Chapter 1: The Real Version
The first thing I noticed about Daniel Mercer was the way he occupied space.
Not aggressively. Not like the finance-bros who swaggered through the corridors of Halstrom & Keene with their too-loud laughs and their performative shoulder-clapping. Daniel occupied space the way a well-built piece of furniture does-solid, unapologetic, inevitable. When he dropped into the Aeron chair beside mine on my third Monday at the firm, the pneumatic cylinder hissed a low, defeated psssshhhhh, and I felt the vibration through the floor.
“You’re the new guy,” he said. Not a question.
“Leo,” I said, and immediately regretted offering my name so quickly. Desperate. Eager.
“Daniel.” His hand enveloped mine. Warm. Dry. A single pump and release. “They’ve got you on the Morrison account?”
“Junior reconciliations. Mostly data entry for now.”
He snorted. “Glamorous.”
That first morning, I stole glances at him while pretending to navigate the labyrinthine shared drive. Late twenties, maybe early thirties. Dark hair cropped close at the sides, longer on top, a single unruly curl that flopped onto his forehead when he leaned toward his monitor. Stubble that existed in that perfect eight-hour shadow zone, the kind that suggested he’d shaved that morning but his jaw simply refused to be contained. A watch-heavy, silver, clearly expensive-that sat on a wrist thick with veins and dark hair.
The veins continued onto the backs of his hands.
By lunchtime, I’d catalogued his phone background (a Ducati Monster 821, matte black), his coffee order (black, two sugars, which he called “candy coffee” with a self-deprecating grimace), and the fact that he spoke to his girlfriend on his morning break using that specific vocal register men use when they’re performing casualness for an audience.
“Yeah babe. No, I know. Listen, I’ll grab the wine on the way back, okay? Chloe’s coming at seven, right? Right. Okay. Yeah. Bye.”
He hung up, exhaled through pursed lips-pfffffft-and caught me looking.
“Women,” he said, shaking his head with theatrical exhaustion. “You got a girlfriend, Leo?”
The question landed like a pebble in still water. Ripples spreading outward.
“Boyfriend, actually.”
I said it the way I always said it: breezy, unapologetic, a little dismissive. The way that communicated this is normal, this is boring, let’s move on.
Daniel’s eyebrows lifted a quarter-inch. “No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Long-term?”
“Three years. His name’s Patrick. He’s in publishing.”
“What’s he publish?”
“Mostly academic textbooks. Sociology, gender studies, that kind of thing.”
Daniel nodded slowly, processing this information with the careful deliberation of someone who’d been raised to believe that gay men were an exotic species requiring anthropological study. But there was no hostility in his expression. If anything, he looked… curious.
“Cool,” he said finally. “Cool cool cool.”
He turned back to his monitor, and I returned to my reconciliations, and the fluorescent lights hummed their monotonous zzzzzzzzzz overhead, and the moment passed.
Or so I thought.
-
The comments started the following week.
I was bent over the printer, wrestling with a paper jam in Tray 3, when a low whistle cut through the copy room’s white noise.
“Jesus Christ, Leo.”
I straightened up so fast my spine cracked. Daniel stood in the doorway, arms crossed, a grin spreading across his face like spilled syrup.
“What?”
“You’ve been holding out on me.” He nodded toward-well, toward my lower half. “That’s not standard-issue accounting ass. That’s an asset.”
The word asset landed with deliberate weight, a pun so obvious it was almost camp. My face went hot. Not blushing-I don’t blush, I’m twenty-eight years old, I pay taxes and have a 401(k)-but something adjacent to it. A warmth that crept up from my collar and settled in my cheeks.
“The printer’s jammed,” I said stupidly.
“I can see that.” He didn’t move from the doorway. “You need a hand?”
“I’ve got it.”
“Clearly not, since you’ve been bent over for like three minutes and there’s paper everywhere.”
I looked down at the confetti of crumpled sheets around my shoes. He wasn’t wrong.
“Step aside,” Daniel said, and it wasn’t a request.
He shouldered past me-close enough that I caught his scent, something woody and clean, sandalwood maybe, or cedar-and crouched in front of the printer. His fingers, those thick, veined things, navigated the mechanical guts with surprising delicacy.
“You gotta lift this latch,” he said. “See? Right here. Everyone misses it.”
Clk.
The drawer slid open, revealing the accordioned scrap of paper that had caused the jam. Daniel extracted it with a magician’s flourish-shrrrrrp-and tossed it into the recycling bin.
