HOLD ME CLOSER

Chapter 14: The Math of Wanting Things

The office contract, initially slated for three months, had been quietly extended into a fourth, a piece of news that reached Krit secondhand through Wichai's usual unceremonious announcement over the morning job sheets, and that landed in Krit's chest with a small unexpected lift he chose not to examine too closely.

He saw Narin more regularly now, the fourteenth floor's furniture needs having settled into a steady trickle of smaller deliveries and adjustments rather than the initial flood of boxes, each visit to that floor carrying with it the low, persistent possibility of running into him, a possibility Krit told himself he was not counting on and counted on anyway, every single time.

They had fallen into something that was not quite friendship and not quite anything else either, a loose rhythm of hallway conversations and small favors, Narin flagging him down once to ask his opinion on where a set of bookshelves ought to go, standing close enough while Krit worked that Krit had become uncomfortably aware of exactly how little space separated them, close enough to catch the clean, expensive scent of his cologne beneath the sharper smell of fresh paint and sawdust, close enough that Krit had found himself, more than once, deliberately slowing down a task simply to keep that particular proximity a few seconds longer than strictly necessary.

He caught Narin once staring blankly at his own reflection in the elevator doors and made some joke about executive exhaustion that had, gratifyingly, pulled a real laugh out of him, and in the narrow mirrored space of the elevator car, for the length of four floors, Krit had found it almost impossible not to notice the particular line of Narin's jaw, the way his tie sat loosened at the collar by that hour of the afternoon, the small vulnerable stretch of throat visible above it. He had looked away first, both times, telling himself it meant nothing, and both times had felt his own pulse behaving as though it disagreed rather strongly with that assessment.

It was nothing, by any reasonable measure. It was also, somehow, the best part of most of Krit's days, a fact he found increasingly difficult to argue himself out of no matter how many times he tried on the bus ride home, his mind drifting, more nights than he cared to admit, toward things considerably less innocent than hallway conversations, the particular warmth of a hand held a beat too long expanding, in the privacy of his own thoughts, into things he had no business imagining about a man who owned the building he swept sawdust out of every afternoon.

He tried anyway, that particular afternoon, sitting with Add over plates of noodles at the small shop near the warehouse where the crew sometimes gathered after a shift.

"You are doing the thing again," Add said, not looking up from his food. "The staring off into space thing."

"I am eating noodles, Add."

"You are eating noodles very slowly while staring at nothing. It is a specific thing you do now. I have started keeping track."

Krit sighed, setting his chopsticks down. "Say I was thinking about someone. Hypothetically."

"Hypothetically." Add's grin was immediate and entirely unhelpful. "Go on."

"Say that someone happened to be, hypothetically, the actual heir to the entire company we are working for. And say I was twenty nine years old with a mother's hospital bills and a debt to a man who wants his money in two weeks, and this hypothetical someone has never once in his life had to wonder how he was going to cover a bus fare." Krit picked his chopsticks back up, mostly for something to do with his hands. "What would you say to that."

Add considered the question with more seriousness than Krit had expected, setting his own bowl aside. "I would say that is a lot of very real problems standing between two people who apparently like talking to each other in hallways. And, apparently," he added, one eyebrow raised, "thinking about each other's forearms, based on the particular quality of that sigh you just did."

"I did not sigh."

"You absolutely sighed. I have known you twenty years, Krit, I know what your forearms sigh sounds like."

Krit felt his ears go warm despite himself, unable to entirely deny it. "Fine. Maybe I have noticed a few things. It does not mean anything."

"It means something," Add said, gentler now, though the teasing had not entirely left his voice. "It has meant something for weeks, if we are being honest, and you know it as well as I do." He leaned forward, elbows on the table. "I would also say that you have spent your whole life doing the math on everything, what you can afford, what you cannot, what is realistic and what is not, because you have had to, because nobody ever gave you the room to want something without calculating the cost first. And I understand that. But krit, some things are not actually math problems, even if it feels safer to treat them like they are."

Krit turned that over for a long moment, the noodles going cold in front of him, unattended.

