My Rival, My Partner

Chapter Five: Late Nights

Dane's POV

By the third week, the shared office had stopped feeling like enemy territory and started feeling, disorientingly, like the place Dane most wanted to be at the end of a long day, which should have alarmed him more than it did.

They'd fallen into a rhythm without discussing it. Dane arrived first with coffee for both of them, Callum arrived twenty minutes later with pastries from a bakery near his building that Dane refused to admit he'd started looking forward to, and somewhere around nine at night, when the rest of the Transit Authority building had gone dark and quiet around them, they'd still be at the long table, heads bent over the same set of drawings, close enough that Dane could smell the clean, expensive scent of whatever Callum used on his hair.

"You're doing the thing again," Callum said one night, not looking up from the section he was drafting.

"What thing."

"Staring at me like I'm a building code violation you're trying to solve."

Dane felt heat climb up the back of his neck. "I wasn't staring."

"You were absolutely staring. I could feel it. It's very distracting, Copper, I'm trying to get the stairwell egress calculations right and you're over there radiating intensely at the side of my face."

"I was thinking about the atrium load," Dane lied, badly, and Callum's answering grin told him exactly how badly.

The truth, which Dane had been carefully not examining too closely for two weeks, was that he'd started noticing things about Callum he had no professional reason to notice.

The way Callum's forearms looked with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, ink-stained from the fountain pen he insisted on using for markup notes despite it being, in Dane's opinion, an absurd affectation. The low, unguarded laugh Callum let out when something actually struck him as funny, so different from the polished, performative one he used in client meetings that Dane had started keeping a private, embarrassing tally of how many times a day he managed to earn the real one.

He told himself it was proximity. Three months of forced closeness would do this to anyone, manufacture a kind of intimacy that felt like something more than it was, the way you could mistake adrenaline for attraction if you weren't careful about the difference. He'd read that somewhere, some psychology piece about hostages and captors, and had immediately regretted applying it to his own situation because it made Callum sound sinister, and nothing about Callum, infuriatingly, felt sinister anymore.

It was nearly ten when they finally leaned back from the table, both of them stiff from hours hunched over the same set of drawings, and Callum stretched in a way that pulled his shirt tight across his shoulders and made Dane look very deliberately at the ceiling instead.

"This is good," Callum said, quiet, studying the combined sketch spread between them, his atrium light study layered under Dane's community-access floor plan, the two visions no longer competing but genuinely, unmistakably better together than either had been alone.

"This is really good, Dane."

It was the first time he'd used Dane's first name instead of *Copper*, and Dane felt it land somewhere just beneath his ribs, sharper than it had any right to be.

"Yeah," he said, and his voice came out rougher than he meant it to.

"It is."

They were both looking at the drawing. Then they weren't. Callum's hand was resting flat on the table, close to Dane's where it rested on the edge of the paper, and neither of them moved for a long moment that stretched taut and electric in the quiet office, the window unit rattling faintly in the background like the only thing in the room still pretending nothing was happening.

Dane's fingers shifted first, not away, but closer, the barest brush of his knuckles against the side of Callum's hand, testing, the way you'd test ice before deciding whether it would hold your weight.

Callum went very still. Then, slowly, deliberately, he turned his hand over on the table, palm up, an invitation instead of an accident, and Dane's breath caught somewhere in his chest at how simple it was, in the end, two hands on a drafting table, fingers finding the spaces between each other like they'd been meant to fit there all along.

Neither of them said anything. Neither of them pulled away.

Outside, the city kept moving without them, and inside the half-lit third-floor office, something that had started as rivalry sat very quietly, very carefully, on the edge of becoming something neither of them was ready to name, but both of them, for the first time, wanted to.