ADJACENT

CHAPTER FIVE: Feel me up

Andrea

I couldn’t calm down.

My entire body froze up. Dread throbbed into my stomach, heavy and immovable.

I wanted to crawl out of my own skin, to exist without a body somewhere for a very long time.

I clasped my hands together to still their shaking and steady myself with a breath, trying desperately to keep my wit.

I want to curl into a ball so small and quiet and disappear.

My chest heaved the red was still there behind my eyelids, bright and spreading, and my mom was screaming her throat out, Ace was on the floor and he wasn’t moving and—

And then I heard it.

That voice.

Deep in a way that had nothing to do with volume.

A voice that left a frequency in the mind after they’d gone.

The kind that, when it found you, found you specifically.

It cut through everything. It rumbled through me.

“That’s it,” he said, right at my ear. “Bare yourself to me.”

My brain stalled.

Who says that to someone on the verge of a panic attack? Who raised this man?

But I sucked it in regardless, sucked the words down and something in the chemistry of the panic shifted. Altered.

I blinked my eyes open.

He was in front of me.

Directly in front of me, close enough that I had to tilt my chin up to find his face, and he was already moving, guiding me a few steps sideways with a hand at my arm, somewhere the air had more room. Blocking my view of the blood.

How he knew it was the blood making me feel like this is unknown to me.

Reality came back in pieces. The warm plaster of the wall behind me. My hands flat against it.

The evening light, the bougainvillea, the distant sound of the brunch carrying on without me.

He was in front of me.

One of his hands had already found the back of my neck, not gripping, something more deliberate than gripping, a pressure that was steady and intentional, and I felt him exhale, felt his chest constrict with it, and my own body responded, drawing breath with his opposite movement.

Whatever he was doing, it was working.

His other hand came up to the wall beside my head, leaning into me fully, and I watched it, couldn’t stop watching it.

Dark skin against pale plaster.

The architecture of his knuckles, the precise way the tendons moved under the surface. A tiny old scar along the outer edge that had long since stopped needing explanation.

His hand on the wall beside my head while his other hand held the back of my neck and I was between him and the wall and the air between us had narrowed to almost nothing.

The shivering in my body shifted changed in tonality.

It became something layered, something that didn’t have a clean name, because something else was taking over now alongside whatever remained of the terror.

Something I wasn’t prepared for and couldn’t compartmentalize quickly enough to manage.

It was the first time in my adult life someone other than my mom and brother had witnessed this. Okay aside nurses in the hospital.

His hand moved from the back of my neck up into my braids, fingers running through the plaits to grip the back of my skull, and he tugged, deliberate, tilting my head back so I had no choice but to look up at him directly.

I dragged a breath in at the stretch.

His face was right there.

The shadow on his jaw, close enough to see the grain of it.

His eyes moving over mine, reading everything and never once looked away.

Something wicked moved through his expression.

Something crackled through me.

Electric and immediate and entirely inappropriate.

I felt it move across my skin in a wave, goosebumps rising in its wake, and I hadn’t touched him, he was the one touching me, holding my head back, holding me between him and the wall, and I felt like something that had been dead to the current and was suddenly, without consent, conducting it.

Was this chemistry? Biology? Some involuntary response my body had decided to have without asking me first?

He smelled like oud and something underneath it that I couldn’t immediately place and couldn’t stop trying to.

I pulled it in with every breath. Warm coffee.

The residual panic was still there at the very edges of my consciousness but he was bigger than it, louder than it, taking up more of everything, and as long as I could see him and feel him and breathe the specific smell of him, air reached my lungs.

He leaned forward, his breath landing warm against the side of my face.

“Next time you panic,” he murmured, “I want to see it.”

I blinked. Still in shock.

He was different like this.

Four years and I had known the composed version, the man who rationed words like something finite and treated every room like a negotiation.

This was something that lived underneath that, something that only surfaced when there was no audience or performance required.

In private he was more present somehow.

More unrestrained.

Like whatever he kept behind the composure had decided, just for this moment, to stop.

“I wasn’t panicking,” I said.

It came out before I could stop it. My voice had returned steadier than I imagined, stripped of the worst of the earlier terror, but not exactly convincing, and I knew it, and he knew it.

I exhale, paste a serene expression to my face and looked him in the eye.

He stared right back.

The corner of his mouth twitched.

“Okay,” he said.

“I wasn’t.”

“Okay, Andrea.”

My name in his mouth, with that weight on it.

I held his gaze and there was nothing left between us, no composure, no professional register, no careful management of what he was allowed to see.

My face was open and he was looking at all of it and he didn’t look away and I couldn’t decide if that was better or worse than if he had.

“Don’t tell Ufuoma,” I said.

“I’m her boss.” he said “I don’t need to tell her anything”.

I straightened. Found the approximate shape of myself and pulled it back on.

Breathed out once again, fully, and let it go.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” he said back quietly, and the single word held something I was going to need significant time and a private room to properly take apart.

And then without another word, he detangled himself from me, walking away like he didn’t just act out of character, like he had not tilted my head back and told me he wanted to see it next time.

Leaving me standing there, wondering what in God’s beautiful planet just happened.

Holy shit.

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Author’s note: Holy shit indeed 😭 why is it getting hotter in here?

Catch up ⬇️

Chapter one - Chapter two - chapter three - Chapter four