Work Text:
i.
The first time you get into your night shift, not once have your only other coworker turned to your direction. It’s obvious that he didn’t notice your sudden presence from the way his attention is glued onto his screen, the way his earphones seem to be set in the highest volume possible, leaking with muffled sounds piercing through the silence of the almost empty workplace.
He remains completely oblivious of your loud footsteps echoing in the office even as you walk to your cubicle on the opposite side of the room. There’s a few beats of silence after you settle on your desk, until he bursts out in laughter.
“Look, Lady, that’s not what I meant. Don’t get the wrong idea.” you hear him say between fits of laughter. “And, Two, it’s almost midnight. Don’t you have to get up early? Be a responsible student and go to sleep.”
Perhaps it’s the lack of sleep that made you exceptionally grumpy that night, because you find yourself huffing at him telling someone else to be responsible. So far he himself hasn’t shown any signs of diligence (he’s such a fucking hypocrite), and you’re beginning to think he doesn’t do his job at all.
You start tuning out his voice as you get into work, trying to focus on the tasks you need to accomplish before you’re finally done for the night. Soon enough, the tranquility of the night is filled with his voice and the clacking of your keyboard, and it remains that way for a while before you finally hear him say, “I’ll be getting back to work. Make sure you all get some sleep, alright? Sweet dreams.”
After that, he turns quiet, and then you immediately hear the sounds of his keyboard as he works nonstop for hours until the end of his shift.
Huh. So he actually does his job.
-
He still doesn’t notice you the next time around for a completely different reason.
“It’s going to be alright, you can talk to me.” The last remnants of laughter in his voice from the other day is gone, replaced by an air of understanding and some sort of paternal tenderness that you never knew he had in him. “I’ll be here for as long as you need, you can tell me whatever is weighing on your mind… no! You’re not a nuisance at all! I’m doing this on my own accord, so you can take your time. I’m listening.”
It's difficult to antagonize him in your head for slacking off his work when he's unexpectedly this caring.
That night, you didn’t have the heart to approach him yourself, so you worked in silence as you listened to him try to comfort someone else. Soon enough, he ends the call and gets back to work, still unaware of your presence.
ii.
It takes him a good while to finally notice he has company in his night shifts. It’s when he decides to send you an email in the middle of working, asking when you’re supposed to show up in the office so he can show you the ropes, considering how he is the only person working in the night shift aside from you. After a few minutes, he receives a reply from you, and he feels himself stiffen from the last sentence of your email:
P.S. By the way, I’m pretty sure you haven’t noticed, but I’m in the office right now.
He gets up from his seat in a hurry to look for you. Eventually, his eyes meet yours from across the room.
“You scared me. I wasn't aware you were here,” he pauses to take in your features that are illuminated by your monitor before he continues, “I’m sorry for the email, I should've seen you.”
“It’s fine,” you reply, a polite smile gracing your lips. “I’m actually surprised you knew just now, I assumed it’d be a lot sooner.”
“Sooner?” He stares at you in question for a few seconds, and then realization hits him. “Don’t tell me you have been coming to work for a while now.”
You don’t say anything in response, but the way you cover your mouth to stifle a small chuckle speaks volumes.
“God.” He averts his gaze, mortified at the thought that he should’ve been guiding you in the workplace days ago as your senior, and yet he fails to accomplish something so simple yet crucial. “I’m so sorry. Really.”
“I told you, it’s fine,” you assure him, and he swears he sees your eyes flicker with amusement. “Also, you apologized to me twice already. You don’t need to apologize that much, you know? ”
“I'm sorry—”
He cuts himself off when he catches himself apologizing again, and you both stifle a laugh before a pregnant pause ensues. Sheepish, he awkwardly rubs the back of his neck. “That wasn't the best introduction, was it? Anyway,” he walks to your cubicle and extends a hand, “it’s nice to meet you.”
He fixes his gaze on you for a moment, then two, and he adds like it’s an afterthought, “Tell me if you need help, or anything. I promise I won't bite.”
