I pulled back. Can you blame me?
It wasn't a decision. Decisions have a moment, a before and after. This was more like something just ... dimmed. Like a fuse blew somewhere between Thursday night in the parking garage and Monday morning, and by the time I got to the office I was operating on a different circuit. A quieter one.
Monday. 8:30am. Bad coffee. Desk. Blue bins. Filing. Scanning. Taking messages.
I didn't look at Graham's office. I didn't look up at all unless I had to, and even then I kept my eyes on the path between my desk and the kitchen or the bathroom or the copy room. Direct routes. No detours past the glass walls.
Graham came by at 4:30. Regular as a clock. "Can you stay tonight? I want to go over the Belmont numbers before the contractor meeting tomorrow."
"I actually have to be somewhere," I said. "Sorry."
His face ... it was small, but it twitched, tightened. Around his jaw for just a moment, then it was gone. "No problem. Tomorrow?"
"Sure."
I saw Jett out of the corner of my eye. His look was acknowledgment. An imperceptible-perceptible nod.
I didn't stay tomorrow. Or Wednesday. I left at 5:15 both days, right when the first wave of people headed for the elevator, and I rode down with them and walked to my car and drove home and sat in my basement room and didn't do anything.
He noticed. I knew he'd notice. Graham noticed everything.
He noticed a bluffing investor's fidgeting hands from across a dinner table. He noticed my question about east-facing windows on my second week. He noticed me on my first day and told Dina to keep me before I'd done a single useful thing. Not noticing wasn't something he did.
The pulling back was supposed to work like this: you create distance, the distance creates clarity, the clarity reveals the thing you thought was real was actually just not. That the attention and flattery of being noticed by someone important was fluff. You realize it was nothing. You move on.
Here's what actually happened: The wanting got worse.
Every day. Steady. Like a volume knob being turned up so slowly you don't notice until it's loud. I sat at my desk and I could smell his cologne. Not physically, but my brain wouldn't let me not smell it. I knew what it smelled like, the scent, filling my lungs with warm cedar, and my brain just ... unprompted, it wanted it again. Triggered by nothing more than seeing his outline through the wall.
I'd look up without meaning to and see him through the glass. At his desk. On the phone. Reading with his glasses on. And the ache in my chest would spike – this quick, sharp thing – and I'd look back down at the filing and the ache would settle into its baseline, which was always there now: a constant, low-grade pressure behind my ribs that didn't go away when I left the building or when I went to sleep or when I woke up. It was like I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms from my drug that was him.
Jett was around. I saw him watching me from across the floor. He didn't approach. He'd done his work. Planted the seed. Now he was watching it grow, and I could feel his satisfaction like a temperature change in the room.
Wednesday. Lunch. I sat at my desk with the ziptop-bagged PB&J and my phone and I opened the temp agency app. I hadn't looked at it since Graham told Dina to keep me. The interface was the same ugly peach layout with the same stock photo of a woman in a headset smiling. Because everyone wanted to sit with a headset and answer phones or cold-call people to sell crap no one needs or wants. I tapped: Available placements.
Data entry at an insurance company on the north side, $17 an hour. Receptionist at a dental office, $15.50. Warehouse work in the suburbs, $16 an hour, physical, the kind of job where you're too tired at the end of the day to think about anything. Which had its appeal at this point. Must be able to lift 70 lbs ... maybe?
I read the descriptions. I imagined them. Showing up to a gray office and typing numbers into spreadsheets for someone who would never learn my name. Answering phones and scheduling cleanings and going home smelling like antiseptic after hearing drills and water sprays and hoses sucking all day. Loading boxes for eight hours until my back ached and my brain was empty like some drone.
None of them had a corner office with glass walls. None of them had a door that was always open. None of them had the smell of cedar and Macallan or the sound of my name said low and slow or the thumb drawing circles against my head. None of them had him.
I thought about Jett's question. "Are you special, or are you just next?" And I thought: does it matter? If I leave, I lose him either way. If I stay, I might be a fool. But at least I'd be a fool who saw him every day. Could my heart stomach that? Would the withdrawal ease?
I closed the app. Put the phone face-down on the desk. Finished the sandwich.
Thursday, almost two weeks since Jett had told me. I was walking past his office on my way to the kitchen, he said "Drew." I stopped.
I don't know why I stopped. Momentum, maybe. Or the fact that my name in his voice still did something to me that 13 days of distance hadn't touched.
"Close the door," he said.
