The Morrison building was the near-miss.
Graham took me to the site on a Tuesday afternoon, second week of the real work he'd been giving me. Different project, different building. The Morrison was downtown, four stories, mid-renovation. Concrete floors with cracks. Exposed wiring hanging from the ceiling in bundles. Plastic sheeting over the window frames where the new glass hadn't gone in yet. The contractors were gone for the day, but their stuff was everywhere. Sawhorses, a table saw with the cord unplugged, hard hats on a shelf by the door. Someone's Gatorade bottle on a windowsill.
"This one's further along than Belmont," Graham said. He was walking ahead through the ground floor. "We start showing the retail spaces next month. I want you to understand the layout so you can talk about it if someone asks."
If someone asks. Like I was going to be part of this. Three weeks ago I was scanning invoices and now he was talking about me like a person who would explain buildings to investors. I just nodded. And wondered why the contractors didn't clean up better.
The first floor was coming together. You could see where the retail spaces would be, the framing was up, electrical roughed in, some units with pluming. He walked me through, pointing at things, explaining the tenant mix. A bakery here. Co-working space here. Something about square footage and lease rates that I half-understood and 100% faked.
At one point he stopped in the middle of a future storefront and turned to face me. The late-afternoon light was coming through the plastic sheeting in this hazy, orange glow and he stood in the middle of it. He looked at me like he was about to say something important. I stopped walking.
"What?" I said.
"You've got drywall dust in your hair." He reached out and brushed it. His fingers went through the hair above my ear, slowly. His thumb traced down to my temple. His hand lingered. Not long. But he was looking at me the way he'd looked at me at the Belmont warehouse, in the column of light through the roof, and his thumb was on my temple and I could feel his fingerprints, like it was actually possible to feel his finger prints on my skin.
"Got it." He dropped his hand. Kept walking.
I followed him. I always followed him. I almost felt like his puppy. But it was more than that. And I'd done a bit of research, and I knew what being his "pup" would actually entail.
We went to the second floor. More framing. The residential units were taking shape, and you could see the bones of the apartments through the studs. Graham was talking about ceiling heights and I was following him through a doorway that was just a frame, no door, no drywall on either side yet, and something fell.
I don't know exactly what it was. A sheet of drywall that had been leaning against the wall, I think, or a section of temporary framing that wasn't braced properly. I heard the sound first. A cracking, scraping groan. And then Graham moved.
His arm went around my waist. He pulled me forward and into him, away from whatever was falling behind me, and I was against his chest with his arm across my stomach and the crash happened behind us and dust went up and ...
It was quiet.
Just quiet. And his arm around me.
"You okay?" Right at my ear. Close enough that I could feel the words vibrate through his chest into my back before my ears understood them. I didn't look around, my eyes pressed closed, and I felt muscles and warmth behind me.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm fine."
He didn't let go.
I could feel his chest against my back. The rise and fall of it. He was breathing a little harder than normal, but not much. Not panicked. Just the adrenaline of a fast reaction. I was breathing harder than that. His arm was solid across my stomach, heavy, his hand flat against my side with his fingers spread. I could feel each one, five distinct points of heat through the dress shirt we'd bought last week. His belt buckle was against my lower back, and his thigh was against the back of mine and he was warm everywhere.
He turned me around. Not fast. His hands went to my waist, both of them, and he turned me to face him. And we were standing in a doorway with dust settling around us and the afternoon light coming through the plastic on the windows and his hands were on my waist and our faces were close.
Close. Like, I could see things I'd never been near enough to see. The exact pattern of lines around his eyes, fine ones that fanned outward. Silver in his cheeks. A scar on his jaw, thin and white, maybe an inch long. His mouth. I'd been trying not to look at his mouth for weeks. I was looking at it now.
He looked at mine.
I know because I saw it happen. His eyes moved. From my eyes, down. Landed on my mouth. Stayed there. And something in my stomach dropped and my skin went tight everywhere at once and I stopped breathing. Just stopped. Him looking at my mouth with his hands on my waist in a dusty half-built apartment with nobody around and nothing between us. Except cloth.
I'd like to say something happened. I really would. It was like every little bit had been leading up to this.
So, I waited for it. I wanted it. Every part of me was leaning toward it, this invisible gravity pulling me forward, and I could see him feeling the same pull. His grip tightened on my waist, the smallest bit you'd never see but you feel. His jaw flexed. He was deciding.
Then he stepped back. Hands off. He looked at the fallen drywall. "I need to talk to the site manager about securing materials. That's a liability."
His voice was normal. Professional. Already moved on. He walked into the next room and I stood in the doorway for a second, and then I followed him because what else was I going to do? Stand there? Stand there where he almost kissed me ... but didn't.
