Page 70 of The Associate
Samuel stood paralyzed for a moment. The air where Gael had just been felt charged and empty. He stared at it, his eyes wide, his hands trembling at his sides, the echo of the touch on his lip burning like a brand.
Blindly, he turned, fumbled for the door handle, and stumbled out into the hallway.
He found his desk as if by sonar while his mind floated somewhere far above, detached and buzzing. He lowered himself into his chair, the motion slow and careful, as if his bones were made of glass.
The screen of his monitor glowed before him filled with the dense text of a contract. The words held no meaning. They were shapes, patterns of black on light, a foreign language. He stared through them, his vision blurring, the letters swimming into a meaningless slurry.
His body hummed.
It was a low, persistent vibration just beneath his skin, a live-wire current left in the wake of a lightning strike.
His mind was a mess. A single, stark phrase, etched in fire on the blank white wall of his consciousness, playing on a loop:
Tonight. My apartment. 8 PM.
The wait was over. The week of silence, the eerie normalcy that had felt like walking on a frozen lake, listening for the crack, was finished. The ice had given way. He was in the water.
Then why did it feel as if he were still falling?
Chapter 19
Samuel
The building rose before him, a sleek, black-glass monolith cutting into the bruised purple of the evening sky. Samuel stood on the opposite sidewalk, unmoving. The cold night air needled his face, but it was a distant sensation.
Inside him, a civil war raged.
His mind was a screaming mess. It chanted the old, familiar litany with the force of a battering ram.
Run. Turn around. Go home. Get on your knees in your own closet and repent. This is the devil’s work. You are walking into damnation.
But his body… his body held a different truth.
It remembered the profound, shocking peace of kneeling on that plush rug. The way the screaming in his head had simply…stopped. The blessed, empty quiet that had followed the command.
It remembered, with a vividness that made his breath catch, the ghost of the kiss: the heat, the taste, the desperate slide of a tongue.
His body did not remember sin. It remembered relief. It remembered a need so deep and fundamental it felt like thirst.
He did not consciously decide to move. One moment he was frozen on the sidewalk, and the next, his legs were carrying him forward. By the time he realized what was happening, he was already across the lobby, his finger pressing the button for the elevator.
It arrived with a soft chime. The doors slid open and he stepped inside.
Alone again, the war resumed, but now it was compressed, echoing in the tight space.
He watched his own reflection; pale, wide-eyed, a man caught in a trap of his own devising. His hands trembled at his sides. With each passing floor, the screaming voice grew more frantic, and the craving grew heavier, more solid, a physical pull in the pit of his stomach.
By the time the elevator slowed to a stop and the doors sighed open onto the familiar hallway, Samuel was a shell. The conflict had not been resolved; it had simply burned itself out, leaving behind a hollow, buzzing static.
The hallway was silent, the plush carpet swallowing any sound his feet might have made. His legs were heavy, foreign appendages made of lead. Each step was an effort, a fight against a gravity that seemed to intensify the closer he got to the door at the end.
He raised a hand. His knuckles, pale and trembling, hovered for a second in the air. Then he knocked..
There was no answer. No sound from within.
Just as the silence began to curdle into a new kind of panic, the door opened.
Gael filled the space. He was dressed in simple trousers and a black shirt of a fine, soft-looking material. The sleeves were rolled neatly to his elbows, revealing the strong lines of his forearms. The top few buttons of the shirt were once again undone, exposing the hollow of his throat and a hint of collarbone. His hair was slightly less than perfectly ordered. He looked casual. At ease.
