The conference room gleamed under the steady wash of white light. Glass walls stretched from floor to ceiling, transparent and unyielding, reflecting the order Aether Solutions demanded. Even the mahogany table gleamed with a polish so meticulous that George Holloway could almost see the grid-pattern of ceiling tiles mirrored on its surface.

He liked that. Order. Precision. Predictability.

George stood at the head of the room, spine straight, expression composed. The quarterly New Hire Induction Seminar was hardly the highlight of his calendar, but it was a ritual he performed with clockwork efficiency. The order had to begin somewhere, and today it began with the thirty nervous faces staring at him from across the table.

"At Aether Solutions," George said, voice smooth and unbroken, "we are not merely reacting to the future—we are engineering it." His words carried the weight of repetition, polished to a sheen over years of practice. He did not believe them. Belief was irrelevant. Delivery was everything.

He scanned the rows—two, three, four—cataloguing details with the same discipline he applied to budgets and schedules. A nod here, a rigid smile there. Most eyes clung to him with a mixture of fear and forced ambition.

And then—

Row three.

A man leaned forward, elbow on the table, chin propped in his hand as though the entire induction were a performance staged for his amusement. His gaze was steady, unflinching, and in that single glance George’s body betrayed him.

His breath stopped. The air left him in a rush, violent and silent.

It was impossible, and yet—

Hazel eyes. A jaw sharper than he remembered, carrying the fine lines of years spent smiling, frowning, living. And that mouth—tilted slightly at the corner, a quirk George had once traced with his thumb in the dark, memorizing every shift of expression.

Mathew.

George’s voice faltered. For a second, the machine broke. The syllable *compliance* stumbled from his tongue, half-formed, and the silence that followed was deafening to him—even if the recruits heard nothing at all.

He recovered instantly, burying the fracture under years of discipline. COO mask in place. Voice smooth again. Eyes disciplined, refusing to wander back to the third row.

But for the next twenty minutes, he could feel it: heat radiating across glass and space, steady and unyielding.

When the induction finally ended, chairs scraped back, and the new hires filed out with practiced politeness. George began collecting his notes, already constructing a mental firewall around the impossible.

And then—

"George Holloway."

The voice was the same and not the same. Deeper now, steadier, threaded with the faintest drawl of amusement. The sound dragged him back a decade, to nights of cheap beer and whispered confessions that had once felt eternal.

George forced himself to look up.

Mathew Evans stood before him, close enough to touch. His hazel eyes burned with a knowing gleam, one corner of his mouth curling upward as if daring George to deny the recognition.

"It’s been a while since you called me Matty."

The word hit him like a blade. Memory pressed hard against the armor he’d built, threatening to break through.

George extended his hand instead. Cold. Professional. Controlled.

"Mathew Evans," he said, his tone as flat and sharp as the glass walls surrounding them. "Welcome to Aether Solutions. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the company’s administration policy. It’s non-negotiable."

Mathew’s smile deepened, dangerous and amused. His grip was warm, steady, unyielding.

"Wouldn’t dream of it, boss."

George retreated to his office like a man fleeing a battlefield.

The door slid shut behind him with a whisper of hydraulics, sealing him inside his sanctuary of glass and steel.

The office was immaculate, as always. Files aligned to the millimeter, pens capped and arranged in strict order of color, monitor tilted at a perfect forty-five degrees. The air hummed faintly from the building’s climate control, sterile and predictable.

Predictable.

Until now.

He set his notes on the desk, squaring each page against the edge as though geometry itself might steady his pulse. His reflection glimmered in the glass wall: flawless suit, neatly pressed tie, expression carved into stone. A portrait of discipline. Nothing betrayed the tremor running beneath his skin.

Mathew Evans.

The name slipped out before George could stop it. A whisper meant only for the steel and silence of his office. Immediately, he despised the sound. It didn’t belong here. It belonged in dorm rooms filled with textbooks and the hum of overworked computers, in whispered laughter over broken printers, in mornings when George should have walked away but never did.

He forced his focus back to the present, to the endless stream of numbers and projections glowing across his monitor. Numbers never faltered. Numbers never smirked while balancing two cups of burnt coffee. Numbers never leaned against his shoulder at two in the morning and asked if he thought the stars above the campus library looked lonelier than they should.

A notification chimed.

Internal message.

George’s gaze flicked to the corner of the screen. His pulse betrayed him.

...----------------...

Sender: Evans, Mathew

Subject: Compliance

...----------------...

He clicked.

...----------------...

Per your instruction, I’ve familiarized myself with the administration policy.

Just to clarify—does that mean I can’t invite the COO for a drink, or only that I can’t call him ‘Matty’ in the break room?

Seeking clarity,

– M

...----------------...

George’s jaw locked. The audacity. Casual, irreverent, sliding past his carefully built walls the way Mathew always had.

He hovered above the keyboard, fingers stiff, before typing:

...----------------...

Mr. Evans,

Please keep all correspondence professional. Personal familiarity has no place within Aether Solutions.

– G.H.

...----------------...

He sent it immediately, the keystroke sharp, decisive—like slamming a door.

