He leaned just close enough. “You have to trust me. A little.”
I exhaled, sharp. “Fine. But if you cross me, I’ll make your life a living hell.”
“I wouldn’t expect less.”
The doors slid open and he shifted to the side, letting me pass. I could feel his gaze on my back all the way to the glass-walled “Innovation Suite,” which would probably be our new shared habitat.
The next hour was a crash course in enforced proximity. We sat across from each other, our laptops, tablets, and legal pads forming Maginot Lines of personal space. His hands hovered over the keyboard, fast and precise, while mine curled around my mechanical pencil — a habit from before the world digitized all thought. Every time his knee brushed mine under the table, I told myself it was accidental. After the third time, I stopped believing myself.
Time ticked by with typed lines, scribbled notes, the soft shuffle of paper between us. Our devices formed a tidy border down the center of the table, an unspoken agreement neither of us acknowledged.
Gabriel worked fast, fingers moving with quiet confidence across the keyboard. I gripped my mechanical pencil hard enough to feel the ridges bite into my thumb, the faint click grounding in a way glass screens never did.
Under the table, his knee kept brushing mine and by this time I had stopped adjusting my chair.
Our teams filtered in, each carrying the skepticism of the recently re-org’d. Gabriel kicked off the meeting with a cold tone.
“Forget everything you knew about the pipeline,” he said, projecting diagrams onto the glass with a wave. “As of today, we’re one team. One vision. We’ll be iterating on the product, shipping weekly, and nobody leaves until bugs are zeroed out.”
He paced. I took notes, but mostly watched him pace.
He fielded questions, most of them lightly hostile or sarcastic, with calculated patience. I answered the technical ones. By the end of the hour, I was shaking from either caffeine or adrenaline or both.
He waited until the others left, then turned to me.
“Was I too harsh?”
I shrugged. “You were you.”
He set his jaw. “You need anything, you come to me. No gatekeeping.”
I snorted. “I don’t need a protector.”
He didn’t smile. “I’m not your enemy, Eliza.”
I tapped my pencil, hard. “That’s what all the best enemies say.”
*
By seven o’clock, the building was nearly empty. The lights outside our glass walls clicked off one by one, leaving us exposed.
“That assumption doesn’t hold,” I said, tapping the edge of my tablet. “You’re treating the risk window like it’s static. It isn’t.”
Gabriel leaned back slightly, fingers steepled, eyes on me instead of the screen. “It stabilizes after the second quarter. The data-”
“The data you’re using is six months old,” I cut in, keeping my voice even. “It doesn’t account for regulatory lag or human error, which is where this actually breaks.”
I didn’t look up right away. I felt his attention settle - steady, assessing, heavy.
When I finally met his gaze, his jaw flexed once, a muscle jumping in his cheek, before he nodded. “All right,” he said. “Then walk me through your alternative.”
I did. Cleanly. Thoroughly. No wasted words.
Halfway through, I shut down one of his counterpoints before he could finish it. He stopped himself mid-sentence, lips pressing together briefly, then easing as he listened. No interruption. No pushback. Just focus.
When I finished, he seemed to be searching for errors or mistakes, which started getting my hackles up. He still didn’t trust me.
“Okay,” he said finally, softer now. “That’s better.”