You stare at his open hand as if to contemplate on what to say next. After what seems to be careful consideration, you finally clasp your hand onto his, your grip light but firm. “Nice to meet you, too. I’m looking forward to working with you.”
As you shake his hand, it suddenly dawns on him that it has been a while since he had physical contact with someone else. He learns the hard way that he's touch starved when he finds the warmth of your hand comforting, the feeling of your hand plaguing his mind for days even after you let go.
A bit taken aback on how he's starting to get attached to a person he just met, he clings onto the tiny sliver of hope within him that maybe, just maybe, you're a good person, and you'll eventually accept him for who he is.
iii.
Considering how your work cubicles are on the opposite sides of the room, the both of you don’t speak to each other as much as coworkers normally do. The most you could do is to exchange greetings as you enter and leave work, and right in the middle of your shifts it’s all business. Nobody dares to topple the balance of the status quo, and it remains that way for weeks, until one particular night.
He has never been a talker, but you could sense how his side of the office is oddly quiet, his typing more sluggish than usual and his sighs growing heavier as the hours pass by. You’re the type to mind your own business so you don’t comment on his behavior, trying to focus on the tasks you have to finish as you ignore the nagging feeling in the back of your mind, the responsibility of approaching him first.
At that moment, your mind flies back to the time when he was comforting someone through a call, and all of a sudden it feels so wrong to leave him alone.
“Had a rough day? Night?”
There’s a brief moment of silence as the sounds of his keyboard come to a stop. For a second, you regret your decision of speaking out of nowhere because you have no way of knowing if he doesn’t want others to meddle in his business even if he's at times as open as a book.
His voice breaks you out of your reverie. “Are you talking to me?”
“...Yeah?” Your response comes out like a question, unsure of what to say. “We’re the only ones here,” you add.
You hear a small laugh from his direction. “My bad. You caught me off guard, is all. We never really talk to each other, so I was wondering if that question was for me.”
“Sorry. Should’ve been clear.”
“You’re good.” He doesn’t reply for a while after that, which he covers with the steady drum of his fingers on his desk. “Well, to answer your question, it’s been a rough day, though I wouldn’t be lying if I told you this week has been pretty rough, too,” he admits. Perhaps it’s the emotional vulnerability that comes within the unholy hours of the night, because there’s something raw in his voice that tells you he has given away more of his emotions than he intended.
In the spur of the moment, you decide to take the leap.
“You can tell me about it if you want. There’s only the two of us here, the least I could do is have your back.” You stand up from your seat to get a good look at him over your cubicles. “Would you like to get morning coffee after our shift? My treat.”
The corners of his lips immediately curl into a smile. “I'd appreciate that.”
You weren't looking for any sort of compensation from him when you said that, really, so you're surprised when he goes to work the next night with two pizza boxes in hand. You ask him, “Do we have a special occasion that I don't know about?”
“It's nothing like that.” A grin is plastered on his face as he places the pizza boxes to a table. “This is for the coffee yesterday.”
You shake your head, fighting off the smile of gratitude threatening to break out of your lips. “You didn't have to do that.”
“But I wanted to,” he says too abruptly, too boldly. He takes a slice of his own and walks to his cubicle. “You better help me out in finishing these all. I can't eat two whole boxes by myself.”
There's a strange sort of camaraderie that forms between the both of you as it all becomes routine, the exchange of coffee and cheap takeout and everything in between, the constant rants of being corporate slaves and capitalism and the minor inconveniences of life, the neverending banters and jokes and teasing within the comfort of your office.
You never really thought about how much it all meant to you until the night you had a fever. You at least have half the mind to email your boss that you're going to be on sick leave, although it never crossed your mind to notify him because you don’t have his number.
When you finally feel better, you immediately go to work the next day (like a typical corporate slave). He notices your presence as you walk into the office, and he says playfully, “Guess who had to eat two meals of Chinese takeout last night just because someone didn't show up.”
“Looks like you had a really good meal,” you joke.
“I sure did, and it's all thanks to you.”
The banter is particularly short-lived because he suddenly says, “It was kinda lonely without you here.”
Your breath hitches.
