Chapter Eleven: Pull and Push
Adrian buried himself in work.
He doubled the LogicMind testing rounds, rescheduled investor calls to earlier hours, and added two more engineers to his late-night development team. The office lights stayed on long after midnight. He told himself it was necessary. That the app’s future — and his own — depended on this momentum.
But deep down, he knew what he was running from.
Maya.
Since their charged conversation outside the art studio, he hadn’t called. Hadn’t replied to her last message. The one that simply read: “Are you okay?”
He hadn’t meant to disappear. He just… didn’t know how to stay.
He sat in the sleek silence of his apartment, surrounded by algorithms and progress charts, but all he could think about was the look in Maya’s eyes — open, searching, unafraid. That look made him feel both seen and exposed.
And that terrified him.
Across the city, Maya stood outside a gallery window, her breath fogging the glass.
Her friend Aisha leaned in. “You’re really going to let him ghost you like that?”
“He’s not ghosting me,” Maya said, more to herself than to Aisha. “He’s retreating.”
“Same thing.”
Maya sighed. “Adrian’s not like most people. He’s been surviving on structure for years. It’s hard for him to let someone in.”
“And yet,” Aisha said pointedly, “he let you in — a little. Then slammed the door.”
Maya didn’t reply. She knew Aisha was right. But something in her still believed in Adrian’s potential — not as a founder, not as a genius — but as a man learning to be human again.
Still, she couldn’t wait forever.
That night, at a friend’s rooftop party in Shoreditch, Maya let herself lean into distraction. A banker named Leo struck up a conversation. He was charming, open, emotionally articulate — the kind of man most people would dream of dating.
He asked if she wanted to grab coffee sometime. She said yes.
Meanwhile, Adrian stood in front of his apartment window, overlooking the Thames. He clenched his jaw as he replayed Maya’s words in his mind: “Sometimes they spill. Sometimes they blur.”
He opened her message again, read it for the fifth time, then placed the phone back down.
He didn’t know how to answer. Not without sounding broken. Not without letting her see the parts of him still bruised by a childhood that taught him love was fleeting, unreliable.
But when he saw a social media post the next morning — Maya laughing with someone unfamiliar, a latte in hand, her smile wide and unburdened — a strange ache settled in his chest.
It wasn’t jealousy. It was regret.
Because for the first time in a long time, something — someone — had made him want more than control.
