The Proximity Contract

Chapter 15: Handled Privately

"I'll handle it," Hale said. "He won't be with the company after this. What else do you want from this?"

Blood had dried at the corner of Elliot's mouth, his right hand had gone stiff around the two fingers that wouldn't open all the way, and he had been standing on one leg since Ostrow stopped moving. Hale hadn't looked at any of it for the length of the sentence.

Elliot had known it standing over Ostrow with the belt still buckled through itself: Hale was going to take this and finish it himself. Hearing it in words was different. It got in under his ribs and stayed there.

"What's on the table?"

Hale looked at him, and said it as if it were a thing he had only just thought of. "I assumed you'd say you didn't want anything."

Elliot moved his eyes off him — to the window, which showed nothing at that hour, and then to Ostrow on the carpet, which was worse, and then back. He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Tonight's different." His voice came out level, and he was grateful for it. "It happened to me. Wanting something back for it is normal."

"Mm." Hale said it the way he said most things. "Cash. Paid leave. You finish the internship early, or we move you to another team."

Elliot's eyes came up at that. Every item on the list was something he could use before the month was out — paid leave was rent still getting paid while he wasn't standing at a copier, and a transfer was a way off that floor. He didn't bother pretending he wasn't adding it up.

"HR will reach out once it's settled." Hale glanced down at Ostrow and back. "This stays with the people who have to know. The compensation, too. Can you live with that?"

Elliot took a beat, though he had already decided. Public meant the whole floor knowing what Ostrow had done to the intern, and then the whole floor reading the rest of it off him in the elevator and the break room and every meeting he sat in. He had to work in that building.

"I can live with that."

Hale nodded once. He didn't look surprised.

Then his eyes crossed Elliot's face on the way back from the carpet and stopped, and Elliot couldn't tell which part of him Hale was reading — the lip, the flush still high on his cheeks, or the two fingers.

"So you weren't drunk?"

"No. I got light-headed early, so I started acting like it." He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist and looked at what came off, which was less than before. "I flush when I drink. That's all."

"Mr. Hale." He said it before he'd finished the thought, and once it was out he kept going, because there was only one question left that he actually wanted answered. "Earlier. You saw me."

Hale didn't deny it. One nod, no more than that.

He'd been seen, then — a supervisor standing too close, a drunk act that had read as real — and Hale had turned around and come up after him. He hadn't had to do that.

"Thank you."

Hale shook his head. "The company put him in that room with you. You don't have to thank anyone for it."

"Every company's got some version of it going on somewhere." Elliot shrugged one shoulder, and the shrug pulled at something in his back, so he stopped. "It's all right. I get it."

Hale's eyes came up at that and stayed on him.

"You've had it happen before?"

"No." Fast. "I've heard about it."

Hale didn't ask again. He let it sit there in the room, and Elliot let it sit.

"Let's get out of here." Hale tipped his chin at the door. "Leave him. I'll have someone deal with it. Get your things."

Elliot looked once at Ostrow — the belt, the towel, half his face gone dark and swelling against the carpet — and Hale caught him looking.

"Don't worry about him."

"Wasn't worried."

He already had the phone in his hand. He turned it over: the timer had stopped at 2:05:11, and the file sat at the top of the list with its duration next to it. He slid it into the inside pocket of his jacket, where it had been since the parking garage that morning, and got the jacket off the back of the chair.

Hale was holding the door. When Elliot came even with him, Hale tipped his head at the corridor: you first.

Elliot went.

The corridor was long and beige and dropped into silence at both ends, six doors on a side, carpet thick enough that his own steps were the loudest thing in the building. Halfway along it he heard the small hiss of something being sprayed, and when he glanced back, Hale had a slim canister in one hand and was moving it once under his jaw and then across the inside of a wrist.

A word came up out of a novel he had read in the world he came from, one paragraph of it: suppressant. Spray-on, scent-dead for a few hours, on the shelf at any drugstore in this one.

Hale wasn't built like an omega. Nobody came through a door the way Hale had come through that door and turned out to be an omega. Which left alpha, and left a name for the thing that had come into room 706 ahead of him — the pressure that had put Elliot's knees back down on the floor before anything had started to hurt, that had held him there and made the air too thick to argue with.