“Ta-da.”
“My hero.”
“Don’t mention it.” He stood, brushed imaginary dust from his slacks, and paused. His eyes traveled downward again, deliberate, unsubtle, lingering. “Seriously, though. You play sports or something? Squats? You’ve got a whole… situation back there.”
“Genetics,” I said, and immediately wanted to die. Genetics. Who says that?
Daniel laughed-a real laugh, loud and unguarded, the kind that crinkles the corners of his eyes. “Genetics. Okay. Sure. Whatever you say, Leo.”
He clapped me on the shoulder as he left, a brief warm pressure through my dress shirt, and I stood alone among the humming machines for a full thirty seconds before I remembered how to move.
That night, I told Patrick about it.
We were eating takeout Thai on the sofa, some reality competition playing on the television with the volume low. Patrick was beautiful in the way indie film protagonists are beautiful: angular, thoughtful, perpetually slightly rumpled. He wore glasses with thick black frames and had the habit of pushing them up his nose with his middle finger when he was concentrating. Right now he was concentrating on disentangling a pad thai noodle from its brethren.
“He sounds like a dick,” Patrick said.
“He’s not. He’s just… like that. Straight guy stuff.”
“Straight guys don’t comment on other men’s asses in the workplace, Leo. That’s, like, textbook harassment.”
I twirled my fork. “It didn’t feel like harassment.”
Patrick looked at me over his glasses. “What did it feel like?”
A question I didn’t know how to answer. Because the truth was, I didn’t know. It felt like something-a needle scratching the vinyl of my carefully organized life-but naming that something felt dangerous. It felt like opening a door I wasn’t supposed to acknowledge existed.
“He’s just a bit of a bro,” I said. “Annoying but harmless.”
Patrick made a noncommittal sound and returned to his noodles. The conversation ended there, but something continued vibrating beneath my skin long after the dishes were cleared and the television clicked off and Patrick’s breathing evened into sleep beside me.
-
The desk arrangement at Halstrom & Keene was an exercise in forced intimacy.
Our workstations were separated by a low partition-frosted glass, waist-high-which meant that every shift of Daniel’s weight, every crack of his knuckles, every slrrrrrp of his coffee through the lid’s drinking hole registered in my peripheral awareness. I knew when he was on a difficult call (his left knee bounced, thump-thump-thump against the underside of his desk). I knew when he was bored (he spun his pen between his fingers in increasingly elaborate patterns, and occasionally dropped it-clatter-clatter-roll). I knew when he was scrolling through his phone under the desk because his breathing would shift, shallow and quiet, the unmistakable rhythm of covert distraction.
By my fourth week, I’d become fluent in the language of Daniel Mercer.
“Okay, serious question,” he said one Thursday afternoon, spinning his chair to face me with enough momentum that his knee knocked against the partition. Thwump. “Hypothetically. If you were a woman. Would you rather a guy tell you the dress looks nice, or would you rather he… I dunno… notice something specific? Like, ‘that color works on you,’ versus just ‘you look good’?”
I saved my spreadsheet-ctrl-S, reflexive, stalling-and swiveled to face him. “Is this about Marissa?”
Marissa was his girlfriend. I’d pieced together fragments: she worked in pharmaceutical sales, she had a Chihuahua named Oliver that Daniel despised (“rat with a superiority complex”), and she’d been dropping hints about engagement rings with increasing frequency.
“It’s about Marissa,” he admitted. “She says I’m not… observant.”
“Are you?”
“I noticed your ass, didn’t I?”
Said with such easy, grinning confidence that it took a moment for the words to register. My stomach performed a strange gymnastics routine-a flip, a twist, a dismount I didn’t quite nail.
“That’s not observing,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt. “That’s objectifying.”
“Ooh, big word.”
“I’m an accountant. We’re required by law to know words of three syllables or more.”
Daniel laughed. “Okay, fair. But seriously. Help me out here. You’re a guy. You date guys. What do you notice?”
The question was unexpectedly sincere. He’d leaned forward, elbows on knees, that single curl falling across his forehead. The fluorescent lights caught the amber flecks in his brown eyes.
“I notice…” I paused, considering. “Hands. I notice hands first. What they’re doing. How they move.”
Daniel looked down at his own hands as if seeing them for the first time. He turned them over-palms up, palms down-then curled them into loose fists.
“Huh,” he said. “Hands.”
“And voice. Not what someone’s saying, but how. The cadence. Whether they rush or take their time.”
“What about my voice?”
