Alex was at the door when she stepped out next morning, and she thought she saw him watching her. Of course he watched her. He was a man, and he watched her, and she watched him watching her. But this was different. Perhaps it was that the drive over had been that quiet hiss of tyres over pavement, rumbling intermittently over cobblestones. Through the mirror, she had seen Jack as he drove her; seen his flared nostrils and the way he tracked her movement inside the car, and she had almost wanted to open the window so it would not be so close between them; that smell of blood. Perhaps Alex could smell it too. She'd heard some men could. But what Jack had done should have made him look past her like the others, but this was too piercing, too precise. He had been standing there, outside the blank doors, as though he was trying to figure out how to get in, as though he were Theseus and not a part of the monster itself, facing down those blank plain doors and those walls. When the car pulled up he turned, and bending took the door-handle and opened it before Jack could. Helen gripped her bag and wondered, if she scratched his arm right here, in the street, and screamed, would anyone come looking. But Jack was in the front seat, and so she was safe, and so her anger was worse, for being afraid still.
Alex said nothing. Just looked at her, and she remembered how odd he was at the best of times, and this was not the best of times by any means. The bags under his eyes were huge and purpled over the thin stretch of his skin, and his hands shook. Still he stepped back, like a gentleman, and even bowed as she exited the car—just slightly, and, Helen thought, almost unconsciously, though it could have been mocking. She'd seen mocking, and she'd seen tired, and she wondered if it were possible to be both.
Through the window, Jack was watching; a prickle on her spine. She could feel it, could feel it tugging low in her belly like a hook on a fish, and tried not to turn to look. But the animal threat of it was too strong, and so she turned. He was not looking at her, but past her, at Alex standing on the curb with shaking hands, flat-glass eyes on both countenances. Jack's she understood. He was possessive with things that were his. That was why she'd ordered him not to enter these buildings, not to disturb her during work hours; and he would obey, of course, unless the higher duties of the contract forbade it. Alex she could not fathom. He was brittle, brittle in a way she could hardly imagine, though it should have been a sensible observation, seeing him in that grey suit echoing the sky.
"Helen," he said at last, looking at her, and his manner was brusque and companionable, as though she were any other coworker, and she smiled at him uncomfortably.
"Alex," she said. It occurred to her that she'd never yet seen him come into work, nor leave it; he always seemed to exist, liminally, on scraps in the undeground boxes. She did not know if he was one of the mad, passionate ones, or one of the petty, ordinary ones, or something entirely different, and not knowing made her afraid. He was dangerous, he could do anything at a moment, without provocation; she knew this. But he had never done anything to her. If anything good had been able to exist within those underground boxes, she might almost have called him a good man. It made something thin and sickly and horrible rise on her tongue, and she noticed only when Alex looked past her again that Jack was still there, waiting in the idling car, still watching them. No. Watching Alex, and his teeth were bared.
Helen grabbed Alex's arm and towed him inside, the both of them holding up their passes instinctively as they went into the lair of the beast.
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