By Thursday I had a routine: Get to the office by 8:30. Bad coffee first, because the Breville had too many buttons and I was afraid I'd break it. Filing until my eyes went hazy. Scanning. Messages that nobody picked up. Lunch at my desk, PB&J in a zip-top bag because I couldn't afford the sandwich place on the first floor. I ate fast so nobody would see the plastic bag, which was stupid because nobody was watching me eat in the back. I was the temp. Temps are furniture. The only reason I looked forward to any of it was the corner office, which I wasn't admitting to myself yet.
Graham's door was always open.
Dina mentioned it my second day. We were in the kitchen and she was pulling a perfect shot on the Breville without even looking. "He keeps an open-door policy. Literally. The door stays open unless he's on a confidential call. If it's closed, don't knock." She said it the same way she'd told me not to transfer calls: Survival information.
So, the door was open, and Graham was visible through the glass walls, and I could see him from my desk if I looked up from the blue bins. I started looking up more than the filing required. His thick neck straining at the collar ... I don't know how I saw it from where I was, or maybe it was my imagination.
He wore different suits but they had the same quality. Like they'd been made to agree with his body. Wednesday was charcoal, lighter shirt, no tie after lunch. Thursday was navy with a tie he kept on all day. Friday, he lost the jacket by 11 and worked in a white shirt and I could see the shape of his shoulders through the fabric, and the way the material pulled slightly when he reached for something on his desk, and I looked back down at the filing bin and my face was warm and I didn't examine why. When I closed my eyes, I thought I saw his nipples through it. This was ridiculous ... I'm straight. I think.
I started cataloging his routines without wanting to. He got in by 8:15– sharp. He deviated by no more than 1 minute, screaming dedication. He always arrived with coffee from somewhere outside, a paper cup. The jacket came off an hour earlier each day, by 4pm Monday, down to 11am on Friday. Glasses went on around 4, wire-rimmed that he'd clean on his shirt before putting them on. He talked to clients in this warm, firm voice that carried throughout the floor even though I couldn't make out words. He talked to Dina in shorter sentences, the way people talk when they've worked together long enough to skip the filler. And he talked to me differently from either. Slower. Warmer. Like he had time for me specifically. I didn't know what to do with that: It felt like he cared.
Wednesday afternoon I was in the copy room, refilling the paper tray, when he walked in. It was small, maybe six by six, and the door closed automatically on a spring. I was crouched down with the ream of paper when the door opened and he was just there, reaching for something on the shelf above me.
"Excuse me." He didn't step back. I stayed perfectly still, my heart racing. He reached over me, close enough that his belt was at my eye level and his shirt brushed my hair. Just the physics of a big man reaching over a smaller one in a small room. But, I could feel the warmth of his body and I could smell him, cedar and something clean, and his sleeve grazed the back of my neck as he pulled down a box of binder clips.
I stood up too fast. We were face to face, or face to chest, really. I'm not short but he had four or five inches on me and in that room with the door closed and the fluorescent light buzzing, the size difference was very specific.
"Sorry," I said.
"For what?" He looked down at me. Amused. That same corner-of-the-mouth thing from my first day. He didn't move. He had to know he was touching me, half his body in contact.
I was the one who stepped back, bumped the recycling bin, knocked a stack of papers off it.
"You'll need to bend over to pick those up," he said. And something about the way he said it, low and warm and just for me, yet so matter-of-factly like he just told me it was partly cloudy outside, it made my ears go hot. He reached past me again to set the binder clips on the copier. His elbow brushed over my back. Down my back. It stopped and paused and I stopped breathing. He pressed lightly, then lifted it off.
"Relax, Drew. I don't bite."
Then he left. The door slowly shut behind him.
I stood there holding a ream of paper and a handful of crumpled printouts. My lower back – my upper butt – was tingling where his hand had been and I thought, very clearly: that was nothing. That was a completely, totally normal human interaction. People touch each other's back accidentally. My face was red because the copy room was warm. The buzzing was the fluorescent light, not my blood.
I went back to my desk. I filed. I did not think about the copy room. I did not look at Graham's office the rest of the day. (okay, fine: I thought about the copy room constantly)
*****
Friday afternoon, my second week, he came by my desk. I was scanning invoices with one earbud in, listening to nothing because I hadn't downloaded any music and the phone's default podcast app kept recommending things about cryptocurrency or Taylor Swift's wedding. He just appeared. That was the thing about Graham. He moved quietly for a big man. You'd look up and he'd be there, filling your entire view.
"Drew." Low and easy. Not loud. I pulled the earbud out too fast and fumbled it and caught it and put it in my pocket and he watched me do all of that without comment.
"Hey. Um, hi! I mean ... hello Mr. Mercer." Fuck me.
"You went to school ... for what?" He leaned against the edge of my desk. Hip against the corner, and arms crossed with his corded forearms visible where the sleeves were rolled. I'd been watching him for days and I hadn't seen him lean on anyone else's desk. Not once.
"I didn't, really. I mean I was there, but I hadn't declared a major. General studies. Which is code for 'I don't know what I'm doing with my life,' basically."
