his nose, held it for three counts the way the internet had once told him to, and let it out.
He knocked.
A beat. The soft sound of movement from inside. Then the door opened, and Landen was there. No jacket. Sleeves rolled. A dark shirt, untucked at the hem, the collar open two buttons. He looked…casual. At ease.
"Hey," he said and stepped back to let him in.
Adriel stepped over the threshold and stopped, just for a moment, and took it in. It was large, larger than he'd let himself picture. The ceilings were high, the floors dark hardwood, the walls a warm off-white. Books everywhere, much like in his office at the Greyson House. Shelves that had run out of room and resorted to stacking, piles on the coffee table, two on the kitchen counter. A desk in the corner of the living spacevisible through a half-open door, buried under manuscripts and marked-up pages.