The temperature in the office seemed to increase by half a degree.
“You rush,” I said. “Except when you don’t.”
Daniel stared at me for a long moment. The kind of moment where something unspoken transfers between two people, an electrical charge jumping the gap. Then he blinked, and it was gone, and he was grinning again.
“You’re interesting, Leo. You know that?”
“I’m a junior accountant who spends eight hours a day reconciling spreadsheets. I’m the least interesting person in this building.”
“Nah.” He shook his head slowly. “That’s what you want people to think.”
He spun back to his monitor, leaving me with the distinct impression that I’d just lost a game I hadn’t known we were playing.
-
Patrick’s publishing house threw a fundraiser in early October-a black-tie affair in a converted warehouse in Williamsburg, all exposed brick and string lights and canapés that cost more than my weekly grocery budget. I wore my best suit, the charcoal Valentino I’d found at a consignment shop two years ago, and Patrick wore a velvet blazer the color of red wine.
“You look edible,” I murmured as we climbed the stairs to the entrance.
“Don’t get any ideas. I have to schmooze.”
Patrick kissed my cheek-quick, firm, possessive-and plunged into the crowd with the practiced ease of someone who’d been navigating publishing parties for a decade. I watched him for a moment: the handshakes, the shoulder touches, the way he tilted his head when someone important was speaking.
“Quite the specimen.”
The voice came from my left. A woman in her fifties, silver-streaked hair, a necklace that probably cost as much as my monthly rent.
“He’s good at what he does,” I said.
“I’m sure he is.” Her smile was knowing. “I’m Margaret. I’ve known Patrick since he was an intern. He speaks highly of you.”
“That’s surprising. He usually just complains about my laundry habits.”
Margaret laughed-a smoky sound, like whiskey being poured. “Oh, I like you. Come. Let me introduce you around.”
She took my arm and guided me through the party, and for an hour I was Leo-the-boyfriend-of-Patrick, making small talk with literary agents and marketing directors, nodding at conversations about advances and print runs and the death of literary fiction. And it was fine. It was pleasant. It was the life I’d chosen, the life I was building, the life that involved a mortgage and joint checking accounts and someone to split a bottle of wine with on Tuesday nights.
But as I stood there, nodding at a publicist’s story about the Frankfurt Book Fair, my mind drifted to the office. To Daniel. To the way he’d looked at his hands when I’d told him I noticed hands first.
-
Monday morning. 8:47 AM. I was at my desk, coffee cooling to the temperature of disappointment, when Daniel arrived.
He was wearing a suit I hadn’t seen before-navy, three-piece, fitted with the kind of precision that suggested a tailor had been involved. His hair was slightly different, the sides faded shorter, the top more deliberately styled. And he was wearing a new cologne. Spicier. More assertive.
“Someone got a haircut,” I said without looking up from my screen.
“Someone’s observant.”
“It’s literally my only personality trait.”
Daniel dropped into his chair with his characteristic heaviness-whumpf-and immediately began the morning ritual of logging into the various systems required for his job. The clk-clk-clk of his password, the ding of the VPN connecting, the soft fwip of his mouse sliding across its pad.
“Busy weekend?” he asked.
“Patrick’s work thing. Black tie. Very fancy.”
“Nice. Get laid after?”
The question was so casual, so utterly unselfconscious, that I actually laughed. “That’s not an appropriate workplace question.”
“We’re accountants. Nobody cares what we do.”
“Marissa have a good weekend?”
Daniel’s expression flickered-something complicated, briefly visible, then smoothed away. “Yeah. Fine. We did brunch with her parents on Sunday. Her mom asked about the ring again.”
“Again?”
“Third time this month.” He rubbed his jaw, the stubble making a soft shhhh-shhhh sound against his palm. “I dunno, man. It’s a lot of pressure.”
“You don’t want to marry her?”
A pause. Too long to be comfortable.
“I didn’t say that.” Another pause. “I just… do you ever feel like there’s a script? Like, society hands you this script and you’re supposed to follow it, and if you don’t, people look at you weird?”
“I’m gay,” I said flatly. “I know exactly what it’s like to not follow the script.”
Daniel stared at me. Several seconds. The kind of staring that’s usually followed by an apology or an awkward subject change.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “I guess you do.”
He turned back to his computer, and I returned to my reconciliations, but the air between us had changed texture. Thicker. More charged. The way air feels before a thunderstorm.
-
That afternoon, he suggested we get lunch together.
