I feel the loss of it.
Which is fine. Arms come off shoulders. That’s the natural lifecycle of an arm on a shoulder. It means nothing that the hallway suddenly feels about ten degrees colder and a foot wider, that’s just the building, buildings do that.
I dig for my keys.
“Hey.” His voice is quiet. “You gonna be okay?”
“Yeah, no problem, totally fine, thanks.” I get the key in on the first try, which after the day I’ve had feels like a standing ovation. “Really. I’m good.”
“Ella—”
“Don’t call me that.”
I move to pull away.
“Elara.”
My feet stop.
I don’t tell them to. They just stop, because you stop when someone says your actual name in a voice that means it, and I look up at him because apparently that’s happening now too.
And it’s… a lot.
He’s looking right into my eyes and it makes me want to fall in and back away at the exact same time, which is not a thing eyes are supposed to do. My heart is going again, the racing thing, the thing itkeeps doing today that I am choosing to blame on caffeine and a near—Kyle—experience.
And of course —of course— this is the moment my brain decides to replay the elevator.Do you practice that? Is it a club?I asked this man, this exact face, whether his jaw required a membership. Out loud. Less than twenty-four hours ago. There is a version of me that gets to stand in a hallway being looked at like this without the wordsis it a clubsurfacing uninvited, and I will never be her.
Nope. The jaw is not the issue. Focus.
“He knows where you live.” It’s not a question. It’s flat, certain, like he’s stating a fact.
Because he is. He knows it.
And I don’t know why, but I hate that so much right now.
Still, now is now and he’s waiting for an answer.
“…Yeah,” I say. “He does.”
Erik nods and I’ve never seen this look on his face before. I don’t love it on him.
“Then come stay with me.” Simple. Like it’s already decided, like he’s reading me the weather and not asking my opinion of it. “Just a few days. Until this blows over.”
“What — no. No, I can’t do that.”
“You can. I’m literally across the hall.”
“I can’t, I have deadlines—”
“You have a laptop.”
“I work better at my desk, and you have a whole life and things and—” And I can hear it. I can hear the sentence loading itself into the chamber and I cannot get my hand in front of it in time. “—I’m sure you have women.”
Silence.
My eyes go very wide.
“I just meant—” I gesture at nothing, at the hallway, at the concept of the universe. “Like. In general. As a category. A man like you presumably has — a calendar. With things in it. People-shaped things. I don’t need to be a thing in your calendar.”