There's some sort of intense emotion in his eyes as he stares at you that you have never seen from him before, and yet you find yourself unable to pull away from his gaze. The both of you remain that way for a few beats, until he blinks and folds that emotion away from his eyes.
He might've taken your lack of response as you not feeling the same way about the situation. Either from regret or from embarrassment, he suddenly backwheels before you could even think of replying. “I'm kidding.”
The tiny crack in his voice doesn't make him sound convincing in the slightest, but you don't say a word about it.
As the both of you get back to business, there is a small part of you that wishes he didn't say that. You would've admitted right there that you missed his company while you were out sick.
iv.
Someone from the day shift just turned in a two weeks notice from the company, and their desk happened to be right next to his. Gladly, your boss isn’t too strict when it comes to seating plans, so when the person from the day shift finally resigned, you go to work that night, making a beeline right next to his cubicle with your belongings in hand.
“Looking forward to working with you, seatmate.”
He laughs. “Took you long enough.”
The only thing that changed is that sharing midnight meals became more convenient. The both of you used to eat on the desk right in the middle of the room just to accommodate the fact that your cubicles are far apart from each other. Aside from that, everything else pretty much remained the same — just the right balance of work and chatter like usual.
Even when barely anything changed, the fact that you could now easily see him instead of having to stand on your tiptoes to see him from across the other side of the room made work a lot less lonely, the quiet of the night a lot more bearable.
You always knew that not a lot of people bothered to take night shifts because of how inconvenient it is, but it’s only until one day that it truly sinks in to you. There are some circumstances in your life that force your hand to work during the ungodly hours. You have your own reasons, although you never knew his.
Out of complete curiosity, you ask him about it.
“Well, I don't think I have any particular reason for it, but if I had to think of one…” He hums as he gets in deep thought. “I guess it's just more convenient to me? I mean, the differential pay and all that.”
There’s some degree of truth in the way he says it, although it’s obvious that it’s not his real reason.
“Yeah right, gotta pay all those bills,” you joke, not making an attempt to delve deeper into the matter. Wryly, you add under your breath, “What a lovely capitalistic world.”
The afterglow of your screen burns your eyes as you squeeze them shut, and you wipe away the tears starting to form with the back of your hand. You whisper under your breath, “I don’t really like working at night. Everything in this world is made to be more convenient during the daytime. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t be here right now, to be honest.”
Your eyes are still screwed shut, but you can sense his gaze on you.
“You feel like you’re missing out from a lot when you just sleep on it in the daylight, huh? I guess I see where you're coming from,” he mumbles, more to himself than to you. “There’s barely anything for me to look forward to regardless of what I do. I’ve got nothing to lose right from the start, may as well take the shift where I gain more.”
You don't know what he exactly means by having nothing to lose, but you don't press on the matter, and he doesn't bring it up again.
The rest of the night is spent in an uncomfortable silence until your shift ends.
v.
He rarely gets a night off work. It’s not that he is in dire need of money — he is actually quite comfortable with his current state of living after years of hard work, but there’s not much going on in his life aside from his job and the server. Perhaps his almost perfect attendance to work is a habit he developed from years ago, from trying to change himself after being convicted, from pushing his own body to the limit just to prove he could be better.
But on some days, he just wants to give everything up, to let go of his self-restraint, to be able to do all the things he holds himself back from doing nowadays in fear of ruining the image he so carefully crafted over the years.
And today seems to be one of those days.
Without a second thought, he takes a few nights off work, even while knowing there’s going to be a shitton of workload waiting for him when he gets back. He spends his time sleeping during the daylight in courtesy of his night shifts completely fucking up his sleep schedule. He then ends up waking up at five in the morning, and the most rational thing he could think of doing is to take a quick trip to the convenience store, forgetting to change out of his sleepwear.
Deliberately, he grabs some snacks. Thoughtlessly, he grabs a bunch of beer cans, a lighter, and a box of cigarettes that he may use up in one go or have it rot in the deepest corner of his apartment until he completely forgets about the impulsiveness taking over him just for this night. He often tries to hold himself back from the urges he used to indulge himself in, he really does, but old habits die hard.
