Page 29 of The Associate
Gael watched it happen. He meant to look back at Harding, to reel his focus back to the centre of the room where it belonged. He told himself to.
He didn’t.
He stared at the side of Samuel’s face. At the faint pulse beating too quickly in the hollow of his throat. At the shadow that pooled in the delicate space beneath his lower lip. Gael could see the individual strands of hair that fell against his temple, the slight flush high on his cheekbones.
Harding droned on, detailing discrepancies. The words, though, dissolved into a formless buzz. They lost their meaning. Gael’smind felt thick, slow. It kept slipping from the data on the page, pulled back to the silent figure down the table as if by a wire.
He forced his eyes to the financial exhibit Harding was referencing. He tried to follow the logic, to engage the professional part of himself. The numbers swam. His concentration was a physical burden, a weight he had to constantly shove back toward the center of the table, only to feel it slide, inexorably, down toward the end of the table.
Another spike of volume from Harding, a misplaced emphasis.
Another reaction. Samuel’s breath hitched, a soft, sharp intake that was immediately stifled. Gael heard it. The sound seemed to travel the length of the silent table directly to him, bypassing his ears and lodging somewhere low in his gut.
A cold wave of irritation washed over him, at Harding’s lack of discipline, yes, but more acutely, at the total collapse of his own.
He dragged his gaze back to Harding’s face. The man’s mouth moved. The sound was nonsense. Gael’s own pulse was a dull, distracting thud in his temples. He pressed the pad of his thumb hard into the edge of the polished table, a grounding point of pain.
It was futile. His eyes cut back, drawn as if magnetized.
Samuel had gone utterly still. The defensive curl was gone, replaced by a flat rigidity as if he was braced for...For what?The submission in the line of his body was so complete, so ingrained, it felt like a physical force in the room. It was a vulnerability so profound it was indecent. And Gael could not look away from it.
The pull was a deep, resonant ache. A gravitational tug toward the boy’s bowed head, the guilty slope of his shoulders, the devastating honesty of his fear. It called to the most treacherouspart of Gael’s nature. The part that saw a flaw in the marble and didn't want to repair it, but to own the crack.
“Enough.”
The word left his lips before he can think. Silence crashed into the room, heavy and sudden.
Samuel did not move. He did not seem to breathe. He became a statue.
Gael kept his eyes fixed on a point on the wall behind Harding. He issued instructions for the next day, his brain operating on autopilot. “Have the corrected drafts on my desk by eight.”
“Yes, sir,” Harding said, the words hurried.
At the far end of the table, Samuel’s head dipped another fraction.
Gael’s stomach clenched. A hot, unwelcome possessiveness twisted through him. He wanted to catalogue every one of these reactions. He wanted to erase them from his memory forever. The conflict was a live wire in his chest.
He tapped the polished tabletop once. The pale light had crept further, now gliding across Samuel’s folded hands.
Gael’s gaze travelled the length of the table one last time. It passed over Alina, over Harding, and landed on Samuel.
He let himself look. He took in the pale column of the throat, the tired shadows, the exquisite control of his posture.
“Dismissed.”
The team filed out quickly, gathering papers, the rustle loud in his ears. Samuel was the last to move, a careful, silent shadow gathering a single, untouched folder. He did not look up.
The door sighed shut behind him, sealing Gael into the room.
The late afternoon light had deepened, the pale stripes now a burnished copper. Gael remained at the head of it, his posture unchanged, his hands resting flat on the cool surface. The image of Samuel, the flinch, the bowed head, the silent, waiting brace, replayed behind his eyes on a relentless loop. It was an itch beneath his skin, a variable that refused to be quantified. The boy’s reactions were a language Gael, in a different context, in a different life, was fluent in. Here, in the sharp light of his conference room, that fluency felt like a dangerous, humming current.
Unprofessional.
The word was a cold anchor in his mind. He had learned the cost of blurred lines. Yet, the compulsion to understand, to decode this particular puzzle, was a pressure overriding his usual caution. It was a silent, losing argument with himself.
With a fluid motion, he rose. The only sounds were the soft shift of wool and the faint tap of his shoes against the hardwood as he crossed the office to the tall filing cabinet of brushed steel. The key was small and cold in his hand. It turned in the lock with a heavy click.
He bypassed the thick client dossiers, his fingers brushing past tabs with familiar, weighty names. He went to the very back of the ‘R’ section and extracted the slim, unassuming file. He carried it back to the conference table.
