HOLD ME CLOSER

Chapter 8: Crossing Paths Again

The building's east wing was not due for furniture delivery for another four days, which meant, in theory, that Krit had no particular reason to be on the fourteenth floor that Monday morning.

He found himself there anyway, sent up on an errand to retrieve a signature from the site manager's office, a task that could easily have gone to anyone else on the crew, a fact he chose not to examine too closely when Wichai handed him the folder without comment.

The floor was quiet at this hour, most of the office staff not yet arrived, sunlight coming in long gold slants through windows still crossed with protective film, dust motes drifting visible in the light the way they only seem to in buildings not yet fully lived in. Krit was halfway down the corridor when a door opened ahead of him, and Narin stepped out, tie loosened, looking like a man who had been awake since long before the sun came up, a folder of his own tucked under one arm, expression somewhere between distracted and tired.

They both stopped.

"You are back early," Narin said, and then, visibly hearing how strange that sounded, added, "I mean. The furniture is not due until Thursday."

"Signature run," Krit said, lifting the folder in his hand like evidence. "Site manager's office. I got turned around again, actually, this floor still does not make sense to me."

Something in Narin's expression eased, close to a smile, the tiredness in his face softening at the edges the way a held breath softens once it is finally let go. "It does not make sense to anyone. I helped design half of this layout and I still get lost."

"That is reassuring, somehow."

"It should not be."

Krit laughed before he could stop himself, and Narin's mouth curved further at the sound, and for a moment neither of them moved to end the conversation, standing in a gold lit hallway that neither of them had any particular business occupying together, the folders in their hands entirely forgotten, both of them apparently content, for the length of a few sentences, to let the morning's schedule wait.

"You are here early too," Krit said. "I thought people like you kept banker's hours."

"People like me," Narin repeated, something wry in it. "I wish. My father believes the day should start before the sun is fully up. Says it builds character."

"Does it?"

"Mostly it builds a headache. I have not decided about the character part yet."

Krit grinned at that, a real grin, unguarded. "My old boss used to say something similar. Different context, though. His was more about breaking people down than building character up."

Something shifted in Narin's face, curious now rather than merely polite, his head tilting slightly the way it did, Krit was beginning to notice, whenever something caught his genuine attention rather than his practiced courtesy. "Old boss?"

"Long story, bad company, before this one. Nothing worth repeating on a Monday morning."

"Fair enough." Narin did not push, though Krit could see him wanting to, some flicker of genuine interest there that Krit was not used to receiving from people several tax brackets above him, an interest that did not feel performative the way so much polite curiosity from strangers tended to. "How is the piano settling in?" Krit asked, mostly because it was the only safe thread he could think to pull, the question arriving a beat too fast, as though he had been holding it ready before he even realized he wanted to ask it.

"Still level," Narin said. "I checked."

"Good. Would not want to have to come back and redo it."

"You could," Narin said, and then seemed to hear himself again, a flicker of something like alarm crossing his face at his own words, quickly smoothed over. "I mean. If it needed it. Which it does not."

"Sure," Krit said, something warm and unfamiliar settling in his chest at watching a man who ran boardroom meetings fumble over a sentence like that, the corner of his mouth twitching upward despite his best efforts to keep a straight face. "Well. I should find that office before someone notices I have been gone twenty minutes for a five minute errand."

"Right. Of course." Narin stepped aside to let him pass, and then, just as Krit reached the end of the hall, called after him, his voice carrying a note of hesitation he seemed to be fighting against. "It is Krit, right? I heard one of the others say it."

Krit turned back, mildly surprised to be remembered at all, let alone by name, a small unexpected warmth catching somewhere behind his ribs at the thought of it. "Yeah. Kritsada. Krit is fine."

"Narin," he said, though Krit already knew, and held out a hand like they were meeting properly for the first time, which, in some sense, they were, the formality of the gesture at odds with the loose tie and the tired eyes and the whole unguarded moment of it.

Krit shook it, and it lasted a beat longer than a simple introduction required, and neither of them commented on that either, and when Krit finally turned and walked away toward the site manager's office, he was smiling in a way he could not entirely account for, and did not try very hard to stop.

