Accidental Proximity
1091 Words
I told myself I wouldn't think about him in the morning.
I made that promise somewhere around 4am, when the tea was cold and the memories had finally exhausted themselves and I managed to pull together enough sense to go back to bed. I lay there in the dark and made myself a very firm, very reasonable promise.
Ethan Cole was married. He was back in whatever life he had built without me. Last night was a moment..... an uncomfortable, unexpected moment..... and now it was over. Done. Filed away with everything else I had survived.
I was good at surviving.
I believed that promise completely.
Right up until Monday morning, when I walked into the lobby of Mercer & Associates carrying my coffee and my laptop bag..... and saw him standing at the reception desk.
I stopped walking.
He looked up at the exact same moment.
The lobby was busy. Phones ringing, people moving, the Monday morning noise of a building waking up. None of it registered. There was just Ethan..... in a dark grey suit, a folder in his hand, looking at me the way he had looked at me across the party..... like he had been expecting me. Like some part of him had known.
The receptionist said something to him. He answered without looking away from me.
I started walking again. Forward, because going backward was not an option and standing still in the middle of a lobby staring at a married man was not the image I intended to present on a Monday morning.
I reached the desk. Stopped beside him. Kept my eyes on the receptionist.
"Morning, Clara. I have the Henderson file ready."
"Perfect, I'll let Mr. Mercer know." Clara smiled and reached for the file..... then glanced between us. "Oh, do you two know each other? Mr. Cole is joining the Hargrove account team. He'll be working from the third floor."
The third floor.
My floor.
"We've met," I said pleasantly.
"Small world," Ethan said beside me.
I could hear the quiet in his voice. The controlled, almost careful way he said it. I didn't look at him.
"Wonderful," Clara said, already moving on. "Amara, could you show Mr. Cole to the third floor? I'm swamped this morning."
Of course. Of course she could.
"Sure," I said.
We rode the elevator in silence.
Not the comfortable kind. The kind that has too much inside it..... the kind that presses against the walls and sits heavy in the chest. I stood on one side. He stood on the other. The elevator was not large. I was very aware of exactly how much space existed between us and exactly how insufficient it was.
"You work here," he said.
"Clearly."
"I didn't know."
"Does it matter?"
He was quiet for a beat. "Amara....."
"Don't." I kept my eyes on the elevator doors. "We're colleagues now apparently. That's all this is. That's all it can be."
"I know that."
"Good."
The elevator opened. I stepped out first and walked him down the corridor to the third floor workspace without looking back to check if he was following. I could feel him behind me anyway. That specific, infuriating awareness I had of him that two years had done absolutely nothing to dull.
I stopped at the correct office and gestured inside.
"You're in here. IT will come set up your system this morning. Kitchen is at the end of the hall. Bathrooms on the left."
"Thank you," he said.
I turned to leave.
"Amara."
I stopped. Didn't turn around.
"I really didn't know you worked here," he said. His voice was quieter now. Genuine. "I wouldn't have taken the contract if I had."
I stood there for a moment with my back to him, staring down the corridor.
"That would have been easier," I said. "For both of us."
I walked away before he could say anything else.
The day was long.
I sat at my desk and did my work and was completely professional and entirely fine. I answered emails. I attended a meeting. I ate lunch at my desk and answered more emails.
I did not think about the fact that he was forty feet away.
I did not think about Saturday night. About the porch, about his voice, about the things I had spent half the night remembering.
I was fine.
At half past three I went to the kitchen to make coffee. I had the room to myself..... kettle boiling, the quiet hum of the building around me..... when I heard footsteps behind me.
I knew before I turned around.
He came to stand at the counter beside me. Not touching. Just close enough that I could feel the warmth of him the way you feel a fire in a room even when you're not looking directly at it.
He didn't say anything immediately.
Neither did I.
We stood there in the small kitchen in the middle of an ordinary Monday afternoon, side by side, and the silence between us was so full it was almost loud.
"This isn't going to work," I said quietly. "You know that."
"I know," he said.
"We can't do this every day, Ethan. You can't stand this close to me every day and expect....."
I stopped.
He turned to look at me. I felt it before I saw it.
"Expect what?" he said. Low. Careful.
I looked up at him. "Mistake", Because up close, in the ordinary fluorescent light of an office kitchen, he looked exactly the same as he had at 2am in my memory. Exactly the same as he had every night I had spent two years trying to forget.
His eyes dropped briefly. Just for a second. To my mouth.
Then back up.
My breath caught.
Neither of us moved.
The kettle finished boiling. The click of it was sharp in the silence and I stepped back, reached for it, poured my coffee with hands that were steadier than they had any right to be.
"Go back to your office, Ethan," I said.
He stayed for one more second..... just one..... like he was deciding something.
Then he left.
I stood there alone in the kitchen gripping my coffee mug, staring at the wall.
Forty feet.
He was forty feet away from me.
Every single day.
God help me, I thought.
Because I already knew..... with a cold, sinking, absolute certainty.....
That I was going to need every wall I had ever built.
And I wasn't sure any of them were going to be enough.
- Writer