I stepped inside. Closed the door behind me. Stood by it with my hands at my sides. It smelled like him. The cedar. The leather of his chair. The Macallan, faintly, from last night or the night before; I hated that's where my brain went.
He took off his glasses, set them on the desk carefully, the way he handled things: precision and intention. He looked tired. Not bad. Just honest. Like a man who hadn't been sleeping well and had decided that pretending otherwise was a waste of time. The lines around his eyes were deeper. Or, I was just noticing them, because I'd spent so much time trying to not look and now I was looking at him and he was looking at me looking at him and everything was hitting at once and I don't know how my knees haven't collapsed.
"Did I do something?" he asked.
"No."
"Because if I crossed a line, I need you to tell me that."
"You didn't."
"Then what changed?"
I looked at the floor. His carpet. Gray. Boring. Berber. The safest surface in the room because it didn't have eyes or a jawline or rolled sleeves. "Nothing changed. I'm just doing my job."
"Drew." Just my name. Not a question. A request. I almost melted— his voice was the same voice he'd used in the car after the dinner, after the warehouse, after every moment between us that had mattered. The voice that said, "I see you and I'm not going to pretend I don't.
I looked up. I couldn't not.
He was standing behind his desk. His hands were flat on the surface, arms braced, like he was holding himself in place. I'd never seen him look so uncertain before. He was a man who filled rooms. A man who pointed at temps across a floor and told them to clear their afternoon. Uncertainty didn't live in his body. But it was there now. In everything about him.
"You're pulling away," he said. "And I want to respect that. I do. But I also need you to know that whatever is happening between us, I didn't ... I'm not ..."
He stopped. He looked at the window. The city was out there, late afternoon, the light tinging on orange.
"I'm not good at this," he said. Quieter. "I'm good at buildings. I'm good at deals. I'm not good at this. There are some things I'm shitty at building." He still didn't look at me.
I stood there with my back against his closed door and I felt the entire structure I'd built ever since Jett told me. The distance, the coldness, the determination to see the pattern instead of the person, I felt all of it shaking. Because Jett had described a man who ran a playbook. And the man in front of me was standing behind his desk gripping the edge of it and saying "I'm not good at this," and he looked like it was costing him something to say it.
Those two things couldn't both be true. Could they?
"Okay," I said. The word came out before I could stop it. The same okay from every other time, the one that kept getting bigger, except this one was different again. This wasn't admission. This was just acknowledgment. It was an, "I hear you. I see you too." without really saying it because I couldn't.
His shoulders dropped. Just slightly. Like he'd been bracing for something worse.
"Okay," he said back. And for a second we just looked at each other across his desk and the room was full of everything we weren't saying and the city was turning more gold outside the window like those two words had taken an hour. Or maybe it was my brain acting up again.
I opened the door and left. My hands were shaking. Not a lot. Just enough that I put them in my pockets on the walk back to my desk. I couldn't let anyone see, least of all him.
That night I almost called him. I lay on my mattress with my phone in my hand and his contact on the screen, "GM, the gray circle, no photo, and the mitten on the ceiling out of focus in the background of my eyes. I stared at it for a long time. I thought about what I'd say. I thought about his voice on the phone at night, how it would sound. Low. Warm. Probably surprised. He'd say "Drew?", a question in it, and I'd say, "I want you," and he'd come get me, and we'd go in his car to one of his properties, and he'd have a sleeping bag – just one – and he'd unfurl it and we'd get naked and I'd cuddle up into his warmth and muscles and fur and we'd press our hard dicks against each other and our precum would mingle between our bodies and ...
No.
What would I say? "I miss you"? "I don't know if you're real"? "I'm scared of what wanting you means"? "Jett told me I'm not the first and I can't get his words out of my head and every time I look at you through the glass I don't know if I'm seeing you or seeing a performance"?
I put the phone face-down on the floor. Stared at the ceiling. The mitten, back in focus.
I wanted to be someone else. Someone who knew how to do this. Who had a framework for wanting a man who was 32 years older and signed his paychecks and may or may not have run this exact play before. Someone who could look at the situation and know what it was. I wasn't that person. I'm 20, and I'd had one girlfriend. I'd watched straight porn until maybe a month ago when a silver-haired man with rolled sleeves and a cedar scent had rewired me from the ground up without either of us saying a word about it.
But I knew one thing: After nearly two weeks of distance and silence and aching, not seeing Graham was worse than the doubt. Not being near him was worse than the fear of being a fool. The wire between us didn't slacken with distance. It just pulled tighter. And I was so tired of fighting it.
I didn't call him.
But I didn't quit, either.
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