Jett found me in the parking garage.
Two days after the tie. The office had emptied at its usual pace, the wave of people between 5 and 5:30 and then the stragglers and then the quiet. I'd left at 5:40. Graham had been on a call with his door closed, which was unusual, and I hadn't stayed to find out when it opened. I was still thinking about Jett in the kitchen and the way he'd said "favorites," and the cold thing in my stomach that hadn't fully gone away.
The garage was mostly empty. Third level. The fluorescents hummed that high-pitched whine that you stop noticing until it's the only sound. My Civic was at the far end of the row, alone, looking worse than usual next to somebody's Range Rover.
Jett was leaning against a concrete column about 20 ft from my car. Arms crossed. Not casual. Staged. Like he'd picked the spot and the pose and been waiting for me to show up, which I think he had.
"Hey," he said. "Can we talk?"
"About what?"
He pushed off the column and walked toward me. He was wearing a slim-cut blazer over a black shirt, no tie, the kind of outfit that communicates effort without admitting to it. He was taller than me. Not by a lot, but enough that he could look down slightly, and he used the angle.
"About Graham."
My hand went to my pocket. My car keys. I held them without clicking the unlock.
"I'm going to tell you something," Jett said, "and you can do whatever you want with it. But I wish someone had told me, so." He shrugged. One shoulder. "Six months ago, I was you."
I didn't say anything.
"The late nights in his office. The site visits, just the two of you. Being asked to stay after everyone else leaves. The way he leans on your desk and asks you personal questions and makes you feel like you're the only person on the floor." He was watching me while he talked. Reading me. Tracking what landed. "The way he looks at you."
"Jett."
"He bought me a suit too." He said it flatly, like he was reading a receipt. "Tom Ford. Navy. $3k. I've still got it. Can't bring myself to return it, can't bring myself to wear it. It just sits in my closet being expensive." He paused. "He took me to the Morrison site before the contractors started. Empty building. Just us. Showed me the view from the fourth floor. Told me I was wasted on project coordination. Said he was going to find better uses for me."
The cold thing in my stomach spread. Up through my chest. Into my throat.
'Better uses.' The exact words. The exact structure. The site visit, just the two of them. The suit. The view.
"Did he touch your hair?" I didn't plan to say it. It just came out.
Jett looked at me. Something flickered in his face. "He brushed something off my jacket once. At the Morrison site. Lint, he said. His hand stayed on my shoulder for a while after."
I thought about the drywall dust. Graham's fingers going through my hair. His thumb tracing down to my temple.
"And the late nights," Jett continued, his voice getting tighter, more controlled, like he was pressing down on something that wanted to come up. "He pours the Macallan around 6:30. Makes a joke about your age. Leans over you at the laptop. Gets close enough that you can smell him and feel him behind you and your whole body goes still because you think if you move the wrong way it'll either happen or it won't. You can't decide which is worse."
He was describing it. Exactly. Down to the scotch and the lean and the freeze. Down to the body going still.
"And then one night, after a client event, I was in his office and we were talking and I thought, okay. This is it. This is real. And I leaned in to kiss him."
He stopped. Looked at the concrete wall behind me. Then back.
"He stepped back like I'd swung at him. This look on his face. Like I'd made a mess on his carpet. And he said, very calmly, that he thought I'd misread the situation. That he valued our professional relationship. 'Professional relationship.'" Jett laughed. One short sound that wasn't a laugh. "Two days later I was reassigned to the north side projects. No more late nights. No more site visits. No more car rides. No more 'stay.'"
Stay. He'd said it to Jett too. The word I'd been carrying around like it was mine, like it meant something specific about me, about us. "Stay." He said it to everyone. It was just a word he used.
"I see him in meetings and he treats me like any other employee. Like the six months before never happened."
I was leaning against my car. I hadn't decided to lean. My body had just done it, shifted my weight back, like I needed something solid behind me. My hands were in my pockets and they were shaking and I was holding the keys tight so they wouldn't rattle.
"So here's my question." Jett took a step closer. Not aggressive. Just close enough that the fluorescent light was on both our faces and I could see his eyes clearly and there was nothing in them that looked like kindness. There was anger. There was the specific bitterness of a person who'd been made to feel special and then been made to feel ordinary. "Are you special, Drew? Or ..." he paused like he was drawing it out for emphasis, like he didn't want to say it: "Are you just next?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
We both heard how weak that sounded, like tissue paper trying to be a wall.
"Yeah," Jett said. Quieter now. Almost gentle, and the gentleness was worse than the edge had been, because it sounded like pity, and I didn't know if I deserved pity or if he was performing it. "I didn't know either."
He turned and walked to his car. He got in and the engine growled to life and his taillights swept across the concrete wall as he pulled out and then he was gone. I was standing in the parking garage under the fluorescents with my keys cutting into my palm.
The motion-sensor lights clicked off. I was standing in the dark.
I replayed everything when I got in my car.
The copy room. His body close, his sleeve brushing my hair, the arm squeeze. "I don't bite. Jett had probably gotten a version of that too. Some small room, some accidental proximity, some line delivered like it was spontaneous.
The Belmont warehouse. His hand on my shoulder, five points of contact. He'd done that with Jett at Morrison. Different building. Same move.
His office after dark. The Macallan and the lamp and the leaning over my shoulder. His thumb on my neck. He'd done that with Jett. Different spreadsheet. Same proximity.
The suit. The store. The mirror. The look on his face when I came out in the one he liked. He'd done that with Jett. Different designer. Same scene.
"You're wasted on filing." He'd said it to me in the car after Belmont with the jazz playing. He'd said it to Jett at Morrison, different words maybe, same sentence. Same promise. "I'm going to find better uses for you."
"You look good in this building." Had he said that to Jett, too? Standing in the Morrison light the way I'd stood in the Belmont light? Had Jett felt the same thing I felt, that dizzying certainty of being seen?
I sat in my car in the dark and I took every interaction I'd had with Graham and I turned it over and looked at the underside of it and I couldn't tell. I couldn't tell if there was pattern underneath or person. If the attention, the warmth, the teaching, the cologne-scented evenings, the way he made me feel like the only one, was real. Or if it was a routine. A thing he did. A sequence he'd memorized and ran with variations, different kid each time, different suit, same building, same view, same line.
And the worst part – the part that made my chest feel hollow – was that even if Jett was telling the truth, even if I was just the next iteration of a pattern Graham had been running for years, it didn't change the fact that I still wanted him. The information should have killed it. Should have been ice water. But I sat there knowing what Jett had told me and I still felt the ghost of Graham's fingers on my neck from the hallway, still felt his hand on my chest at Belmont, still felt his thumb on my temple at Morrison, and the wanting hadn't moved. Not even slightly.
I was either special, or I was a fool, and I couldn't tell which.
I drove home. Didn't eat. Lay on the mattress. Stared at the wall, not the ceiling this time, the wall, which was blank drywall that the previous tenant had left a single nail hole in, probably for a picture. I stared at the nail hole and I thought: am I special, or am I just next?
And underneath that, quieter, the other question. The one I'd been carrying since the Morrison doorway and the night I'd come with his name in my head.
What does it mean that I still want him even now?
I didn't sleep.
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