Chapter 371: pathetic

NOAH

The concrete pavement outside the development site carried a completely different kind of noise than the carpeted floors of the main office.

Here, the city did not pause or adjust for anyone.

Delivery trucks rumbled past, throwing up clouds of grey exhaust, and people in dark coats brushed past my shoulders without looking up from their phones.

Everyone had somewhere to be, a purpose that had absolutely nothing to do with me.

I stood near the temporary chain-link fence, my tablet balanced precariously in one hand and my heavy leather bag digging a familiar ache into my shoulder.

On paper, I was working. Cassian had sent me out here as a site liaison to handle a routine physical check, something about confirming the structural updates and securing a few final signatures from the lead contractor.

It was an errand I had done a dozen times before, the kind of boring, predictable task that usually took forty minutes and required zero deep thought.

"And the second-floor floorplans, were those approved under the previous timeline or the revised one?"

The voice broke through the noise of a passing cement mixer, loud and slightly impatient. I looked down at the contractor, a stocky man named Miller who was holding a rolled-up set of blueprints under his arm like a weapon.

He was staring at me, his pen hovering over a clipboard, waiting for an answer that should have taken me two seconds to find.

"Yes," I said.

Miller blinked, his thick eyebrows drawing together until they almost met above his nose. He stood there for a second, the wind catching the edge of his neon safety vest.

"...Yes which, Mr. Bennett?"

My brain arrived back in my head about three seconds too late. A hot wave of embarrassment hit the back of my neck, and I quickly tapped the screen of my tablet to hide the fact that I hadn’t been looking at the project files at all.

"The revised one," I muttered, clearing my throat as I pointed to the updated digital stamp. "Sorry about that. I meant the revised one. The changes from last Tuesday were fully integrated."

Miller made a small, grunting sound, noting the correction down with a quick flick of his pen. He didn’t say anything else, turning his attention back to the stack of paperwork, completely unaware that my mind was currently three days in the past, stuck In a room I had already walked out of.

I couldn’t shake the memory of Preston.

Three days ago, when the meetings had finally ended and the heavy glass doors of the conference room swung open, he had walked out with that slow, unbothered stride of his.

He hadn’t looked around, instead his eyes had found mine instantly, cutting through the large space as if he had known exactly where I was standing before he even crossed the threshold.

It wasn’t a look meant to threaten me, nor was it kind. It was something much worse.

It was the look of a man who had examined a piece of furniture, figured out exactly where it belonged in his house, and filed it away under something useful.

He had given me a small, slow half-smirk, just a slight movement of the corner of his mouth before turning his back and walking away, his leather shoes clicking against the tile until the sound vanished down the hall.

Even now, standing in the middle of a noisy street with the sun hitting my face, a chill went down my spine at the memory.

The chill always came first, before I could even format the actual thought.

He had looked at me like I was a thing. A tool he could pick up and use whenever the timing was right, not a person with a name or a life of his own.

And then there was Cassian.

He had come out of that same room a few minutes later, his face completely unreadable.

He had been quiet... not the kind of quiet that means someone is resting or at peace, but the heavy, tight silence that I had spent months learning how to read. It was anger turned completely inward, a wall of ice that he built around himself whenever the pressure got too high.

The real Irony of it was that I was the one who had started pulling away first.

I was the one who had decided that the emotional weight was too much, that I needed to find some space before I lost my footing completely. I had chosen the distance. I had asked for it.

So why did it hurt so much more than I ever expected now that he was actually giving it to me? Even if it was just temporary, even if it was just because he was buried under his own professional problems, the coldness from his side made me feel incredibly small.

It was a pathetic sort of feeling, the kind that made me want to curl up in a corner and disappear, mostly because I didn’t even have a good word for what was wrong with me.

I wanted the space, but the moment the space appeared, I felt like I was drowning in it.

"Noah? I need your initials on the bottom of page four," Miller said, tapping his thumb against the clipboard.

I forced the thoughts back down into the dark, nodding quickly as I took his pen.

"Right. Sorry." I scribbled my initials on the rough paper, handing it back before he could notice the slight shake in my fingers.

The errand was finished. The paperwork was signed, the tablet was synced with the office database, and the official part of my day was technically over.

I stood on the edge of the curb, my shoulder throbbing slightly from the weight of my bag, watching the cars crawl through the midday traffic.

The thought came to me quietly, without any grand realization, just a simple, practical need: I needed a distraction.