"I don't think it's wallowing," he said carefully.
"No?"
"He's not doing it for the reader." Adriel's finger moved along the margin, tracing the lines without touching them. "This is just what he does. Every night, probably. This is the voice in his head that doesn't switch off." He paused. "It's supposed to be uncomfortable. You're supposed to feel stuck in there with him."
Landen sat back slightly. He'd been uncomfortable reading it and had assumed that was a fault in the prose. He was no longer sure.
"People yearn to be chosen," he said slowly, working it through. "Completely. That's what he's really saying, underneath all of it. And his partner had chosen him. Shown him, multiple times. The matter should be solved by then, right?”
The rain beat against the glass. The lamp hummed. Adriel's pen had gone still and he was looking at the page but not reading it. Landen waited.
"Some people don't believe they're worthy of it," Adriel said finally. The careful tone had gone out of his voice, leaving something quieter underneath. "Even when someone tells them. Even when the proof is right there. The voice saying they're not has been there a lot longer. It's louder. It doesn't just stop because someone was kind to them once or twice."
Landen turned and looked at him.
The lamplight was warm on the curve of Adriel's cheek, the soft line of his jaw. Color had come back into his face, not the vivid startled flush but something slower and deeper, spreading down his throat and disappearing beneath his collar. Adriel's lashes were dark against his skin. His pulse going at his throat, rapid and visible. His eyes fixed on the manuscript.
He's not talking about the book.
Landen knew it immediately, the way you knew certain things.
He looked back at the manuscript.
"Maybe he can add a specific memory instead of the general spiral," he said. His voice came out lower than he'd have liked. "One concrete thing instead of the catalogue. It'll hit harder."
"Yeah." Adriel's voice was not entirely steady. "I think so."
They kept working.
Another hour passed. Landen turned pages, asked questions, made notes, kept his voice even and professional, and was, beneath all of it, running on fumes.
The warmth of Adriel's body in the close air. The smell of his skin. The way he chewed the end of his pen when he was thinking hard and then caught himself doing it and put it back on the page with a small, slightly embarrassed motion. The way he forgot himself entirely when the text caught him, his hands moving as he talked, something open and unguarded in him that Landen suspected very few people got to see.
The knee still pressed against his under the table.
Around ten, Adriel found another problem. He leaned forward to point it out, reaching across the manuscript, and his shoulder came to rest against Landen's, warm and solid through the fabric of his sweater.
"Here, and then here. He sets this thread up in the second act and then it's just gone. It never pays off. The whole resolution in the final chapter depends on it and it's just… missing."
He was very close. Landen could feel the warmth of him along his whole left side, could smell his soap clearly now, mixed with something he was starting to realize was just Adriel. His hair had fallen forward over his brow. His finger moved across the page, tracing the text, his voice carrying that focused, slightly urgent quality it got when he'd found something real.
Landen looked at the lines he was indicating.
He also looked, for just a moment, at the side of Adriel's face. The pink tip of his ear. The soft curve of his cheek. The slightly parted lips.
"You're right," Landen said. Level. It cost him more than it should have. "Flag it."
Adriel leaned back. The loss of contact was immediate and Landen did not react to it in any visible way, which was, at this point in the evening, a minor personal achievement.
Adriel uncapped his pen. Made the notation in his small, elegant script. His hand was not quite steady, Landen noticed, and looked away before he could spend any more time noticing it.
He thought about what Adriel had said about the monologue. The color in his face afterward. He thought about all of it, the weeks of it, the archive and the stairwell and the break room and every careful step back he'd taken and whether any of it had made the slightest difference.
It hadn't.
He was sitting in a lamplit office at ten o'clock with Adriel's knee warm against his and the smell of his soap in the air and the memory of his shoulder solid against his own thirty seconds ago, and all the distance he'd been so carefully maintaining had quietly, incrementally collapsed. He didn't think he was going to be able to rebuild it.
He wasn't sure he wanted to.