“There’s a deli on 38th,” he said. “Best pastrami in Midtown. You eat meat, right?”
“I’m gay, not vegetarian.”
“Same thing, basically.”
I laughed despite myself, and fifteen minutes later we were walking through the Midtown lunch rush, shoulders occasionally colliding with strangers and with each other. Daniel walked like he did everything else: confidently, taking up space, completely unbothered by the human obstacle course around him.
The deli was cramped and noisy, the air thick with the smell of cured meat and pickle brine. We found a table in the back corner, wedged between a refrigerated drinks case and a wall covered in signed celebrity headshots.
“So,” Daniel said, around a mouthful of pastrami on rye, “how’d you and Patrick meet?”
“Dating app. The boring modern answer.”
“What app?”
“Why, you looking to switch teams?”
He snorted. Snrk. “Just curious. I’ve never… I mean, I don’t know anyone who…”
“Who’s gay?”
“Who met their boyfriend on an app. I guess.”
I set down my sandwich. The pastrami was indeed excellent-peppery, tender, the kind of meat that made you understand why people waited in lines for this stuff.
“We matched. We messaged for a week. We met for coffee, which turned into dinner, which turned into him spending the night at my place.” I shrugged. “It’s not a very interesting story.”
“Spending the night. Like…” Daniel waggled his eyebrows.
“We had sex, yes. Is that what you’re asking?”
His ears went pink. The tops of them, just the curved shells visible above his haircut. “I’m not-I mean, you don’t have to-”
“Relax. I’m not going to give you a play-by-play.”
“Why not?” The pink deepened, spread to his cheeks. “I mean-not because I’m, like, into it. Just curiosity. Academic.”
“Academic.”
“Yeah. Like… how does it work? With two guys?”
I tilted my head, studying him. He was deeply uncomfortable, that much was obvious-his shoulders were up near his ears, and he was gripping his sandwich with unnecessary force-but he was also leaning forward. Not pulling away. Wanting the answer.
“There’s more than one way,” I said. “Same as straight sex. But typically, one person does the penetrating and one person gets penetrated.”
“What are you?”
“The person who gets penetrated.”
The word hung between us. Three syllables. Clinical and precise and somehow, in the cramped chaos of the deli, the most obscene thing I’d ever said out loud.
Daniel exhaled slowly. Haaaaaaah. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I asked. You answered. I’m processing.”
“Processing.”
“My brain is doing calculations.”
“You’re an accountant. Your brain is always doing calculations.”
He laughed-too loud, slightly manic-and several nearby diners glanced our way. Then he leaned back in his chair, shaking his head, that single curl bouncing on his forehead.
“You’re different than I expected, Leo.”
“What did you expect?”
“I dunno. Quieter. More… I dunno.”
“Gay men can be loud and opinionated. We’re not a monolith.”
“No, I know. I just…” He trailed off, searching for words that apparently didn’t exist. “I’m glad you’re my desk neighbor, that’s all.”
Something in my chest did a complicated maneuver. Half flutter, half clench.
“I’m glad too,” I said.
-
November arrived with a cold snap that turned the office windows into sheets of condensation every morning. Patrick and I celebrated our fourth anniversary-dinner at the Italian place where we’d had our first date, a bottle of wine that cost too much, sex that was familiar and comfortable and slightly perfunctory, like a song we’d played too many times.
“I love you,” he said afterward, his head on my chest.
“I love you too,” I said.
And I meant it. I did. Patrick was good and kind and patient and he folded my laundry when I forgot and he remembered my mother’s birthday. He was everything a person could want in a partner.
So why was I lying awake at 2 AM, staring at the ceiling, thinking about my straight colleague’s hands?
-
“Okay, Leo, I need your opinion.”
Daniel had wheeled his chair around to my side of the partition-a first. He was close enough that I could see the individual pores on his nose, the tiny scar bisecting his left eyebrow, the way his stubble grew slightly thinner on the left side of his jaw.
“On what?”
He pulled out his phone, thumbed it open, and showed me a photo. Marissa. Blonde, pretty, wearing a sundress on what looked like a beach vacation. She was laughing at something off-camera.
“She wants to use this for the Christmas card this year. I think it’s bad.”
“It’s not bad.”
“She looks…” He struggled for words. “I dunno. Fake.”
Looking at the photo, I could see what he meant. The laugh was technically correct-teeth visible, crinkled eyes-but something about it felt performed. The smile of someone who knew they were being photographed and was delivering what the photographer wanted.
“There’s another one,” Daniel said, swiping. “Here.”