He had a name for it now.

Under the canister, at the collar, when Hale turned his head toward the elevator, there was something else. Cold and green. Mint, of all things, faint and low, the way a smell goes when somebody is trying to cover it with another one. Elliot drew it in and felt the pressure that had been sitting on him since the seventh floor let up, and he had no explanation for that, so he put it down with the rest of the night and kept walking.

He slowed without telling his legs to.

"Something wrong?"

"Honest question." He made his voice light and let it stay light, because the alternative was asking the thing he actually wanted to ask. "Is the company going to clear me out too?"

Hale didn't turn his head. "You're doing your job. Why would we let you go?"

From the company's side, cutting them both loose tonight was the cleaner guarantee — no conversation in a hallway six months from now, no intern standing around reminding everybody of it. Hale could get there without help, which was why Elliot wasn't going to say it.

"Just asking," he said. "Good to hear."

They rode down in an elevator with glass on the street side, and Elliot watched the dark lobby come up at them, the restaurant side black behind its windows. He had assumed that was the end of it — that Hale would go out through the front, and Elliot would get himself home and be sore in the morning, and that would be that.

Hale crossed the lobby and went behind the front desk, to a door with no sign on it, and tipped his head again.

Elliot followed, because his hands had started to hurt properly.

The room was small and clean and smelled like coffee and paper, with a desk, two chairs, and a shelf stacked to the ceiling with boxes of pens and pads of hotel stationery. The clerk from the front desk was standing behind it with his sleeves rolled and a first-aid kit open in front of him. Hale set the key card down beside the kit.

"Get those looked at," Hale said.

"Thanks." And then, because the clerk was already holding a swab and there was no version of the next ten minutes that didn't happen, Elliot sat down. "Thanks. All right."

The iodine stung. His knuckles first, split in two places, the blood gone brown in the creases of the joints, and then the right hand, where the clerk worked around the curled fingers instead of straightening them and asked nothing about it. The fluorescent light was on and everything was visible, and Elliot watched the clerk's hands do the work and kept his own eyes there rather than on Hale, standing eight feet away in a coat that cost more than the room Elliot lived in.

"Anywhere else?"

"Nothing worth it." Elliot turned his wrist so the clerk could tape it. "I'll do the rest at home."

"There's everything you need here," Hale said. He didn't move.

Elliot looked at him. He could have said no. Nobody in the room was going to make him.

He pulled his pant leg up.

The shin was worse than he had thought: the skin split and dried black along the ridge of the bone, two dark discs under the surface where the corner of something had caught him on the way down. The clerk reached for the gauze. Elliot rolled the cuff the rest of the way, and a few inches above the new scrape there was an old mark, silver-pink, wide as two fingers, sitting in the crease of the joint where the leg folded.

Hale's eyes stayed on the new split for two seconds, three, and then moved up those few inches and stopped.

"The cream from last time didn't work?"

Elliot looked down at his own knee. He never looked at it; it was inside the fold, where nothing showed. Now he was looking at it in the back office of a hotel with somebody else's attention fixed on the same square inch of skin.

"It worked." He rotated his leg a few degrees so the clerk could get the iodine where it needed to go. "I stopped putting it on."

"Stopped."

"It scabbed over. I left it a week and then it was this."

Hale didn't answer that. He took his eyes back and put them on the room, and the silence did what the iodine hadn't.

The clerk finished — a square of gauze taped flat over the shin, a wipe passed once across Elliot's split lip, a nod, a step back. Elliot thanked him, and then thanked Hale, who was still standing there in his coat.

The shame arrived after, late, with nothing to point at. He was sitting in the back of a hotel after nine at night with both hands cleaned and a bandage on his leg and a compensation package somewhere in the world with his name on it, and Hale had arranged all of it. He couldn't yet tell the difference between being rescued and being processed.

He put a hand into his jacket for his phone to check the time.

It went off against his palm — the screen lighting up on the way out, SAM RENNER across it — and his thumb was already on the glass.