He found the site manager's office two turns later, got his signature, and walked back down through the same gold lit hallway on his way to the elevator, though Narin's office door was closed by then, and Krit told himself the small flicker of disappointment he felt at that was nothing worth naming, though he noticed, walking past it, that his steps slowed just slightly, as though some part of him were waiting for the door to open again anyway.

Add noticed something different in him the moment he got back to the truck.

"You are in a good mood," Add said, suspicious, tossing him a bottle of water. "Suspiciously good. What happened."

"Nothing happened. Got a signature. That is it."

"Uh huh." Add studied him a moment longer, the particular squint of a man who had known someone twenty years and could read every flicker of their face like weather on the horizon. "You saw him again, did not you. Piano guy."

"I ran into the site manager's office."

"That is not what I asked."

Krit sighed, capping the water bottle a little harder than necessary. "Fine. Yes. We talked for a minute. It is not a big deal, Add."

"Never said it was." Add held up both hands, though the grin on his face said otherwise. "Just noting, for the record, that you have not smiled like that over anyone in a long time."

Krit did not have a good answer for that, and Add, mercifully, let the silence stand as its own kind of confirmation, climbing into the truck cab and leaving Krit to follow, the small persistent warmth in his chest refusing, for the rest of the day, to entirely fade, resurfacing at odd moments, hauling a box, waiting for the elevator, in a way that made the whole day feel lighter than the work itself had any right to.

By the time his shift ended, the sky had gone the color of weak tea over the rooftops again, the same shade it always turned this time of year, and Krit found himself, on the bus ride home, replaying the handshake more than the conversation itself, the particular warmth of it, the beat too long it had lasted, wondering, in the quiet unexamined way a person wonders about things they are not ready to name yet, what exactly it was he thought he was doing, and whether it mattered at all that he had no good answer.

Narin, for his part, spent a considerable portion of that same morning failing to concentrate on a vendor contract that should have taken him twenty minutes to review and instead took the better part of an hour, his eyes sliding down the same paragraph three separate times without retaining a single clause of it. He kept catching himself staring at the closed door of his office, as though Krit might reappear there a second time if he simply willed it hard enough, an absurd thought that he was fully aware was absurd and entertained anyway.

Kanya knocked once, letting herself in without waiting for an answer, the way she always did, a habit Narin had never once managed to correct in the two years she had worked for him. "The Ratanakorn call moved to eleven," she said, setting a folder on his desk.

"And you have the walkthrough with the flooring vendor at one."

"Noted," Narin said, not looking up from the contract he was not actually reading.

She lingered a moment longer than the message required, her eyes moving once over his face with the particular sharpness Narin had learned, over two years, to be wary of. "You seem distracted this morning."

"I am fine."

"Mm." She said it exactly the way she said most things she did not believe, a single syllable that somehow managed to convey an entire paragraph of polite disagreement, and left without further comment, closing the door behind her with a click that felt, to Narin's ear, slightly too deliberate.

He set the contract down once she had gone and allowed himself, for exactly as long as it took to draw one full breath, to think honestly about what had happened in the hallway that morning. Nothing had happened, strictly speaking. Two men had exchanged a handshake and a few sentences about a piano and a headache. It was the kind of exchange that occurred a hundred times a day in a building this size, forgettable by any reasonable measure.

And yet he found he did not want to forget it, which was, he understood even as he thought it, precisely the problem. He had spent years cultivating a particular kind of carefulness, a habit of noticing his own wants early enough to redirect them before they became inconvenient, and he was fully aware that this feeling, whatever it was, had slipped past that habit entirely before he had even registered its approach, arriving already grown rather than announcing itself in some smaller, more manageable form he might have caught in time.

He thought of the Chatchawan dinner, still two days off, of Ploy's dry humor and her mother's list and the particular ease of an arrangement that asked nothing real of him. He thought of his father's voice at the breakfast table, flat and certain, discussing the merits of the connection as though it were a matter of shipping routes. None of it, he noted with some private discomfort, occupied nearly as much space in his mind that morning as a five minute conversation in a hallway with a mover who had gotten lost on his way to find a signature.

He picked the contract back up, made himself read the paragraph a fourth time, and this time, mostly, succeeded, though some small persistent corner of his attention remained fixed, for the rest of the morning, on the sound of a laugh that had not been particularly loud and that he could, nonetheless, still hear clearly enough to trouble him, clearly enough that he suspected, uneasily, it might stay with him a good deal longer than one morning