For a moment, silence. The office returned to its hum, as though mocking him. Then—another ping.

He shouldn’t have looked. But he did.

...----------------...

Crystal clear, COO. Consider me fully compliant.

(Though for the record, you always hated that word.)

...----------------...

George exhaled sharply through his nose. Not a laugh. Certainly not that. He snapped the laptop shut, the sound precise, controlled.

Through the glass wall, the city stretched outward in glittering order: towers stacked with ambition, streets flowing with purpose, neon pulsing in a rhythm that promised progress. He had built himself into that same order. Ten years of discipline, of precision and authority. Ten years of proving that control was stronger than chaos.

And in a single morning, Mathew had walked back into it—unchaged. A smile at the corner of his mouth. A question in his eyes. A challenge he wasn’t supposed to issue.

George pressed his palm flat against the desk until the bones of his hand ached. He told himself the rules would hold. They had to. They were the foundation of Aether Solutions, the spine of the machine. Without them, there was only disorder.

Yet the words on the screen lingered, as though etched into the glass walls around him: You always hated that word.

He had. Still did. Compliance meant surrender. It meant bending when he had spent years standing straight.

George closed his eyes briefly, just long enough to picture the past—a dorm room at dawn, Mathew’s laugh cutting through exhaustion, warmth he hadn’t wanted but had taken anyway.

He opened them again to his office, his fortress of rules and silence. He whispered the mantra in his head: The rules will hold.

But even as he repeated it, he felt the truth gnawing at him.

The fracture had already begun.

The assignment email arrived on a Tuesday morning.

George had been reviewing quarterly numbers, his mind deliberately narrowed to the comfort of percentages and margins, when the subject line sliced through his concentration like a blade.

...----------------...

Subject: Project Allocation – Evans, M.

...----------------...

His stomach tightened. Against better instincts, he clicked.

...----------------...

Mr. Holloway,

Following our resource review, we’ve assigned Senior Analyst Mathew Evans to your department’s lead initiative, codename “Holloway Project.” Mr. Evans will report directly to you for the duration of the quarter.

– Resource Management

...----------------...

George leaned back in his chair, pulse drumming in his throat. Out of thirty analysts in the building, it had to be him.

He considered sending a protest—phrased in the appropriate corporate jargon, of course. Conflict of interest. Resource misalignment. Strategic inefficiency. He could make the language airtight. But the CEO himself had praised Evans’s metrics in yesterday’s executive meeting. Any objection would invite scrutiny. Worse, it would invite questions.

By the time the morning stand-up began, George had stitched his mask back into place.

The team clustered in the glass conference pod—bright, sterile, every word amplified by the acoustics. Aether Solutions had designed these rooms to be efficient: no shadows, no corners, nowhere to hide.

Mathew was already there. He leaned against the wall with casual ease, hands tucked into his pockets, posture radiating the kind of defiance that somehow never registered as insubordination. His badge caught the light, the company logo flashing against his suit like an ironic emblem of belonging.

“Morning, boss,” Mathew said, tone light, as if they were back in college and George was the one dragging them both to lecture halls. His hazel eyes lingered, sharp and amused.

George’s reply was clipped, precise. “Mr. Evans. You’ve been assigned to the Holloway Project. You’ll be reporting directly to me.”

Mathew tilted his head, a half-smile tugging at his mouth. “Lucky me.”

The others chuckled, assuming it was ordinary office banter. Only George heard the undercurrent—the sharp, private note meant solely for him.

The meeting moved forward, strategies mapped out across glass screens, tasks distributed with the cadence of corporate ritual. George spoke with surgical brevity, every instruction delivered like a sealed directive. But it didn’t matter how narrow he kept his focus; Mathew was there. A steady presence, his gaze finding George whenever he tried to look away. Not challenging, not overt. Just… present. As though George was the only one in the room who mattered.

When the session finally closed, George gathered his notes with mechanical precision, stacking them edge to edge until they formed perfect right angles. He was halfway out the door when Mathew fell into stride beside him.

“Direct reporting, huh?” Mathew said lightly, keeping his voice low so no one else would hear. “Guess that means I’ll be seeing a lot more of you.”

George didn’t falter, didn’t even glance sideways. “You’ll see me as much as the project requires.”

“Relax, George.” Mathew’s tone was playful, but his eyes lingered with intent that felt far sharper. “I know the rules. But rules never stopped you before.”

The words landed like a spark in the dry tinder. George stopped dead, just outside his office door. For a fraction of a second, his composure slipped—the tiniest fracture in the flawless mask.

A memory flashed unbidden: late nights bathed in the glow of computer screens, whispered promises over takeout containers, the rare and disarming warmth of Mathew’s laugh.

He forced the image down, crushed it beneath the weight of discipline. His voice came out hard, measured steel. “This is not before.”

Mathew’s smirk widened, the expression sharp as a challenge but softened by something that looked dangerously close to affection. He didn’t press further. He only nodded, a gesture that looked obedient to anyone watching, and walked away.

George stood frozen in the corridor, his words echoing in his own mind.

Not before.

And yet the past had already breached the walls, threading itself through every crack in the protocol.