The mornings in this part of the world had long forgotten what it meant to change. Grey wasn’t a colour anymore, but a constant hum of muted skies and wet sidewalks, where light thinned before it ever touched the ground.
It was the kind of climate that left people with quiet hands and slower hearts; a place where emotions stiffened somewhere behind the ribs, preserved like unsent letters that were too delicate to destroy, too heavy to share. Even warmth felt rationed.
And yet, in the middle of all that muted stillness, like gold threading through frostbitten dusk, sat Adrian.
The sterile buzz of the lab seemed to dim around him, as if the room leaned in. He was sun-dappled warmth in the colourless chill of a too-early morning. Leaning over charts and printouts, he looked like he was coaxing meaning from chaos. His lip was caught gently between his teeth, like the way some men chew on thoughts that are too tender to speak.
His lashes cast soft shadows on the high curve of his cheekbone. One thumb tapped lightly against the paper, as if playing a lullaby only he could hear. Adrian was a streak of crimson on a snow-bleached canvas, in a room drained of soul.
What was he doing here, of all places?
He looked like he belonged somewhere softer: with open windows, worn paperbacks stacked in every corner, low jazz humming in the background, and something warm baking in the oven. Adrian was alive in a way most people had forgotten how to be. And someone else had noticed it, too.
Arya.
She leaned toward him, resting one forearm on the table, feigning innocence.. Her fingers brushed his sleeve deliberately. She was speaking, but Adrian barely turned. His smile was politely distant. His attention stayed fixed on the data in front of him.
Just then, the decontamination door hissed open.
Becca stepped through. Black boots laced to the knee. An insulated coat, cinched at the waist, clung to her shape. It revealed a high-neck thermal bodysuit cut clean along the spine when she shrugged it off.
Her eyes scanned the room once. Then, found him.
He wasn’t her cup of warm cocoa.
He was the softness a woman like her didn’t stumble upon, but chose to keep. She wouldn’t sip him. She’d take him in slow, deliberate mouthfuls when the craving got too sharp to ignore.
Her gaze lingered on him.
The way his lashes lowered when he thought no one was looking.The nervous flick of his fingers along the page, like they were waiting for instruction. He didn’t even know what he was offering.
That made her want him more.
She craved him with the hunger of ownership. The kind that made her palms prickle. She wanted to devour the quiet in him. To press her fingers into the softness behind his eyes and take hold of every place he hadn’t yet learned was vulnerable. She craved him the way fire craves its next mouthful of air.
And just as the thought began to settle like smoke behind her ribs—
“Dr. Voss, just a moment — about the compound ratios in Lab 3…”
Johar stepped into her path, clipboard in his hand. He didn’t block her, but he sure was a moth drifting too close to flame. Her head inclined toward him, but her body never turned. It remained fixed on Adrian, the way a compass clings to the north.
She moved past, and her hand came to rest on the back of Adrian’s chair. Her fingertips splayed gently against the metal, as her nails brushed just between his shoulder blades. It was a gentle dig to which Adrian jolted, as if she tugged invisible strings and he obeyed without thought. He wasn’t slouching anymore. His body seemed to move by memory of rules she never voiced. And suddenly, Arya’s presence became unbearable.
He shifted; his hand brushed hers off his forearm.
She blinked, lips parting slightly in confusion; that flicker of hurt when a fantasy ends mid-sentence. Her fingers fell to her side, and she pulled her chair and looked away.
Becca didn’t look at either of them. Something curved at the corner of her mouth, but it wasn’t enough to be a smile.
Her gaze remained on Johar. He was still standing there with his numbers and his clipboard, and the faintest sheen of nervous sweat beginning to gather near his temple.
She allowed him to finish.
Then her lips parted — “Later?”
Her eyes didn’t wait for his answer. She was already past him.
Dr. Rebecca Voss moved to the head of the conference table. She set down her tablet and turned to face the projection, fingers sweeping the screen once; the lab’s shared display came to life, loaded with data points, simulations, and a looping isotopic decay curve.
Her voice was low and modulated. It was crisp enough to cut through the ambient noise.
“If your models are still constraining decay rate analysis within a forty-eight-hour observation window, your projections are non-viable. Adrian’s preliminary model has already shown stabilisation patterns emerging past the sixty-hour mark. At seventy-two, the curve settles into a predictable rhythm with minimal noise, observable behaviour. Use his framework. Deconstruct your assumptions. Rebuild your simulations accordingly.”
She didn’t look at Adrian.
But the entire room did.
What she’d said wasn’t technically praise. But the implication sat thick in the air: She had singled out his model.
Adrian’s spine snapped into alignment as if pulled by a wire. His pulse throbbed behind his ears, but his hands stayed still on the desk. His jaw clenched.
The room shifted around her like a solar system caught in orbit.
As soon as Becca stepped back from the screen, the briefing dissolved into a low hum. Teams broke apart into clusters, huddling at the whiteboard and across open laptops, whispering recalibrations, revising notes, bumping shoulders and ideas. The room was in motion now.
Becca didn’t pause to observe the effect. She had already turned; Johar falling into step beside her, muttering something about thermal loss patterns and batch irregularities. She nodded once, brushing a strand of hair back from her cheek, her gaze already flicking to the data he showed her.
Adrian watched her from his seat, still anchored to the table like a man caught in the riptide of something deeper than admiration. He told himself he was processing the data; that he was simply thinking.
But that wasn’t the truth. He was captivated, completely and without defence, as if some quiet force had turned his gaze toward her and refused to let it go.
It was in the way she stood; she held herself like a dancer paused in the middle of a thought. And yet, he saw something quietly radiant. There was a warmth she never spoke of, something tucked behind her eyes and between her silences. It was warmth delicate as a pulse at the throat of winter. It glowed beneath her composure like an ember under frost.
He realised he had been staring far too long, and with a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth, as if his thoughts had slipped past the guard of his expression. His eyes dropped to his notebook, suddenly unable to look directly at her, as though the inked lines might rescue him from the warmth he had no business feeling. He tried to scribble something on the page: a data point, a reminder, a question. But the pen shook ever so slightly between his fingers, and the words came crooked.
He blinked hard, trying to steady the blur in his vision, trying to will his thoughts back into order. But before he could lift his head, she was already there.
He hadn’t heard her approach. Not the click of her boots.
And yet now, suddenly, she stood beside him.
His breath caught in his throat, like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t.
Her shadow sliced across his notes. She didn’t look at him, but placed two files in front of him, side by side.
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