He didn't give me the speech. Every adult I'd told about dropping out had a speech. The guidance counselor at school. My parents; my aunt on the phone, unsolicited. They all said some version of you should go back or you'll regret it or education is an investment in yourself. Graham didn't say any of it.
"What interested you?" he said. "Before you decided it didn't." His arms shifted, the muscles twitching. I needed to stop looking.
His question landed differently than any I'd been asked in months. Everyone else asked what I was going to do, and I hated the question because I didn't have an answer and every time someone asked it I shrank a little. He asked what had interested me. Past tense. No pressure about the future.
And I actually thought about it instead of deflecting. "Buildings."" And I was surprised, because I hadn't thought about this in a while. "I took this one architecture elective, like a gen-ed thing, and I actually went to every class. The professor had this thing where she'd put a building on the projector and make you explain what it was trying to do. Not what it looked like. What it was trying to do. And I don't know. I liked that. The idea that a building could be trying to do something."
Graham looked at me. Not the professional look, but the one that felt like being seen by someone who knew what they were looking at.
"Buildings," he said. Quiet. Like testing the weight of it.
"Yeah. I know that's not really a..."
"Come to my office for a minute."
Fuck. It'd been two weeks, was I going to be fired?
I followed him across the floor. He walked ahead and I noticed the back of his neck. The silver hair was cut close at the nape and the skin there was tan and there was a mole just below the hairline on the left side; I just filed it away, and I don't know why.
He didn't sit behind his desk. He sat on the edge of it, facing me, and pointed at the chair across from him. "Sit."
I sat.
For 20 minutes, he talked to me about the Belmont warehouse project. A four-story building on the east side, being converted to mixed-use residential and retail. He turned his laptop toward me and showed me the renderings and the architect's plans and his voice changed when he talked about it. Lighter. Faster. Not the client voice or the Dina voice. An excited voice: Passion. This building mattered to him.
His knee was about two feet from mine. Sitting on the edge of the desk like that, he was above me, looking down, and I was looking up. I could smell him. Not strongly, just this ambient warmth. Whatever it was, cologne or aftershave or just the way he smelled, it was clean and slightly warm and I kept losing what he was saying because the smell was distracting in a way I couldn't explain.
I asked a question. Something about the east-facing windows and morning light and whether the units on that side would overheat in summer. I thought it was a dumb question. I almost didn't ask it, but I needed to show I was listening.
He stopped talking. Looked at me. Tilted his head slightly. "That's actually the exact argument I had with the architect last month. Almost word for word."
I blinked. I felt it in my chest. Not my heart racing or whatever, just a warmth that spread outward from somewhere behind my ribs. Being told you see something the way a professional does, by someone who clearly knows what they're looking at.
"You're something, Drew." He said it again the way you'd say the weather's nice. His eyes stayed on mine too long, searching. Then he looked back at the laptop. "Let me show you the floor plans."
When I left his office, 40 minutes had passed instead of 20. Dina was at her desk. She looked at me, then at Graham's door, then back at me. Her expression was careful. Evaluating.
"He asked me to stay on Monday," I said. "Past the initial two weeks."
"I know," Dina said. "He told me Wednesday."
I stopped walking. "Wednesday?"
"Wednesday."
He'd told Dina to keep me on my first day. Then to keep me even longer and he didn't even tell me. The temp. But why?
The bus ride home was long. I sat in the back and watched the city go by and thought about it. Tuesday. He'd seen something in six hours. In a handshake and a few minutes of conversation. Then a week later. What had he seen? What was there to see? I was 20 and broke and directionless and living in a basement. I didn't have a plan or a skill set or even a major.
At home I made ramen in the microwave. The cheap kind, Maruchan, the brick that comes in the crinkly package with enough salt to kill a colony of slugs. I ate it out of the pot I'd heated water in because the one bowl I owned was in the sink growing something. The sound of the TV came through the ceiling, some reality show with a lot of yelling. An hour ago, I'd been sitting in Graham Mercer's office smelling cedar and listening to him talk about morning light. Now I was eating 35¢ ramen out of a pot. The distance between the two rooms was the distance between everything I had and everything I wanted, and I wasn't sure which room I meant.
I thought about Graham saying let's keep him. I tried to imagine his voice – the tone – when he said it. Was it client voice? Dina voice? Or this new Drew voice? And why did I care so much? I'd never been into guys, but something about Graham – Mr. Mercer – just ... I don't know what.
I thought about my head at his chest, his crotch on my chest in that small copy room. Him saying I'd have to bend over, his elbow touching me.
I thought about him saying "you're something, Drew" and the way he'd looked at me after, like the sentence had more words in it that he'd decided not to say.
And I just lay there on my mattress, staring at the mitten-shaped water stain on the ceiling, and I turned it all over and over in my head. What had he seen. Why me? The question sat there and I couldn't make it go anywhere.
I'd had a girlfriend in high school. Sarah. We dated for five months and it was fine and then it was over and I didn't miss it: Second base was as far as we went. I told myself the not-missing-it was because we were young. Because it was high school and nothing in high school is real. I told myself a lot of things. I was good at telling myself things.
In the dark, staring at the mitten, I could still feel his elbow. The exact shape of it. The firmness.
I turned over and faced the wall.
If you enjoyed this story, consider supporting the author on Substack.
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
