[Bailee’s POV]
The stairwell on nine has become my confession booth. No cameras, no foot traffic, and the acoustics swallow sound like they've signed an NDA—the only space in this building where I can sit with a sandwich I'm too nauseous to eat and call it lunch.
Third step from the bottom, back against the railing, bread going stale in my lap. The cluster of cells I'm still not calling a baby has declared war on turkey, and I'm negotiating with my own stomach like a hostage situation where nobody wins.
A door opens two flights above. Footsteps descend—measured, unhurried, the rhythm of a man who has never once rushed toward anything because everything rearranges itself around him. Cedar and cold metal reach me before he does, flooding the stairwell like smoke filling a sealed room.
Blake rounds the landing and stops. His grey eyes find me on the step like he's confirming coordinates he already had, and every molecule of blood in my body picks a side I didn't authorise.
"What exactly is the head of Legal doing in a stairwell?" I wrap the sandwich, grateful for something to do with my hands besides pressing them against my own treasonous pulse.
"I could ask you the same thing." He sits beside me—not across, not one step down, beside—without requesting permission or checking if concrete meets his standards.
His knee settles four inches from mine. The distance feels less like space and more like a conversation neither of us is having out loud.
"I like the echo." I lean back against the railing. "Very atmospheric—really elevates the sad sandwich experience."
"I like the quiet." He sets a coffee cup between his feet, sleeve riding up just enough that tattoo ink vanishes under rolled cuffs. "The alternative is a partners' lunch where three senior wolves spend an hour ranking golf handicaps while I calculate the billable hours I'm haemorrhaging."
"The great Blake Wallace, fleeing from golf talk." I press my hand against my sternum, where his scent is doing damage to my lungs. "How the mighty have fallen."
"Concrete wins over putting greens. Every time." His mouth shifts—that tectonic movement, the fault line rearranging a millimetre beneath the surface. "I don't even like golf."
"But you played." I don't know why I'm asking, or why I'm still sitting here when every nerve I own is memorizing the heat radiating off his body in the cool stairwell air.
"Briefly." His thumb traces the rim of the coffee cup, slow, deliberate. "Until I realised I was swinging a club because my father expected it, and the whole thing felt like performing someone else's hobby inside my own body."
"So you quit." My hip presses into the metal railing, grounding myself against the pull that lives in those four inches between his knee and mine.
"Took up boxing." His jaw shifts, something private crossing behind those gunmetal eyes. "At least the violence is honest—you hit something, it hits back, nobody pretends it's civilised."
A laugh escapes me—real, surprised, dragged out of my chest before my defences can catch it. The sound bounces off concrete and comes back warmer than it left.
Something in Blake's face changes. Not a smile—Blake doesn't smile, he permits controlled seismic activity—but the surface cracks, granite shifting to reveal something underneath that makes my ribs compress.
"My version was piano lessons." I pull my knees up, resting my chin on them. "Mom saved for six months to afford them, and I hated every minute—the teacher smelled like mothballs and disappointment, and my fingers were too short for octaves."
"But you kept going." Not a question—his eyes hold mine with that patient, unhurried focus, the lock-picking gaze that makes me forget what I'm supposed to be keeping shut.
"Her face during the recitals." My throat works around something I wasn't planning to give him. "Front row, her one good dress—same one she wore to three separate events because she only had the one—watching me butcher Beethoven like I was performing at Carnegie Hall."
"Worth the suffering." He says it quietly, without the question mark. The understanding in those two words lands somewhere below my armour, in a place I didn't know was exposed.
"I can still manage a very aggressive 'Chopsticks.'" I force lightness into my voice because the alternative is having feelings at a man made of granite. "And nothing else—six months of savings, eight years of lessons, and that's my entire musical legacy."
"That's more than most people keep from the things they survived." His voice drops half a register and the words settle at the base of my skull—warm and safe.
My spine locks, one vertebra at a time, bottom to top. The stairwell shrinks—or maybe it was always this small and I just didn't notice until his scent was in every breath and his knee four inches from mine.
The gap between us feels less like distance and more like a decision I keep refusing to make. My skin flushes from collarbones upward, heat spreading in a wave I can't redirect.
I'm aware of him the way you're aware of a live wire—every nerve oriented toward a point of contact that hasn't happened yet, the proximity doing more damage than any touch could.
The most dangerous part isn't the pull. It's how natural this feels—sitting on concrete, trading pieces of ourselves like cards in a game neither of us has admitted we're playing. Like this is something I could have, if I weren't carrying a secret that belongs to him or his brothers.
"I should get back." My voice comes out rougher than planned, scraped against something I didn't mean to expose. I stand too fast and my knees protest the concrete, hand catching the railing for balance.
Blake nods once. He doesn't stand, doesn't reach, doesn't try to extend what I've already ended—just watches me climb the stairs with those grey eyes that miss nothing. The restraint of it makes my chest do something I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon pretending didn't happen.
I push through the door without looking back. The fluorescent hallway swallows me whole, and the absence of cedar and cold metal feels like a loss.
Behind me, the stairwell door swings shut on a room that should feel exactly the same as it did an hour ago—concrete, bad lighting, the echo I said I liked. But the air holds the shape of a conversation I wasn't supposed to have, and the step where he sat beside me holds the ghost of four inches that felt like less every minute.
My hand finds my stomach through my blouse—that reflexive press I can't stop making. And the stairwell, my confession booth, my one safe room in this entire building, feels emptier than any room should.
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