Page 68 of The Associate
Was he imagining it?
It put every nerve in his body on a razor’s edge. His hands, resting on his pad, grew damp, threatening to smudge the ink. He was a mouse sensing the shadow of the hawk, but the sky remained relentlessly, tauntingly empty.
He finished his point with a rushed conclusion and fell silent, his ears ringing in the quiet that followed. He was braced, waiting for the comment, the question, the subtle probe that would be the other shoe dropping.
Gael simply gave a slight, noncommittal nod and moved the conversation to the next associate. “Alina, the claimant’s standing argument.”
The meeting wound down. Chairs scraped softly as associates gathered tablets and documents. Samuel moved slowly, carefully aligning the pages of his notes, slipping his pen into its loop, buying seconds. He was the last to rise. From the corner of his eye, he could see Gael still seated behind his desk, a single sheet of paper held in his hand, his head bowed in study.
This was it. The moment. The air in the room seemed to thicken, waiting for the words Samuel both dreaded and, in the deepest, most secret part of himself, craved.
Samuel. A moment.
He stood there, halfway between his chair and the door, a pause that felt like an eternity.
Gael did not look up. He did not speak. He turned the page over, his attention utterly absorbed by the text.
The coiled spring inside Sam, wound so tight all week, did not release. It simply went slack, leaving a strange, hollow inertia.
He turned and walked out, pulling the heavy door closed behind him.
In the quiet of the hallway, he took a breath. He told himself he was relieved. The fantasy of normalcy beckoned like a safe, grey shore. He could almost believe it.
But as he walked back to his desk, the cold, hollow pit in his stomach yawned wider.
∞∞∞
The afternoon light had grown long and thin, slicing across Samuel’s desk in pale bars. He was annotating a deposition transcript when the notification appeared.
In the lower right corner of his monitor, a new email alert bloomed.
The sender: G. Wise.
The subject line was empty.
The preview text showed only a few words:My office. Now.
Samuel’s hand froze, his pen poised above the paper.
Seven days. It had been exactly seven days since he had woken in that grey room, since the rug had met his knees. A week of silence, of ghostly gazes, of rehearsing conversations that never came.
The bubble of pretended normalcy, the fragile fiction he had constructed hour by hour, popped. The air seemed to rush out of the room.
This was it. The first time they would be truly, undeniably alone since that morning. Just the two of them, and the weight of everything that had happened.
A strange calm descended, the kind that follows the silence after a long period of dread. The waiting was over. His body knew it before his mind did. He saved his document, closed the file, and placed his pen in the precise center of his desk blotter. His movements were slow, deliberate.
He stood up. The floor felt unstable for a moment, then solidified. He walked out of the bullpen, his footsteps echoing with a hollow sound in his own ears. The corridor stretched before him, a tunnel of polished floor and muted light. He passed Alina’s desk; she said something, but the words were just sounds, devoid of meaning. He nodded, a mechanical response, and kept walking.
His mind was filled with a high-pitched, featureless white noise, like the static of a dead television channel.
He reached the door. It stood ajar, a sliver of shadow showing between the door and the frame. No sound came from within.
He did not knock. He lifted a hand that did not feel like his own as he placed it flat against the cool, varnished wood., and pushed.
Gael stood before the wall of glass, his back to the room, a tall, dark silhouette against the muted tapestry of the late afternoon light. His hands were in his pockets, his posture one of absolute stillness. He was gazing out, but Samuel had the unnerving sense he was not seeing the skyline at all.
He closed the door behind him with a soft click. He did not step further into the room. He did not speak. His eyes were fixed on the broad plane of Gael’s back, the sharp cut of his shoulders beneath the fine wool of his suit jacket. The silence was a living thing, thick and expectant.
