Page 81 of The Associate
Filthy. Desperate. Sick.
The old, internal catechism hissed, automatic as a heartbeat. The illicit pleasure curdled instantly, turning thick and toxic in his veins. Shame, his oldest companion, doused the heat, leaving him cold, hollow, and trembling. Without thinking, he hunched his shoulders forward, trying to make himself smaller, to fold into the sofa and disappear.
“Posture.”
The single word, spoken without Gael even looking up from his tablet, cracked through the room like a gunshot.
Samuel jerked as if struck. His back snapped straight, shoulders wrenching back. He hadn’t even realized he’d slumped.How had he seen?His eyes had been on his screen.
“Eyes on the page, Samuel. Not on me.”
Sam flushed bright red at being caught and fixed his gaze on the dense block of text, but his vision swam, the letters blurring and dancing. He couldn’t get a full breath. The panic, the old, icyfingers, began to unspool in his chest, winding tight around his lungs. The words on the page morphed into meaningless black marks.
“Do you have family in the city, Samuel?”
The question was so mundane, so utterly, bizarrely disconnected from the silent meltdown happening inside him, that Samuel’s brain stuttered. He blinked, his gaze wrenching up from the book. Gael hadn’t moved. He was still looking at his tablet.
“My… my parents. Sir. In Queens.” His voice sounded thin, reedy.
“Siblings?”
“A brother. Jacob.”
“Older? Younger?”
“Younger.”
“Are you close?”
Samuel’s throat closed. The ghost of their last encounter in the bar rose in his mind.
You deserve more out of life than this.
“It’s… complicated,” Samuel managed, the evasion tasting like ash. “We don’t see each other often.”
“Why not?”
“We... we live different lives.” It was a pathetic, transparent dodge, and he knew it the moment it left his lips.
Gael made a soft, non-committal sound in the back of his throat. “Friends?”
This was worse. Samuel’s grip on the book turned his knuckles bone-white. “I… I guess Alina. She’s kind.”
“Is she a friend, or a colleague who is kind?”
Samuel had no answer.Was anyone a friend? What did that even mean?
He stared at the book, the words now a grey smudge.
“A colleague,” he whispered. The admission was a bare, lonely truth, and it scoured him from the inside out.
“I see.” Gael’s tone gave nothing away, which was somehow worse than judgment. “And outside of work?”
Penny. Her name rose in his mind, a secret compact, a shared scar he’d never spoken of to anyone in this world. He shook his head, a tiny, frantic movement, as if he could dislodge the question. “No one.”
The silence that followed was thick, heavy as a blanket. Samuel could feel Gael’s gaze lift from the tablet and settle on him.
“Romantic entanglements?”
