Page 52 of The Associate
It wasn’t just fear that had him avoiding the senior partner’s wing. It was the terrifying understanding that if Gael Wise touched him again, Samuel wasn’t sure he would have the strength, or even the will, to pull away.
Chapter 13
Samuel
The summons came at 10:17 AM, a single line of text on Samuel’s monitor:
My office. The Crenshaw brief.
A cold, sick shockwave rolled from his gut to his throat. The Crenshaw brief was done. It had been bound, filed, and forgotten two days ago.
Samuel’s hands lay flat on the keyboard, perfectly still, while his insides churned.
The phantom sensation was immediate and vivid: the scent of sandalwood and starched cotton flooding his senses, the heat of a body standing too close behind him, the world narrowing to the point of contact and the low voice murmuring about enforceability clauses just the day before in the very office he was once again summoned to. He had trembled then. He hadleanedinto it.
Disgust, hot and acidic, washed over him.
Sin. Sickness. That’s what it is. That’s what they said.
But a quieter, more terrifying voice whispered:
It was the only time the noise stopped.
He stood, the movement robotic. He pulled the Crenshaw file from his drawer. His hands, he observed with a strange detachment, were not shaking.
The walk down the corridor was a journey through a muffled, distant world. The photocopier’s thud was a heartbeat. A paralegal’s laugh from a doorway was a foreign language. All he could hear was the memory of his own ragged breathing in the elevator, and the two words that had followed.
Good boy.
He shoved the memory down, a mental flinch so violent it made his head pound.
The door to Gael’s office was ajar, a sliver of shadow and polished wood. Samuel knocked.
“Enter.”
He pushed the door open.
Gael was at his desk, his head bent over a sheet of paper, a fountain pen in his hand. The morning sun illuminated the swirling dust, the sharp lines of Gael’s profile, and the empty visitor’s chair directly in its path. Exactly where Samuel had stood last time. Where Gael had stood behind him.
Will he do it again?
The thought was followed by a shameful, curling warmth low in his belly.
No. Don’t.
“Sit.”
Samuel did. He placed the file on the desk with exaggerated care, aligning the edges with the wood grain, a futile attempt at order.
He’s going to get up. He’s going to come around the desk.
His palms were damp. He pressed them against his thighs.
Gael finished his note. He set the pen down with a definitiveclick. Then he looked up.
His eyes moved over Samuel’s face slowly. They cataloged the shadows under his eyes, the pallor of his skin, the tight set of his mouth.
Samuel looked down at the file, his shield now just a meaningless rectangle of cardboard. His pulse hammered in his throat, in his ears. The silence stretched, becoming a living, pressing weight on his chest.
