Chapter 71: The Hearts Slowly Change Lisa’s

POV

Now there was a heaviness in the space between us.

Not the suffocating kind — the kind that is a gentle, insistent force, telling you that it is there with every breath you take. It chased me down the hall, hovered around the conference table, caressed my skin when I wasn’t even being touched.

The slow change was already in effect.

I was just the last to acknowledge it.

Working on the coalition’s new campaign should have been enough to completely take my mind. Numbers, legal drafts, timeliness, strategic outreach — the sort of work that used to ground me, anchor my thoughts to solid ground. But today, every file I handed to Leo, every page he returned, seemed to be charged with a secret current that buzzed beneath our skin.

At least three times before noon our palms met and parted.

Each time was brief.

Each time lingered.

“You keep giving me the wrong papers,” he said softly for the third time, his mouth twitching slightly at the corner.

“You keep sitting too close,” I muttered back not really thinking.

He paused.

Then he leaned back a little, an intentional inch of space between us. “Better?”

I could feel my chest constricting even from a distance.

“Yes”, I lied.

The reality was, sitting next to him was easy now. Too easy. The warmth of his shoulder pressed into mine, the slight smell of his cologne — a clean and earthy scent, similar to the smell that hits you when you walk outside after a rain — the manner in which his arm was draped so near I could virtually sense the temperature of his arm.

Every sense was on overdrive.

“I’ll go to the other side of the table,” he proposed.

“No,” I said without hesitation, much to the surprise of both of us.

We locked eyes.

I swallowed. “It’s fine, I just… I didn’t used to share a room with people.”

“Still aren’t,” he said more quietly.

“With you?” I hesitated. “I’m getting there.”

Something flickered across his face.

Then he gazed down at the report again, though the tension between us had altered — palpable now, buzzing blatantly rather than being shrouded behind politeness.

By early afternoon, he said we should take a lunch break.

“In my office,” he said nearly tentatively, as though offering me an escape route. “If you’re comfortable.”

The word comfortable hung in the air, loaded with meaning.

“I am,” I said, even though my heart was already racing.

His office always seemed stiffer to me. A place of decisions and power. Glass desk, minimalist shelves, a view that went straight to the city’s core. But today the blinds were drawn halfway, blearing the light too sharply. A small table near the corner had two plates with simple sandwiches and tea that was poured.

He had all that ready.

“Who started to plan what to eat for lunch?” I went.

He shrugged mildly. “This has been since I discovered I enjoyed eating with you.”

The bluntness of it made me curl my fingers on the armrest of the chair.

We were at each other’s faces at first. An unconscious politeness.

But he got up halfway through the meal to fetch paper towels when I was dabbing sauce on a file and didn’t realize that. When he came back, he did not sit back in his own chair - he sat beside me, close again, familiar again.

“This is easier for sharing,” he said, pushing the napkin over the table.

Sharing.

The word now had a different taste.

For a long time we had been eating in a kind of serene silence—but it wasn’t blank. It was full of something unnamed, something warm. Under the table, his knee made a feeble nudge against mine and this time neither of us apologized.

“How do you do it?” I asked, not turning around to look at him.

“Do what?

“So how do you have that much on your plate and still come in here every day as if it’s not weighing on you?”

He breathed out slowly. "Because if I don’t show up, I transform into the version of myself I hates the most."

I finally looked at him. “That is which version?”

“The guy who couldn’t save his mother.”

The world seemed to wait.

I didn’t expect that.

“You’ve never said anything about her,” I said softly.

He looked out the window, but he was not looking at the city. He was someplace else now. Somewhere far darker.

"She was ill for years. Treatment, recovery, relapse, repeat. Everyone told me people die everyday — that it was normal. But all I could think about was … if I just tried harder, if I found another doctor, if I made more money… maybe she’d still be here.”

His voice dropped, filled with a timeworn and agonizing something. “She died believing in me. And I was raised believing I let her down.”

The pain in my chest tightened. “Leo…”

He then looked at me and the walls in his eyes were gone. Torn down. Laying everything bare.

“It’s why I hate to see you in pain,” he admitted. “It brings that helplessness back. That feeling like if I don’t run and run and run fast enough and hard enough, I’m gonna lose another person I care about.”

The word care resounded too much inside of me.

I reached for his hand impulsively.

He became rigid, catching his breath, as  my hands very softly gripped his.

“You didn’t fail her,” I said softly. “You loved her. Sometimes love is |all you’ve got to give,” she said.

“You think so?”

“I need to,” I said. “I'm trying to forgive myself for things I couldn’t fix, too.”

Our eyes locked.

We were not being cautious in our silence this time.

It was intimate.

Unavoidable.

His thumb rolled gently across my knuckles, and all I felt was heat rushing up my arm from the smallest motion.

“You’re beginning to get out of my control, Lisa,” he breathed.

“You’re becoming dangerous for my heart,” I whispered before I could stop myself.

The words hung between us, delicate but true.

Neither of us moved away.

We both knew better than to pretend now.

Later, as the day faded, we went back to work, but nothing felt normal. Every note I wrote, every change to the proposal, every sigh we exchanged seemed layered in meaning. When he bent over to fix a number on my screen, his breath touched my cheek, and I felt my hands shivering on the keyboard.

He gazed at me like he had more to say.

I stared at him like I was afraid of doing exactly that. By the time the fluorescents flickered and the dark sky bled with the approaching dusk, I was already choked up with the truth until inhaling felt like pain.

It wasn’t just chemistry.

This wasn’t just comfort.

This wasn’t just some random attraction stirred up by being through trauma together and hanging out.

This was something deeper.

Far more dangerous.

And as I gathered my things and was getting ready to leave, my reflection was caught in the dark window of his office, and I didn’t know the woman who looked back at me was… anymore.

Her eyes were softer.

Brighter.

And full of surrender.

I wasn’t just fighting Andre now.

Every time Leo sighed I was battling the burst of pain in my chest.

That quiet hope that blossomed whenever he smiled.

That desperate pull toward him I pretended not to feel.And the scariest part of all?

I wasn’t winning.I was losing.

Slowly.

Completely.

And there some reckless, broken part of me that wasn’t even trying to stop it anymore.