The days began to blend together — mornings spilling into afternoons, afternoons into soft blue evenings, until I couldn't tell where work ended and I began.
Somewhere between endless drafts and coffee-stained deadlines, the office became another world — its own quiet universe of flickering lights, late-night screens, and voices softened by exhaustion.
And in the center of it all, like gravity itself, was him.
Mr. Blake.
He was never loud, never demanding — but his presence pulled the air taut whenever he was near. I found myself listening for his voice without meaning to, memorizing the rhythm of his footsteps in the hallway, the faint trace of cedar and ink that always seemed to linger after he passed.
It wasn't intentional. It just happened — quietly, naturally, the way sunlight slips through curtains when you're not looking.
That Thursday, Ms. Henley handed me a stack of editing notes thick enough to bruise my fingers.
"These go to Mr. Blake for final review," she said, sighing. "He'll probably want to go through them tonight."
"Tonight?" I asked.
She gave me a look that said welcome to publishing.
So I stayed.
By eight-thirty, the office was nearly empty. I walked the quiet hallways with the folder pressed to my chest, telling myself this was just another task — nothing to overthink, nothing personal.
When I knocked, his door was open.
He was at his desk again, sleeves rolled up, tie loosened, eyes tracing something on his screen with a kind of intense calm.
For a second, I just stood there, the silence heavy between us.
He looked up. "You're still here."
"Ms. Henley said you'd want these tonight." I placed the file on the edge of his desk.
He nodded, leaning back slightly. "Most interns would've dropped it off and left hours ago."
"I don't like leaving things unfinished."
"Neither do I," he said softly.
Something flickered in his eyes — a warmth, a weight, a knowing I couldn't name.
He gestured toward the chair across from him. "Sit. You might as well stay while I go through them. In case I have questions."
I hesitated. "You don't have to—"
"I insist."
So I sat.
For the next hour, the only sounds were the quiet rustle of pages and the faint hum of the city outside.
Every so often, he'd make a small note in the margins, his expression unreadable. Once, he asked my opinion on a passage. The words caught in my throat, but I managed to answer — and when I did, something in his face softened, like he hadn't expected me to speak with certainty.
"You have good instincts," he said after a pause. "For structure. For rhythm."
"Thank you," I murmured.
He turned another page. "Most people miss the emotional spine of a story. You don't."
I wasn't sure how to respond to that. So I didn't.
The clock ticked quietly between us.
At some point, he stood and walked to the window. The city stretched below — a mosaic of glass and motion, shimmering beneath the night.
"You know," he said without turning around, "when I started here, I thought publishing was just about words. Stories. I thought that was all there was to it."
"What changed?"
He glanced at me then, the corner of his mouth curving faintly. "Everything."
There was something about the way he said it — the weight of it, the honesty — that made me wonder what he'd lost along the way.
But I didn't ask. I never did.
Because every time I tried to look deeper, something about him warned me not to.
The whispers came again the next morning.
Just fragments — light, careless things that meant nothing but felt like everything.
"…he's been off lately…"
"…I swear I saw him downtown yesterday—no, not dressed like that—"
"Maybe he just—"
Laughter. A printer starting up. The sound vanished into the hum of the office.
I froze by the coffee machine, listening.
They weren't talking about me. I knew that.
But still, the air felt strange — thin, charged, as if something just beneath the surface was shifting.
When I looked up, he was standing by the conference room door, speaking to one of the senior editors. Calm. Collected. The same as always.
Nothing about him looked different. Nothing was wrong.
So why did the words he's been off lately keep echoing in my mind long after the whispers faded?
That night, I couldn't sleep.
I sat by my window, the city stretching endless and restless below. My notes for the week lay scattered across my desk — neatly labeled, perfectly organized, the picture of control.
But my thoughts were anything but.
I kept replaying little things: the way he'd said everything changed, the way people in the office spoke about him in careful, half-finished sentences, the way his gaze sometimes lingered on me a fraction too long before he seemed to remember himself.
And then, just as quickly, I'd shake it all away.
It wasn't my place to wonder. It wasn't my story to unravel.
I had no evidence, no reason — only a whisper, a feeling, a flicker of something too small to mean anything.
So I turned off the light and told myself, once again, to stop thinking about him.
But the next morning, when he walked past my desk and said quietly, "Good work on the report, Ms. Jazmyne,"
Something in me betrayed that promise.
It wasn't the words. It was the way he said them — careful, deliberate, like he was testing how they'd sound between us.
And for a heartbeat, I wanted to ask him if he remembered me at all. If he ever thought about the subway, the storm, the silence that started everything.
But I didn't.
Because he looked at me like a man who'd learned to build walls around every part of himself that once reached for someone else.
And I wasn't ready to be the one to climb over them.
So I smiled — small, polite, pretending my pulse wasn't pounding in my throat — and got back to work.
But as the day went on, I realized something terrifying and beautiful all at once:
The more I tried not to feel anything, the deeper it rooted itself inside me.