He stuffs the beer cans and snacks in a plastic bag after purchase, then shoves the lighter and the box of cigarettes into his pocket as he leaves the store. If his old friends are watching him today, they’d probably be laughing their asses off. So much for trying to change himself when he still feels like a fraud every single time he acts like a decent human being.
On his walk back to his apartment, he barely registers the fact that someone is tapping on his shoulder until a few moments later, and he freezes right on the spot because who the hell is going to be awake in this fucking hour aside from his old friends who he desperately tries to avoid—
“Oh. It’s you.” He breathes a sigh of relief when he sees your face. He isn’t expecting to see you outside work, much less within your normal work hours, but he’d rather take you over anybody else he knows.
You walk next to him on the pavement. “I was behind you in the line, but you never noticed me even when I was calling you multiple times.”
“Were you? I guess I was too deep in thought, I'm sorry about that.”
So you saw him buying all that crap. He wishes you never did.
He takes a quick look at you, and he’s suddenly thrown into a loop because it’s only then he realizes he has never seen you in any other outfit aside from what you usually wear for work. It then occurs to him a second later that you’re in your sleepwear. Reluctantly, he averts his gaze from your figure, feeling like he is crossing multiple boundaries just from the sight of you in your most vulnerable state, within the unholy hours of the day no less.
“This is not the first time you scared me, though,” he tells you after he has finally calmed his nerves somehow. “Do you have a knack for it?”
You shrug. “Perhaps.”
He can see you staring at him, your eyes piercing right through him so intensely, as if you’re trying to find something that he has kept hidden from you from the entire time you both knew each other. Maybe he isn’t exactly doing a good job when it comes to keeping his emotions in check, because you suddenly seem worried for him, even after he made an attempt to make it seem like he has all his shit together.
“You still look quite startled.” You chew on your bottom lip. “It isn’t my intention to scare the living shit out of you in every chance I get. I’ll try to be more careful next time when trying to catch your attention, sorry.”
“It’s not your fault, don’t worry about it. I just get easily startled,” he lies through his teeth, because there is no way he is going to admit that he is scared of facing the people he stuck with back then for the sake of easing his loneliness.
Despite him lying in an attempt to reassure you, it’s painfully obvious that you still appear guilty, and it makes him feel shittier by the second. He hates the feeling of hiding an important part to him from someone who he is starting to value a lot, and yet he couldn’t help but tread carefully around you, not while he isn’t sure if he could fully trust you yet.
You both eventually reach a crossroad, and he knows that you are parting ways in this section. He faces you, about to bid you goodbye and turn the other way to walk back to his apartment when your voice suddenly breaks the silence.
“Wait.”
He turns to you. “Yes?”
“Wanna hang out for a bit before you go home?” you ask. “I could use some company.”
It doesn’t even take him a second to think of a response. “Sure.”
Wordlessly, you grab his hand and walk to your destination. Wordlessly, he matches your pace as he follows you, giving your hand a light squeeze as if he has no intention of letting you go for the meantime. No one makes an effort to break the silence as the both of you walk hand in hand, his plastic bag crinkling as it sways in his hand.
You stop by an empty playground. The chains squeak loudly as the both of you sit on the swings, and, as he places his plastic bag to the ground, he hands you a beer can. “Want one?”
“Going to have some booze in a place for children? Really now?” You raise an eyebrow, but there is a telltale hint of amusement in the way your eyes flicker with silent laughter as you take the beer can. “Hell yeah. I’m down.”
Hiss!
The both of you open your cans at almost the same time. It’s been a couple of months since he has ever bought beer for himself, he absentmindedly thinks to himself as he brings the can to his lips, about to take a sip of his beer before he becomes aware of your outstretched arm with your own can in hand.
“Cheers,” you say.
Perhaps he has gone without a smoke for too long, perhaps it’s the lack of sleep or his crappy vision. For some reason, the carbon dioxide smoking out of your drink is strongly reminiscent of tobacco.
