Distance between us

Overtime

The Delgado project ran them both ragged through the back half of March, which meant Elena and Julian occupied the same late-night hours often enough that it stopped being a coincidence and started being, without either of them naming it out loud, something closer to an arrangement, a rhythm their days began organizing themselves around without either party fully admitting to the organizing. He brought coffee, unasked, and left it within reach without comment, always exactly the way she liked it, though she still hadn't told him and had started to suspect, with some unease, that he'd simply paid attention. She brought opinions he hadn't solicited and, more and more, found himself actively wanting, seeking out even, angling questions during the day specifically so he'd have a reason to come find her answer in person that evening.

"Your load-bearing wall is in the wrong place," she told him one night, jabbing a pencil at a sketch he'd left open on the drafting table, the kind of casual trespass she wouldn't have dared with anyone else on the fortieth floor and somehow never thought twice about with him, her elbow propped on the same table where his notes sat, close enough that she could smell the coffee he'd been nursing for the better part of an hour.

"It's not load-bearing yet. It's a concept."

"It's a bad concept, is what it is." She turned the page toward the light, tracing the offending line with the eraser end of her pencil. "You've got the stairwell fighting the structure instead of working with it. Move it eighteen inches east and the whole thing opens up you'd get natural light all the way down to the second landing instead of that awkward dark pocket you've currently got yourself stuck with."

"Ruthless." But he was smiling the real one, she'd started to be able to tell the difference, not the practiced boardroom version he wore for clients and photographers, tight at the edges and calibrated for cameras, but something looser, more unguarded, that made the corners of his eyes crease in a way she'd caught herself thinking about at inconvenient moments, during the bus ride home, during the slow hours at the diner before she'd finally quit two weeks into the new job, in the particular quiet right before sleep when her mind refused to cooperate with her intentions. He turned the sketch fully toward her. "Fix it, then. Prove me wrong."

She did, working quickly, the pencil moving with the particular confidence she only ever felt in front of a blank page, sketching the corrected stairwell in a handful of assured lines while he watched over her shoulder, close enough that she was aware of exactly how close, and he watched her do it with an expression she was starting to recognize and starting to be genuinely frightened of, because it looked less like a boss admiring an employee's competence and more like a man who had stopped pretending, at least to himself, that he was only staying late for the sake of the blueprints.

"There," she said, sliding it back. "Now it doesn't fight itself."

"You're better at this than I am."

"I'm not better than you. I'm better at this specific thing, this one time, on this one sketch." She said it fast, deflecting, the way she deflected most compliments, as though praise were a ball thrown too hard and the only sensible response was to duck out of its path entirely.

"Take the compliment, Elena." He said her first name easily now, the way he had that first night in the model shop, and she'd stopped, mostly, minding, had in fact started to notice the specific warmth that spread through her chest whenever he used it, a warmth she was doing an increasingly poor job of pretending not to notice. "You're allowed to just be good at things without immediately explaining them away."

"Old habit." She busied herself gathering pencils she didn't need to gather, straightening a stack of paper that was already straight. "In my family, you don't get complimented much. You get told what still needs fixing. Saves time, saves everyone the trouble of getting used to praise they might not get again next week."

Something in his face softened at that, in a way that made her want to take the sentence back, too personal, too much of a door left ajar, a small unguarded fact about her childhood offered up before she'd fully decided he was someone she trusted with it. "That sounds exhausting."

"It's efficient." She shrugged, aiming for lighter than she felt. "Anyway. It's late. We should both go home."

"Probably." Neither of them moved. Outside the model shop's single window, the city had gone properly dark, the kind of dark that made the lit windows of other office towers look like a second, sparser skyline hovering somewhere above the real one.

"Julian." She set the pencil down, finally, and made herself say it, because someone needed to and she doubted it would be him, doubted he'd ever be the one to name the thing they were both so carefully circling. "This is you understand this is a bad idea. Whatever this is. Whatever it's turning into."

"I haven't said what this is."

"You don't have to. I've seen the society pages, same as everyone else in this building. I know who you're supposed to end up sitting next to at every dinner for the rest of your life, and it's not the girl from the model shop who takes three buses to get to work and still owes six hundred dollars on a community college loan she took out for a certification course."

He didn't argue with that, which she respected enormously and hated in almost equal measure, because some small, unreasonable part of her had wanted him to argue with it, to tell her she was wrong about the shape of his future, to produce some counterargument sturdy enough to lean on. Instead he said, quietly, in a voice that had none of the boardroom left in it at all, stripped down to something plainer and more dangerous, "Supposed to isn't the same thing as going to," and then he gathered his jacket and left her standing alone in the model shop with a corrected blueprint, a cooling cup of coffee she hadn't touched, and a heart doing something reckless and entirely unauthorized in her chest, thudding against her ribs in a way that had nothing to do with the late hour and everything to do with six words she suspected she'd be turning over in her mind for a very long time.