This one was different. Candid, clearly-Marissa was looking off to the side, her expression thoughtful, the wind catching her hair. She looked real in this one. She looked like a person rather than a subject.
“That’s better,” I said.
“Right?” He swiped back and forth between the two. “Why is she so obsessed with the fake one?”
“Because she thinks it’s what people want to see.”
Daniel looked at me. Really looked, in a way he rarely did-sustained eye contact, no jokes, no deflections.
“You do that,” he said quietly.
“Do what?”
“You’re different at the office. With everyone else. All polite and quiet and buttoned-up. But when it’s just us…” He gestured vaguely between us. “You’re you.”
My throat tightened.
“Everyone performs at work,” I said. “That’s what professionalism is.”
“Sure. But you’re a better performer than most.” He locked his phone and slid it back into his pocket. “I like the real version better.”
He said it simply, without agenda, the way someone might mention they preferred Coke to Pepsi. And then he wheeled himself back to his side of the partition, leaving me staring at the place where he’d been, my pulse doing something irregular in my throat.
-
The first time I saw Daniel’s cock was an accident.
Mid-December. The office holiday party, held in the building’s event space on the 34th floor. Ugly sweaters were encouraged, and someone had spiked the eggnog with enough bourbon to sedate a Clydesdale. I was three cups deep when I stepped into the men’s room to splash water on my face.
The urinals were occupied. Two of them. Daniel stood at the leftmost one, his back to the door, his shoulders broad beneath a truly hideous sweater covered in sequined reindeer.
I shouldn’t have looked. I know I shouldn’t have looked. I was a person in a committed relationship with four years of history and a joint savings account and a boyfriend who folded my laundry.
I looked.
The angle was wrong for a proper view-I caught the reflection in the polished chrome of the paper towel dispenser, a distorted funhouse-mirror image that nevertheless communicated the essential information.
Daniel Mercer was big.
Not just above-average. Not just impressive. Big in the way that made your brain do a double-take, recalibrating its understanding of what was physically possible. Thick and long and uncut, the head just visible where his foreskin had retracted slightly, glistening with the faint moisture of-
I looked away. Fast. Too fast. The movement caught Daniel’s attention.
“Leo?” He half-turned, didn’t stop what he was doing. “That you?”
“Yeah. Eggnog.”
“It’s lethal, right? I’m five cups in.”
“Impressive.”
Splsh-splsh-splsh. The sound of urination, echoing in the tiled space. I stared fixedly at the sink, at my own reflection in the mirror-pupils too wide, cheeks too flushed-and concentrated on appearing normal.
Daniel finished, zipped, flushed. He moved to the sink beside me and began washing his hands with the aggressive thoroughness of someone who’d been trained by a particularly strict mother.
“Marissa’s pissed at me,” he said.
“Why?”
“I told her the sweater she bought me was ugly.” He gestured at his chest. “Which, I mean. It is.”
“Objectively hideous.”
“Right? Thank you.”
He dried his hands on his slacks-the paper towel dispenser remained untouched-and turned to face me. His cheeks were ruddy from the bourbon, his eyes slightly glassy, but his focus was clear. Too clear. Like he’d been drinking just enough to become more himself, not less.
“You looked,” he said.
The floor dropped out of my stomach.
“What?”
“At the urinal. You looked.”
Denial rose automatically-I didn’t, I wasn’t, you’re mistaken-but something stopped it. Maybe the eggnog. Maybe the way he was looking at me, curious and calm, completely unbothered.
“I didn’t mean to,” I said. Which was true and also a lie.
“It’s fine.” He shrugged, those massive shoulders rising and falling. “People look. That’s what happens when you’ve got…” He gestured downward. “You know.”
“Humility. I see it.”
He laughed, loud and genuine, the sound filling the small bathroom. “Oh, I’m humble. I’m the humblest guy I know.” He stepped closer-one step, casual, meaningless in the context of a small room-and lowered his voice. “Patrick know you look?”
The question was a scalpel. Precise. Sharp. Sliding between my ribs before I registered the incision.
“There’s nothing to know.”
“Okay,” Daniel said. Easy. Agreeable. The word meaning nothing and everything. “Okay, Leo.”
He clapped my shoulder-thump, warm pressure through the fabric of my shirt-and walked out of the bathroom, leaving me alone with my reflection and my pulse and the phantom image of his cock burned onto the inside of my eyelids.
-
The train ride home that night was a study in self-recrimination.