He walked me through three more rooms. He talked about finishes and bathroom layouts and something about the plumbing that I'm sure was important. I didn't hear a word. Not one. My brain was still in the doorway. My body was still pressed against his chest. His hands were still on my waist and his eyes were still on my mouth and every cell in my body was still vibrating with his heat.
In the stairwell going down, he was ahead of me. He looked back over his shoulder.
"You sure you're okay?"
"Yeah. Fine."
He studied me. I don't know what he saw but he saw something. "You'd tell me." Not a question. "If anything made you uncomfortable. You'd tell me."
I held his gaze. The stairwell was dim and the dust was still on both of us. His face was careful and searching, and this was the closest he'd come to acknowledging what had just happened. What had almost happened.
"I'd tell you," I said.
He nodded once. Turned. Kept walking.
The drive back was quiet. He put the jazz on. I looked out the window. The city went past and I watched it without seeing it. My reflection in the car window looked the same as always and that felt wrong. Like the outside should match the inside, which was rearranged.
At the office he said, "Go home early. You've had enough excitement." Light. Easy. Like he thought I didn't want more excitement. For all the questioning I'd been doing of myself and what it meant to be near him and how it felt, when it almost seemed to happen, it didn't.
Maybe nothing had happened. Maybe a piece of drywall fell and he grabbed me and checked if I was okay and that was it. Reflex. Professional concern.
I went home. Sat on my mattress. Did the thing I always do. Built the explanations. He grabbed me because something was falling. Instinct. Anyone would do that.
He held on because he was making sure I was okay. Normal.
He turned me around to check my face. Reasonable.
He looked at my mouth because I was talking, or because there was dust on my lip, or, because ...
Because.
The explanations ran out where they always run out: The because that doesn't have an end. He looked at my mouth "because." He held on "because." He keeps me late "because." He said let's keep him "because."
I lay on my mattress in the dark. The ceiling with the water stain. The faint traffic sound from the street above my window.
I didn't build any more explanations. I was tired of building them. They didn't hold up anyway. They were like the temporary framing in the Morrison building, propped against a wall, not secured, and the slightest pressure knocked them over.
I reached down. Closed my eyes. And I didn't pretend. I didn't try to steer my brain toward something else, some video, some memory of Sarah in her parents' basement that I'd been using like a shield for years. I let it go where it had been trying to go for weeks. Where my "research" on pornhub had taken me and what might happen if ...
Graham. His arm around my waist. His hand on my side, fingers spread. Being pulled against him, his chest against my back. His breath on my neck saying "you okay?" His hands turning me around. His eyes moving from mine down to my mouth. And then what would have happened if he hadn't stepped back. If he'd leaned in instead of pulling away. His mouth on mine in that dusty doorway. His hands tightening on my waist. Pulling me closer instead of letting go. His hand going to the back of my neck the way it had in his office, that thumb, except this time there was no spredsheet and no excuse and his mouth was on mine and his body was against mine and I was hard, I was so hard it hurt, and I didn't stop, I didn't redirect, I just let it happen.
I grasped my cock as I let him feel my neck, as I let him kiss me, let him nibble down as he took off my tie that his company had bought me, unbuttoned my shirt that his company had bought me, and kissed down my chest as he undid the belt and the pants and everything else. I moaned as I felt like I could feel his breath on me and his hands on my dick and his mouth wrapped around my shaft. I pinched my nipple with my free hand as I saw what he was doing to me, as he used one hand to play with me while the other stripped off his own shirt, as his thick silver chest was revealed and I pressed my hands against his hard muscles and just when I thought he was going to thrust and breach me ...
I came. Hard. Harder than the night after the dinner, harder than anything in months. My whole body seized and I gripped the mattress with my free hand and my back arched and I made a sound into the dark of my basement room that I'd never made before and I just lay there afterward. Breathing. Wet. Hand still on myself. Staring at the ceiling as cum dried on my chest and my lip and I could smell my seed and I didn't care and I wondered if Graham's smelled the same, or if his cum smelled like him.
And I thought, clearly, without any of the usual static or hedging or explanation-building: I want him. I want Graham Mercer. Not in some abstract, theoretical, I-find-him-attractive way that I could file under "normal admiration" or "professional respect" or whatever. I want him the way you want someone. The real way. The physical, specific, keep-me-up-at-night way. The way I have never, in twenty years of being alive, wanted anyone. Not Sarah. Not any girl. Not anyone. Just him.
And then, following close behind, quieter but heavier: what does that make me?
I didn't have an answer. I lay there in the dark and the question sat on my chest like a physical weight in the cool, drying cum and I didn't have an answer. The question was enough.
I turned my head and looked at the mitten stain on the ceiling. It looked different in the dark. Less like a mitten. More like a hand, reaching.
I closed my eyes and I could still feel his thumb on my temple where he'd brushed the dust from my hair.
I didn't sleep for a long time.
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