The site visit happened the following Wednesday.
Graham told me at 9am. He was standing in his doorway with the outside coffee, the paper cup from whatever place he went to that wasn't the office kitchen, and he pointed at me across the floor. Not subtly. Just pointed, like he was picking someone for a team. My chest did the thing again. The warm thing.
"Drew. Clear your afternoon. I want to show you the Belmont property."
Then he went back inside. No other words, no other gestures.
Dina was at her desk. She looked at me over her glasses.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing." She typed something. Then, without looking up: "He usually brings Jett to the sites."
I didn't know who Jett was. Not really. The guy with the jaw and the haircut. We'd been on the same floor for just over two weeks and hadn't spoken beyond the nod you give someone when you pass them in the kitchen. He worked in project coordination, which sounded important when Dina described it and became incomprehensible when she explained it. He wore slim-fit shirts and shoes that looked Italian and a watch that caught the overhead lights. I'd noticed him watching me my first day. I hadn't noticed him since, but that was because I'd been busy noticing someone else.
Graham's car was a black Audi A6. I don't know cars, really, but I knew this one was expensive in the way that expensive things are when they don't try. No flash. Just good. Clean inside: Not recently-detailed clean but permanently clean, like mess didn't occur to him. The leather seats had been sitting in the sun and they were warm through my khakis. He started the car and the AC came on low and a jazz station was playing. Piano. Something without urgency that sounded high-brow while trying to be for everyone.
I was very aware of the center console between us. The cup holders. The gear shift. His right hand resting near it sometimes when he wasn't turning. The veins on the backs of his hands. His watch, which was heavy and silver. I didn't know watches. I knew it looked like it cost more than my car. It was like the man wore a car and drove a house.
"Have you been to the east side much?" he asked.
"I've driven through it."
"It's changing faster than anywhere else in the city. Five years ago, you couldn't give away a building over there. Nobody wanted them. Now we're in bidding wars over lots that were parking garages in 2020." He talked about the neighborhood for ten minutes and it wasn't a lecture, he was just talking. The way people talk when they care about a subject and they've found someone who might listen; I was listening because it was a good distraction, but his honeyed voice was almost worse than his hand near the center, and I still didn't know why ... because I'm straight. I think.
He pointed at buildings as we passed and I watched his hands when he pointed. That one was a printing press until 2018, they're turning it into live-work studios. That one's going to be a brewery, the owner went to college with him, terrible beer but the guy has vision. He knew every block. His voice did something when he talked about the buildings he loved. Dropped a half-register. Got looser. I could have listened to it for hours, which was not something I normally thought about a man's voice.
I asked one or two questions, short ones, and he answered them fully. At a red light he glanced over at me ,and I was already looking at him, and neither of us looked away for a second. His eyes were gray-green in the afternoon light. I didn't know they were gray-green. Then the light changed and he turned back to the road and I turned to the window and my pulse was in my ears.
"You've got good instincts," he said. "For someone with no training."
"Thanks. I think."
"It was a compliment, Drew." The way he said my name. I'd noticed it before. He said it like he liked the shape of it. Like it was a word he was choosing to use rather than something he had to call me. Everyone else just said hey or you.
The Belmont property was a four-story warehouse. Red brick, windows boarded on the first two floors, the upper ones just dark and empty. It looked abandoned because it was. Weeds in the sidewalk cracks. A chain-link fence with a padlock. I would have walked past it. But Graham looked at it the way I'd seen people look at a sunset, or a painting they loved, or their kid doing something good. Like he was seeing something that wasn't there yet – in his head, the potential of it – and liked it. I looked at his face instead of the building and thought: that's what passion looks like on a man who doesn't perform things. And then I thought: why am I cataloging what passion looks like on his face. And then I thought: Wait ... that's how he looked at me the other day.
"Come on."
He had a key for the padlock and another for the front door, which was a heavy steel thing that groaned when he pushed it. Inside was dust and open space. The ground floor was one big room, concrete, with columns holding up the ceiling, and the light came through the gaps in the boards over the windows in these long angled bars. Yellow and warm. Dust floating through them in a chaotic, slow dance. Our footsteps echoed. It smelled like old wood, wet stone, and time. Just us. Just a man and an empty building and me following him into it.
"Sixteen residential units on the upper floors. Ground floor is retail, two or three tenants, we're talking to a coffee place and a bookstore." He walked ahead and I followed and he pointed at walls that didn't exist. Drew imaginary lines with his hand. His hands were big and precise and he used them the way some people use their voice, with expression. "The retail space runs the full length. Natural light from the street side. Back here is where the elevator goes. Staircase here."
He was building the building out of nothing. Voice and hands. And I could see it. I could actually see it. The coffee shop with the big windows. The staircase. The hallway with the mailboxes.