I sat in a corner seat, forehead pressed to the cold window, watching the dark tunnels flash past. The subway car was nearly empty-a woman with shopping bags, a teenager scrolling TikTok, a man asleep with his mouth open-and the fluorescent lights flickered with a regular fzzzt-fzzzt that matched my internal static.
I had looked. Deliberately. The reflection in the paper towel dispenser had been a choice, not an accident, and pretending otherwise was a disservice to my own intelligence.
And I had liked what I saw.
That was the worst part. The part that squirmed in my stomach like something alive. I had liked it. The thickness. The length. The impossible promise of it. I had looked at my straight colleague’s cock and felt something hot and urgent unspool low in my belly, and now I was sitting on a train trying to convince myself I was still the person I’d been yesterday morning.
My phone buzzed.
Patrick: You on your way?
Me: Just left. Home in 20.
Patrick: I made pasta. It’s probably terrible. Fair warning.
Me: I’ll survive.
Patrick: How was the party?
I stared at the question for a long moment. The cursor blinked, expectant, waiting for my answer.
Me: Fine. Too much eggnog.
Patrick: Drink water when you get home. Love you.
Me: Love you too.
The words were automatic. Muscle memory. And I meant them, I did, I meant them the way you mean a prayer you’ve recited since childhood-familiar, comforting, slightly hollow at the edges.
-
Monday morning arrived gray and drizzly, the kind of December day where the sky seemed to be slowly collapsing onto the city. I arrived at the office at 8:32, damp and under-caffeinated, to find Daniel already at his desk.
This was unusual. Daniel’s arrival time typically hovered somewhere between 9:15 and 9:45, depending on traffic and Marissa-related delays.
“You’re early,” I said, shrugging off my coat.
“Couldn’t sleep.” He didn’t look up from his monitor. His voice was rougher than usual, the edges sanded down. “Marissa and I had a fight.”
“About the sweater?”
“About everything.” Clk-clk-clk. His keyboard absorbed the brunt of his frustration. “About the wedding, the future, the fact that I’m ‘emotionally unavailable’ and ‘commitment-phobic’ and whatever other words she found on Google.”
I sat down, the familiar psssshhhhh of my chair a small comfort. “Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Emotionally unavailable.”
Daniel stopped typing. His hands rested motionless on the keyboard, those thick fingers with their dark knuckle hair, the silver watch catching the fluorescent light.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. Probably. I don’t feel unavailable. I feel like everyone wants me to be someone I’m not.”
“Who do they want you to be?”
“The script guy. The guy who proposes on a beach at sunset and cries at the wedding and buys a house in Westchester and has two-point-five kids. The guy who knows what he wants.”
“And you don’t know what you want?”
He turned to face me. The partition between us seemed suddenly flimsy, the frosted glass doing nothing to blur the intensity of his gaze.
“I know what I don’t want,” he said. “That’s a start, right?”
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. The air had thickened again, charged with that pre-storm electricity, and my heart was doing something irregular behind my ribs-ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump-bump-bump-a rhythm that belonged to a different genre entirely.
Daniel’s eyes dropped from my face to my chest, to my stomach, to my lap. A slow cataloguing, deliberate, unhurried.
“Leo,” he said. Just my name. Nothing else.
“Daniel.”
“We should get lunch today. The deli again.”
“Okay.”
“And maybe…” He paused, his tongue wetting his lower lip-slllp-a quick, reflexive gesture. “Maybe you can tell me more. About you. About what you like.”
“What I like.”
His gaze lifted to meet mine. The amber flecks in his brown eyes seemed to glow.
“Yeah. You know. Like we talked about before. How things work.” He shrugged, a studied casualness that didn’t quite land. “Academic.”
“Academic,” I repeated.
“Purely academic.”
Neither of us believed that for a second.
I looked at his hands, still resting on his keyboard. I looked at the curl falling across his forehead. I looked at his mouth, the full lower lip, the faint asymmetry of his smile.
And somewhere in the back of my mind, the part that handled long-term consequences and moral reasoning, a very small voice whispered: Patrick. You have a Patrick at home.
But the voice was distant. Muffled. Like it was speaking through several layers of glass, and I was already reaching for the hammer.
“Lunch sounds good,” I said. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
Daniel’s smile widened by a fraction of an inch.
“Yeah,” he said. “I thought you might.”
He turned back to his monitor, and I turned back to mine, and the morning stretched out before us, measured in keystrokes and reconciliations and the electric silence of two people pretending not to know exactly where the
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