My Rival, My Partner

Chapter Three: Forced Merger

Dane's POV

The shared office the city had arranged was on the third floor of the old Transit Authority building, half-renovated, with exposed brick on one wall and a window unit that rattled like it was personally offended by the assignment. There was one long table, two drafting stations, and, Dane noted with something between dread and reluctant admiration, an excellent view of the museum site itself.

Callum was already there when Dane arrived Monday morning, jacket off, sleeves actually rolled this time, hair slightly less perfect than conference-room Callum's had been. He looked up from a laptop covered in sticky notes and gestured at the room like a man presenting a gift he wasn't sure the recipient wanted.

"Welcome to captivity," Callum said.

"I want it on record that I object to this arrangement."

"Noted. I objected too. My father nearly had an aneurysm." Callum said it lightly, but something tightened at the corner of his eyes that Dane filed away without meaning to

. "Committee's mind is made up, though. Apparently they liked both proposals too much to pick, and even more than that, they liked the idea of us fighting about it on their dime instead of theirs."

Dane set his bag down at the empty drafting station, putting exactly as much table between them as the room allowed, and told himself it wasn't a symbolic gesture.

"Fine. Let's set terms. I don't need you charming the committee behind my back, and I don't need you taking credit for..."

"I don't do that." For the first time, Callum's easy tone actually cracked, just slightly, just enough that Dane heard something real underneath it.

"Whatever you've decided about me, Copper, I don't steal credit. Ask anyone who's actually worked with me instead of just watched me from across a conference room."

The silence that followed had teeth in it. Dane hadn't expected the pushback, and he liked, against his better judgment, that Callum hadn't simply absorbed the accusation with a smile the way Dane had assumed he would.

"Fine," Dane said again, quieter. "Let's just get through this."

They worked in wary parallel for the first two days, separate sketches, separate notes, a very deliberate silence maintained across the six feet of table between them, broken only by clipped, necessary questions about load-bearing walls and city code. By Wednesday, the silence had become its own kind of exhausting, and when Callum slid a coffee across the table without a word, black, no sugar, exactly how Dane took it, which meant he'd been paying more attention than either of them wanted to admit, Dane drank it before he thought better of accepting anything from him.

"How did you know how I take my coffee?" Dane asked, several sips too late to pretend he hadn't noticed.

"You ordered it the same way at the conference. Some of us pay attention, Copper."

Callum didn't look up from his drawing, but Dane caught the small, satisfied curve of his mouth anyway.

By the end of the week, their designs, meant to stay separate, meant to remain proof of whose vision was better, had started, almost against their will, to speak to each other. Callum's instinct for how light should move through the atrium met Dane's stubborn insistence that the building serve the neighborhood kids who'd use it, not just the donors who'd fund it, and somewhere in the overlap something better than either of their solo pitches began to take shape on the table between them.

Neither of them said it out loud. But Dane started arriving ten minutes early, and Callum started staying ten minutes late, and the six feet of table between their stations had, without any formal agreement, shrunk to three.

On Friday evening, gathering his things, Dane's eye caught something on the corner of Callum's laptop screen he wasn't meant to see, a calendar reminder, blunt and formal in a way nothing else about Callum was...

*Report to R.A. Thurs, 7 p.m.*

He didn't ask. He told himself it wasn't his business, that whatever Callum reported to his father about, on whatever schedule, had nothing to do with the two of them or this building or the three feet of table that kept shrinking between their chairs.

He almost believed that too. Right up until Monday morning, when he noticed the reminder was gone from Callum's screen entirely, and Callum wouldn't meet his eyes for the first hour of the day.