The fruity scent of beer smells nothing like tobacco, really, but he used to have both so simultaneously and so frequently to the point that his mind immediately associates one to the other. The box of cigarettes suddenly makes its presence known in his pocket, so he shifts in his seat to accommodate the discomfort in his pocket. The swing lightly squeaks.
“Cheers to what?” he asks, remembering he is in the middle of a conversation.
“Cheers to our friendship, maybe?” You turn to him, and there’s something about the way your eyes linger on his, something indescribably firm yet tender that he can’t quite place his finger on, and he can somehow still feel it on him even after you break eye contact. “Cheers to putting up with a crappy corporation. Cheers to being able to survive in this world without full coverage health insurance. Anything,” you pause as you take a deep breath. “I wish for a lot of things, don’t I? How greedy of me.”
“It’s not greedy to wish for all the things you deserve.” He reaches his can to yours, rims touching. “Cheers.”
You both take a cursory chug.
“You haven’t been coming to work lately,” you say so simply, and yet a pang still makes its way to his chest from the notion of you thinking about him in his absence.
“I took a few days off. I’m just…” He looks down to his can and realizes it’s empty. “Tired.”
“Yeah, I get it.” You take the last swig of your drink. “I miss being with you at work, but you better take a good rest while you still can until you have to deal with all your shit.”
He doesn’t reply and the both of you fall quiet, empty beer can in hand, the morning wind breezing through your skin, watching the first rays of sunlight tinge the night sky.
He can't bring himself to think of how beautiful the sunrise is. The sentimentality people often get from watching the sunrise is lost in him since long ago, especially when he is just reminded of the way sun rays peek through the blinds at work as a signal for him to go home and sleep to get ready for another night at work, rinse and repeat.
More than anything, the sight of sunrise is unpleasant to him. Although he finds the sunrise a bit more bearable than the whiff of tobacco that briefly invades his senses before it gets carried away by the wind.
“Have you ever smoked?”
The words tumble out of his lips before he could think about them. He’s not looking in your direction, but he senses the way you gaze down to your toes as you contemplate on how to answer his sudden question.
“Nope,” you finally answer. “I thought about it, though. You could say I was curious enough to think about trying it.”
“How did you get past that curiosity, then?”
“I had someone who was intent on not letting me do so, telling me I’m going to destroy my lungs, or I’m going to get cancer, or… you know. All that stuff that apparently shortens your lifespan,” you say. “It eventually got to me, and I stopped considering it ever since.”
An ugly emotion rises in his chest.
“Wish I had someone who did that for me.” The ugly emotion winds itself in his chest tighter and tighter until he can no longer ignore it. He belatedly realizes it’s envy. “With no one to guide me back then, I was pretty impressionable, so it didn’t take me long before I smoked a whole lot. I don’t really do it nowadays, though.”
The box of cigarettes in his pocket suddenly weighs a lot heavier than it should, its imprint tingling on his thigh. It stings. It burns.
“It wasn’t something I particularly enjoyed, but there was no one to stop me from doing it. Everyone else around me either enabled my behavior, or didn’t care at all.” The aftertaste left in his tongue turns bitter. “I guess I was hoping back then that someone would care enough to stop me. Took me a long time before I knew that the only person that could stop me was myself.”
It’s somehow liberating to be able to talk to you about this, he thinks to himself, although there’s some sort of uneasiness that sits in the pit of his stomach, knowing that he never intended to be this loose-lipped around you about his past. He blames it on the booze.
“Do you still get urges?” you ask.
He just stares at you.
You stare back.
“Perhaps I overstepped.” You cast him an apologetic glance as you idly traced the rim of your can with your thumb. “You were alone back then, but not anymore. I’m here for you. Remember that.”
For the first time that day, he allows himself to indulge in a dose of happiness, basking in the warmth of the sun and your company. “Thank you. I appreciate it, really.”
-
As soon as he reaches his apartment, he crashes on his bed, his conversation with you playing in his head over and over.
He told you that he used to have no one, and while that wasn’t a lie, it occurs to him only now that he has the server way before he has known you — he trusts the server more than he has ever trusted anybody else, but it doesn’t change the fact that everyone is in different parts of the world, and there’s no way someone would be by his side in the blink of an eye no matter how much he wishes that’s the case.