"I do not even know if he wants the same thing I might be wanting. I am not sure I even know exactly what I am wanting yet." That was not entirely true, and Krit knew it even as he said it, the particular shape of what he wanted having grown considerably clearer over the last several weeks of catching himself watching Narin's hands, his mouth, the unguarded stretch of him leaning against a door frame at the end of a long day, wondering, in unguarded moments he was not proud of, what it might feel like to close the distance between them properly rather than simply standing near enough to feel the pull of it and walking away again.

"Then maybe that is worth finding out," Add said, gentler now, "before you talk yourself out of something you have not even properly started."

Krit did not have a good answer for that, and Add, for once, did not push further, letting the conversation settle instead into easier, safer territory. Though the words stayed with Krit for the rest of the evening, following him home on the bus, into his apartment, into the quiet hour before sleep when the cat curled against his feet, and the ceiling fan ticked its familiar rhythm and his mind, against every reasonable instinct telling him not to, kept circling back to a gold-lit hallway. He had no good reason to keep thinking about it anyway, the memory expanding, in the dark, into something considerably warmer than the hallway itself had actually contained, Narin's hand around his lingering a beat too long, the particular low register his voice dropped into when he forgot, for a moment, to be careful.

He fell asleep, eventually, with his own pulse still not entirely settled, and did not examine too closely, come morning, what exactly he had been dreaming about.

Fourteen floors up that same evening, in an office long emptied of its usual staff, Narin found himself in a nearly identical predicament, a contract he was meant to be reviewing lying forgotten beneath his hand while his thoughts wandered, unbidden and increasingly difficult to redirect, toward the particular warmth of Krit's forearm brushing his while they had bent together over the bookshelf that afternoon, an accidental contact that had lasted no more than a second and that Narin had nonetheless spent the better part of an hour since turning over in his mind like a stone he could not put down. He thought of the low sound of Krit's laugh, close enough that afternoon that he had felt the warmth of it rather than merely heard it, and found his own breath going unsteady at the memory in a way that had nothing at all to do with the contract in front of him, and everything to do with a wanting he had stopped, sometime in the last few weeks, being able to convincingly lie to himself.

He set the contract aside entirely, unable to pretend any longer that he was accomplishing anything useful with it, and allowed himself, for a few private minutes, to simply sit with the feeling rather than talk himself out of it the way he usually did. He thought of a conversation he overheard between Krit and Add. Krit's occasional careful hesitations, the debt, the mother, the whole weight of a life that had never once afforded him the luxury of wanting something simply because he wanted it.

Narin understood that weight only in translation, only by analogy, his own burdens cut from an entirely different cloth, and yet he found, turning the thought over, that he recognized something of himself in it regardless, the particular exhaustion of a life spent calculating cost before ever allowing desire, though his calculations concerned a father's approval rather than a mother's hospital bills. He wondered whether that shared exhaustion, different in every particular and identical in its essential shape, was part of what had drawn him so completely toward a man he had, by any reasonable measure of his previous life, no business wanting at all.

He thought, staring out at the darkened city beyond his window, that he was tired, suddenly and thoroughly, of being the kind of man who calculated everything before allowing himself to feel it. He did not know yet what he intended to do with that particular exhaustion. He only knew, sitting alone in an office fourteen floors above an ordinary street, that he no longer wanted to spend his evenings quite this way, contracts forgotten, thoughts elsewhere, the one thing he actually wanted just out-of-reach behind a careful professional distance he had built, brick by careful brick, for reasons that no longer felt entirely convincing even to the man who had built them.

He picked up his phone once, scrolling to the message thread he and Krit had begun weeks earlier under the thin pretense of coordinating delivery schedules, and typed out three separate messages before deleting each one in turn, unable to settle on a version of himself brave enough to send something that admitted even a fraction of what he had just spent the last hour thinking. He set the phone down finally, unsent words still hanging somewhere in the space between them, and told himself, closing his laptop at last, that there would be another chance, another hallway, another excuse, soon enough, and that he would find the courage for it when the moment actually arrived rather than practicing it uselessly alone in an empty office.

He was not entirely certain he believed himself. He went home anyway, the unsent messages still sitting quietly on his phone, waiting for a bravery he suspected, somewhat uneasily, might arrive