[ Ratha Guild – Guide Wing, Floor 3 ]
Simon had been waiting for eleven minutes.
He knew because he had checked his watch twice and was actively resisting a third. The waiting hall was quiet – soft piano from the ceiling speakers, sunlight moving through the wide windows in slow panels, a tall ficus standing beside the clinic door like it had been placed there by someone who had read about the calming effects of greenery and taken it seriously. It was a balmy spring day. Everything about this hallway had been designed to put people at ease.
It wasn't working particularly well on Simon.
His thumbs moved against each other in a restless loop. His left leg jittered under the bench. He was aware of both things and couldn't quite stop either.
Across from him, a white sliding door:
Room 310
C-Rank Guide
Sera Yun
He had been requesting her for two months.
Every week, without fail, the maximum frequency permitted between an unpaired esper and guide of rank difference. He told himself it was because the sessions helped. His mood had improved. His temperament had steadied. The data on his watch confirmed it – subjective figures, admittedly, but figures nonetheless.
There were practical reasons. There were several of them. He was very good at articulating practical reasons. What he was less good at was explaining what happened in the room.
The first time, he hadn't expected anything.
C-rank guide, B-rank esper – a mismatch by the numbers, mandatory cross-grade exposure, nothing more. He had gone in mildly irritated, certain it would be the first and last time. She had been new then, rotating through probationary sessions, and he had skimmed her profile with the particular indifference of someone already certain of the outcome.
He remembered sitting across from her on the sofa, arms loosely crossed, ready to be professionally pleasant and leave. He had been twenty-five then. He was still twenty-five now. It had only been two months. It felt…longer.
And then she had looked up.
He still wasn't sure what happened at that moment. Her eyes were red – deeply red. A vibrant, saturated color that found his immediately, without searching, as though she had known exactly where he was looking before he had decided to look. He had thought, the first time, that they looked like something precious. He hadn't been able to say what exactly. The word had never quite arrived.
There was nothing particularly dramatic about the moment. She had simply looked at him, and he had the sudden irrational conviction that she already knew something about him that he hadn't told her.
He had felt heat creep up his neck and looked away first. He had a bad habit of that – the blush arriving before he could stop it, crawling up from his collar to his cheeks whether he wanted it there or not. Twenty-five years old and he still hadn't learned to keep his face under control. Whatever he felt showed up there first, announced itself to anyone looking, and waited for him to catch up. Green eyes, his mother had always said, were honest eyes.
He found this less charming than she did.
He put that feeling aside. He was good at putting feelings aside.
The session itself had been – he reached for the right word and kept not finding it.
Pleasant was accurate and wrong. Overwhelming was too strong. It had started simply enough – her hands clasped in his, then her cheek against his cheek, then her mouth soft and unhurried against his own.
He had been prepared to feel nothing in particular.
He had not been prepared for his own reaction to it – the way his careful professional composure had simply ceased to exist, his shoulders dropping, his breathing slowing, something tight and persistent that had lived in the center of his chest for so long he had stopped noticing it quietly, completely easing.
He had leaned into her and wanted more.
That was the part he couldn't fully account for. Not the wanting – that was explicable, she was warm and close and the session worked the way sessions worked. But the specific quality of the wanting. The way it arrived, not as heat, but as something quieter. A pull. Like walking toward a room where something waited and not quite knowing what, and going anyway, and not being able to stop.
He had left feeling breathless and slightly mortified and had requested her again the following week.
By the fifth session he had stopped trying to account for it.
It wasn't, he had decided, anything unusual. She was charming. She was warm. She remembered how he took his tea. She never pushed past the fifteen minute mark regardless of how the session was going – a hard stop, no exceptions, professionally firm in a way he found he respected more than he expected to. He had watched other espers on her roster leave her office with the particular dazed quality of someone who had been somewhere pleasant and hadn't entirely come back yet. He recognized the expression because he wore it too.
She made people feel good and also purified them a little bit. That was her job. He requested her because she was good at her job.
Or that was what he told himself.
Their sync rate hovered around sixty percent – low even for a cross-rank pairing, technically inefficient, the kind of number that should have ended the arrangement after the first session. On paper, there were guides the same rank as him who cleared his pollution faster and more completely. He saw them on rotation like he was supposed to.
But every week, without fail, he used one slot on her instead of a fourth efficient session. A deliberate trade – marginally higher pollution levels on average, one less productive cleanse – for fifteen minutes in that office.
He had never quite examined that trade directly.
What he couldn't quite articulate was this: sometimes, in the sessions, when her mouth was soft against his and the pollution was clearing and he was leaning into her wanting more – sometimes he had the feeling that the wanting wasn't entirely his. That somewhere underneath the warmth and the ease and the particular cloud-soft pleasure of it, something was pulling. Not pushing. Not asking. Just – pulling, steady and patient and certain of the outcome, the way gravity pulled, the way a current pulled, the way something much older and much more certain than desire pulled.
He had never told anyone this.
He wasn't even sure why he kept thinking about it.
He checked his watch. Thirteen minutes.
Two more.
The piano played softly. Sunlight moved across the floor in slow panels. The ficus stood beside the clinic door and performed its function. Simon dragged a hand through his blonde hair and straightened up slightly, as though she might already be able to see him through the door, and then felt immediately stupid for doing that.
He tried not to think about her eyes.
A small clack rippled through the air.
The sliding door opened.
Her gaze found his immediately – the same way it always did, without searching, without delay, as though she had known exactly where he was before she opened the door. Red eyes glinting with something he had long since stopped trying to name. The sunlight came through behind her, catching the black of her hair, and she smiled – small, warm, the professional warmth she gave everyone.
He held his breath without meaning to.
"Hey Simon," she said. "Good to see you."
His heart thumped hard in his chest.
He smiled back. He hoped it looked normal. It probably didn't – it never did, his face had always been too earnest for his own good, everything he felt arriving there slightly ahead of his permission.
He did not notice the way her gaze moved over him – brief, practiced, assessing – the way something measured a meal before deciding how to approach it.
He was already getting up from the bench.