The longing for a physical connection sits in the backburner for the longest time, the need for it never really occurring to him since he had the server at his beck and call. It’s the moment you come along that the longing ignites itself, and all of a sudden everything crashes and burns because dawning to a realization that he is a lot lonelier than he thought hurts a lot more than he anticipated.
He pulls out his phone and stares at your name, attached to the new number he listed in his contacts. The both of you exchanged numbers on the way home, apparently for him to be able to reach out to you when he just needs someone by his side.
(Or when his urges get bad, you didn’t say as you parted ways, but that was heavily implied. There was an unspoken agreement between the both of you that your conversation stays in the playground, and never beyond that.)
People often count on him, and yet no one, in many years, has ever told him that he could count on anyone else until you did. His thumb hovers over your name, wondering if how much you said is true, and if he can really trust you with his own weaknesses.
A few beats pass before he finally takes the plunge and sets your number as a priority contact.
vi.
Until now, he still pays for the decisions he has made in the past. They manifest in ways that happen so often they’re unnoticeable — it’s in the little moments when he holds himself back from getting closer to someone in fear they learn about his past. It’s when he lays awake on his bed for hours, wondering how his life would turn out if only he stayed alone instead of forcing his way to be with people he didn’t want to be with for the sake of companionship.
But he never knew he had to pay a price that’s a lot more huge than maintaining his distance from the people around him, at least until one morning. He is walking by a secluded alleyway, a shorter path he usually takes on the way back to his apartment from work, when someone behind him yells his name and stabs him.
He barely processes what in the world is going on before the assailant pulls out the blade and makes a run for it. The only rational thing he could think of doing at that moment is to stand there and watch his clothes seep in blood from his throbbing abdomen, until the dull ache pulsates into excruciating pain and he collapses into the pavement.
The assailant’s voice is all too familiar to him — it’s a voice he used to hear often in the past before he cut ties and tried to change himself. He hasn’t done anything to them for years, so he couldn’t think of a reason why he got attacked. Perhaps there’s no need for a reason behind it, this might be the price he has to pay for getting himself involved to begin with.
Without missing a beat, he fishes his phone out of his pocket and quickly dials a priority contact.
You answer after a few rings. “Hello?”
He can’t believe he set your number as a priority contact for this. “Hello.”
A shock of pain courses through his body and he hisses in agony, which immediately catches your attention. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
“I need your help,” he says between gritted teeth, holding back a groan of pain. “I don’t know how I can explain this, but… I just got stabbed.”
“You got what? Shit, I got you. Stay there and tell me where you are,” you quickly instruct him. “I’m calling for help. Please hang in there.”
-
Either by sheer dumb luck or by pure calculation from the assailant, none of his vitals took a hit. All he is going to have is a scar that he has to carry for the rest of his life.
The hospital room is silent, save for the dialogues from the romcom playing on the television and the dull hum of the air conditioner.
The responsibility of breaking the silence falls upon you. “So,” you start, “I’m happy you trust me enough to call me first when something this drastic happens to you, but… have you already told anyone else about this? Maybe your relatives?”
“Most of my family is gone,” he answers, albeit a bit too abruptly.
“Oh.” Your eyes flicker with something akin to regret. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. I never told you about it anyway.”
You fold into your seat. “Do you at least know anything about the person who stabbed you?”
“About that…” he looks at you thoughtfully for a few moments before he says, “he was an old friend.”
You frown. “What kind of friend stabs you?”
“Well.” He weakly smiles. “I guess you could say we were in a tough crowd, so that sort of thing is normal. Doing all the stuff that could get us in trouble, I mean.” He leans back into his pillow. “In hindsight, I didn’t really enjoy being with them, but back then, having your own companions is a lot better than being all alone.”
“You wanted to feel like you belong, then,” you point out.
“Pretty much. It’s not until I became a convict that I decided to leave them and forget about everything that happened, but getting stabbed by one of them years later just proves that they’ve never forgotten how I left,” he says. “And neither did I, because I still recognized him even after all these years.”