"Upstairs. Kitchen faces east in every unit, which means morning light, which means the first thing you see when you make coffee is the sun. Living spaces have fourteen-foot ceilings because we are not dropping them. That's the whole point. You buy a warehouse conversion for the ceilings and the windows and the brick. You start hiding those things, you've got a regular apartment in an expensive building."
He was walking as he talked, hands gesturing, and every time he turned to check if I was following, the light caught his face differently. I was keeping up. I was keeping up too well. That was the problem. Closer than I'd realized. We were maybe a foot apart in a dark, echoing room and his hand came up and landed on my chest. Not a push. Just a stop. Palm flat, right over my sternum, and I could feel the soft heat through my shirt.
"Almost walked into me," he said. But he didn't move his hand. Not immediately. His fingers stayed spread across my chest, and I could feel my own heartbeat under his palm and I was sure he could feel it too. Then he dropped his hand across my slight abs and turned back around like nothing had happened.
"Top floor. Come on."
He put his other hand on my shoulder to steer me toward the staircase. And it stayed there. For the full flight of stairs. The weight of his hand and the warmth of it through my shirt and the specific pressure of each finger distracted me, and I almost tripped; but I didn't. Five points of contact. He was guiding me, the way you'd guide anyone through a dark stairwell. That's all it was.
At the top of the stairs he let go.
My shoulder didn't get the message. It stayed warm for minutes.
The top floor had a hole in the roof. Just open sky, blue and bright, and pigeons in the rafters making their sounds, and light pouring through in a column that lit up the dust. Graham walked to a window and pulled a board aside with one hand, casual, like it weighed nothing, and showed me downtown through the gap. The skyline was sharp against the afternoon sky. You could see the river.
"That's the selling point," he said. "Every unit on this side gets some version of this."
I was standing next to him. Our arms were close. Not touching. Close. I could see the silver hair on his forearm below the rolled sleeve. I could smell him, that same warm scent from his office, stronger here because we were in an enclosed space and there was no glass between us and no desk and no professional distance.
"What do you think?" he said. Quiet now. The big-room voice was gone. This was just for me.
"I think it's going to be amazing." I said it without thinking about it, which is the only reason it sounded real. Because it was real. I meant it. And he looked at me and he could tell I meant it, and he smiled in a way I hadn't seen at the office. Less controlled. Almost boyish, which is a strange word for a – fifty-something? – -year-old man, but that's what it was. Like showing someone the thing you love and having them love it too.
"Stay right there," he said. "Don't move."
He walked ten feet away and turned and looked at me. Standing in the light from the hole in the roof, dust floating around me, the city behind me through the gap in the boards. He looked at me the way he'd looked at the building from outside. Like he was seeing something.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing. Just the light." He came back over. Stood close. "You look good in this building, Drew."
I didn't know what to say. I wanted to say, "I could never afford living here," but I knew that this wasn't the right time, and my body was sure of it. My face was hot. He was smiling that uncontrolled smile and my brain was doing something I couldn't manage. I think I said thanks. I might have just stood there.
In the car on the way back, the jazz station playing, traffic slow, he was quiet for a while. I looked out the window. My reflection in the glass looked normal, which seemed wrong. Like something should have changed visibly. My chest still felt warm where his hand had been. My shoulder still held the memory of his grip. I was collecting these sense-memories like evidence, but I didn't know what the case was.
Then he said, "You're wasted on filing, Drew. I'm going to find better uses for you."
I said "okay" because I didn't have any other words. What do you say to that? What do you say when a man like Graham Mercer, who looks at abandoned buildings and sees homes, looks at you and apparently sees something too.
***
That night I made ramen again. Maruchan, the pot, the fork. The bowl was still in the sink. I sat on my mattress and ate and thought about his hand on my chest. The flat palm, the heat, my heart under it.
His hand on my shoulder. The stairs. Five points of contact.
"You look good in this building, Drew," his voice a warm phantom in my basement room.
I finished the ramen and put the pot on the floor and lay back and stared at the mitten stain. I was twenty years old. I'd had one girlfriend. I'd watched normal porn, meaning very straight porn, meaning what guys watch. I'd had one moment in college where a guy at a party leaned in to say something over the music and his mouth was close to my ear and I'd felt something drop in my stomach. I'd left the party. I'd told myself I was tired.
I was really good at telling myself things.
But lying there, I couldn't tell myself anything that stuck. I could still feel his palm on my chest. I could still see him looking at me in that column of light. I could still hear his voice saying my name the way he said it, like it was something he'd picked out for himself.
I pressed my hand flat against my own sternum, right where his had been. It wasn't the same. Not even close. My hand was smaller and cooler, and it didn't carry the weight of anything behind it.
I pulled my hand away and turned over and faced the wall.
I didn't think about what it meant. Not directly. I circled around it the way you circle a puddle that might be deeper than it looks. I got close to thinking about it. But I didn't step in.
Not yet.
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