Page 67 of The Associate
Samuel
A week passed.
The city moved through its cycles, days bleeding into nights and back again. On Samuel’s body, the violence of the alley began its slow retreat. The sharp ache in his ribs softened to a deep, persistent soreness, a yellow-green stain beneath his skin that he probed with careful fingers each morning in the shower. The scrapes on his palms scabbed over, then faded to pink, new skin. The physical evidence was disappearing.
The memory was not.
It lived in him, vivid and unchanging. It had the hyper-real clarity of a film played on a loop behind his eyes.
The single, quiet word that had cut through it all.
The feel of his knees hitting the plush wool. The impossible, devastating relief. The weight of the hand settling on his neck.
He expected… something. In the cold light of returning to the office, he braced for a consequence. A private summons. A loaded glance across a conference table. A single, pointedquestion about his recovery that would be a code for everything else.
Nothing came.
Gael Wise was a ghost. He was present, but not at the same time. Samuel would see him striding down a corridor, his gaze passing over Samuel as if he were a potted plant, a piece of furniture. In meetings, his voice was its usual cold rumble, dissecting case law without a single inflection that spoke of dawn-lit living rooms or hands on trembling skin.
Samuel existed in a state of high-alert waiting. Every ping of his email, every buzz of his desk phone, every footfall outside his cubicle was a potential trigger. He was braced for an impact that never landed. The tension had no release valve. It just built, day by day, a silent scream held behind his teeth.
He began to feel untethered, a step out of sync with reality. The memory of that morning was so intense, so fundamentally life-altering, that Gael's refusal to acknowledge it started to make him doubt his own senses.
Had it happened?
Had he truly knelt on that rug, wept in front of his boss, been touched with such gentleness?
Or had the mugging and the shock concocted some elaborate, desperate fantasy?
The vividness of the memory warred with Gael’s demeanor, and in the dark hours, Samuel started to fear he was going mad.
∞∞∞
The air in Gael’s office was cool and thin. Samuel sat in one of the low-slung visitor chairs, a legal pad balanced on his knee, surrounded by the other associates. The case was a dry tangle of maritime insurance law, and the senior partners were picking it apart with surgical, dispassionate precision.
His turn came. A minor point about jurisdictional precedent in coastal disputes. He cleared his throat, the sound too loud in the hushed room. He began to speak, his eyes on his notes.
He felt it immediately; a pressure, a specific, focused heat on the left side of his face, as tangible as a beam of sunlight through a magnifying glass.
Gael’s gaze.
Samuel could feel it tracing the line of his jaw, lingering on his mouth, dipping to the hollow of his throat where his pulse had begun to hammer.
His words faltered for a fraction of a second. He forced himself to look up, to meet the source of the pressure, to acknowledge it, to break its spell.
Gael was not looking at him.
The older man’s head was tilted down, his eyes scanning the open file in his hands, a faint frown of concentration on his brow. His pen tapped once, softly, against the paper.
Samuel looked back at his notes, his face flushing. He continued, his voice tighter now.
The pressure returned, heavier, more insistent. It felt like a physical touch, a thumb pressed to his temple. He could almost smell the sandalwood. His skin prickled.
He jerked his gaze up again, a nervous, birdlike motion.
This time, Gael was looking out the vast window behind his desk, his profile a stark cut-out against the grey sky.
A cold trickle of sweat traced a path down Samuel’s spine. It was maddening. The attention was so potent he could taste its metallic edge, yet every time he sought to confirm it, to lock eyes and make it real, it vanished, leaving him staring at the evidence of his own delusion.