There’s a moment of silence as you take in everything he just unpacked.
“Sorry if this comes off as a surprise to you,” he says. “I honestly have never thought of telling you about this, but I somehow felt the need to explain why I just got stabbed out of nowhere. I think you at least deserve to know after helping me out.”
“Don't apologize, you're not at fault. Just remember that I'll always be with you regardless of what happens, or what you did in the past.”
He stiffens.
“Why would you do that for me?” he asks as if he's begging you to just walk away, as if he doesn't deserve to be treated as such. “I still haven't told you everything. There are things I would prefer to never tell you.”
“That's alright,” you quickly reassure him. “I wouldn't ask you for the details on what happened back then. You can tell me whenever you feel like it's the right time to do so, or you can just not tell me. That's fine too.”
He grips on his sheets so hard his knuckles turn white. “I'm not the person you think I am.”
“And I know you're a good person,” you say so casually, so boldly, like it's simple truth. To you, it's really the truth. To him, it's not.
“How are you so sure?”
“We've known each other for a while now at work. You're my senior, so you had more than enough chances to treat me like shit, but you've only done the opposite. If that's not what it means to be a good person to you, then you might've set the bar too high. Don't be too hard on yourself.”
You fix your gaze on him, and there's a gravitational force in the way you look at him that he can't pull away from, even though he wants to avert his gaze so badly.
The thought of being able to trust you is liberating but terrifying — liberating in a way that he doesn't have to second-guess himself before bearing a vulnerable part of himself to you, terrifying because trusting someone else is an uncharted territory to him, and he doesn't know where to start nor what directions to take in order to keep your trust.
He is painfully aware of the risks that come with trusting you, though at this point he truly knows what he wants to do, moving forward.
“Then, if you don't mind…”
You turn to him, inquisitive. “Yeah?”
“I’m counting on you.”
A beam breaks out of your lips, the sunbeams passing through the hospital blinds and hitting the contours of your face just right. “I’m counting on you, too.”
vii.
He returns to work after a few weeks of recovery. Currently, he is on a call with Nightowl, and you’re not on your desk, presumably in the room next to your office for the coffee maker.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Quest? You haven’t been online for a while now.”
“I am,” he answers, attempting to ease Nightowl’s concern. “It’s just a deep flesh wound, nothing too serious.”
Even after trying to reassure Nightowl, there’s some strange sort of uneasiness that remains constant in Nightowl’s eyes that he can’t quite pinpoint. Before he could ask Nightowl about it, the remnants of apprehension immediately flicker out of Nightowl’s expression as his eyes light up.
“Tell your coworker I love the sweater!”
He turns around and sees you entering the office with two cups of coffee in hand. As he relays Nightowl’s message to you, your laughter scatters in the room like sunrays. “Thank you!”
He then faces Nightowl. “You heard that.”
Nightowl nods. “Yup.”
A glance on his desk reveals a mug you just placed before you return to your desk. He stares at the mug before finally drinking half the cup, sending a grateful gaze to your direction even though you’re blissfully unaware of the way he looks at you.
The coffee in the office tastes the same as far as he could remember, but there's something about the way he doesn't have to go to the other room and fumble on the buttons of the coffee maker himself that makes the warmth of the coffee feel more comforting than usual.
The tranquil moment doesn’t last too long, though, because Nightowl’s voice breaks him out of his trance. “Quest, you've been staring at your coworker an awful lot.”
He has enough decency to finally look away from you.
The way Nightowl eyes him through the screen makes him feel like an ant being scrutinized under a magnifying glass. He has half the mind to lower his volume despite everything, not wanting to risk the possibility of you hearing Nightowl’s voice leaking from his earphones just in case Nightowl says something he doesn’t want you to hear.
And he is glad he just did that, because the next words that tumble out of Nightowl’s lips catches him off guard.
“Are you in love or something?”
There’s a moment of silence before he fixes his gaze on you again, focused on your work, a fond smile growing in his lips as he burns the scene right in front of him into his memory.
“You could say that again.”