Page 18 of The Authenticity Clause
“This series,” Julian said, still studying the screen. “Does it have a name?”
“Hidden Worlds,” Leo breathed. The name felt heavy, too revealing, now that he’d said it aloud to this man.
He kept swiping. A library where the books were made of crystallized moonlight. An underwater metropolis built inside a giant, translucent jellyfish. Each image was a piece of his soul, a map of the places he went when the real world was too much. They were intensely personal, deeply vulnerable. Sharing them with Julian felt like standing naked in the middle of the office.
Julian didn’t offer any empty praise. He didn’t say “it’s beautiful” or “you’re so talented.” His compliments were questions, each one showing that he was trulylooking.
“Why is the architecture here,” he pointed to the tree city, “so much more organic than here?” He pointed to the jellyfish city.
“Because the first one grew, it wasn’t built,” Leo found himself explaining, the words coming more easily now. “It’s a symbiotic relationship with the tree. The second one is an engineered marvel, a triumph against a hostile environment. One is about harmony, the other is about survival.”
Julian nodded slowly, processing this. He looked from the tablet to Leo, and for the first time, Leo felt like Julian was seeing past the chaotic employee, past the imposter. The look in hiseyes wasn't skeptical or annoyed. It was… interested. Genuinely, intensely interested.
“They’re metaphors,” Julian stated, his voice soft.
Leo’s breath caught. He could only nod.
Julian handed the tablet back, his fingers brushing against Leo’s. A tiny spark of static, or maybe something else entirely, jumped between them. The rain continued to drum against the glass, a steady, soothing rhythm. The office was quiet and still.
Leo looked down at the glowing screen, at the hidden world he had created, and then back up at the man who had just seen it, who had understood it without needing a flowchart. He still felt vulnerable, exposed. But for the first time since he’d met Julian Thorne, he also felt seen.
Chapter 13: The Reciprocity
The silence that followed Leo’s admission was a different entity from the one that had preceded it. Before, it had been an awkward void, a vacuum Leo had desperately tried to fill. Now, it was a space filled with the resonant hum of the images Julian had just seen. It was a silence that had weight and texture.
Julian’s mind, a machine built for deconstruction and analysis, was failing. He tried to categorize what he’d seen.Digitalillustration. High-fantasy concept art. Expert use of color theoryand atmospheric perspective.The labels were technically correct but insultingly inadequate. They were definitions for the body, not the soul. And what he had just witnessed was pure, unadulterated soul.
The chaos he saw in Leo every day—the mismatched socks, the frantic energy, the non-sequitur ideas that somehow worked—it wasn’t a flaw in his programming. It was a feature. These hidden worlds on the tablet were the source code. The vibrant, impossible city in the tree, the library of crystallized moonlight—they weren’t just drawings. They were ecosystems of feeling, intricate and raw. They were a testament to a mind that operated on a plane of existence Julian could observe but never truly inhabit.
He had hired a designer. He had discovered an artist.
And the artist was now looking at him with wide, vulnerable eyes, bracing for a verdict, expecting Julian to quantify his soul on a one-to-ten scale.
“I, uh, I know it’s a bit weird,” Leo said, his voice quiet, breaking the spell. He was already trying to retreat, to build a wall of self-deprecation around the tender thing he had just shared. “It’s just a hobby. Doesn’t really have any practical application.”
Practical application.The phrase was a reflex, a defense mechanism Julian understood all too well. It was the language of people who had been told their passions were not productive enough, not serious enough. It was the language of creative hearts learning to armor themselves with pragmatism.
And for the first time, Julian felt the cold, hard lines of his own armor begin to ache. He had spent his entire adult life championing a specific kind of creativity—the kind that could be measured in engagement metrics and conversion rates. Clean, efficient, profitable creativity. He had dismissed everything else as noise. But the art on that tablet wasn’t noise. It was a symphony.
An unfamiliar, deeply unsettling impulse rose within him. It was the urge to reciprocate. To offer a piece of himself in return for the one Leo had just offered. It was a transaction utterly devoid of logic, a terrible business decision. Vulnerability was a liability. He had learned that lesson the hard way. His mind screamed at him to retreat, to offer a polite, professional compliment and steer the conversation back to neutral territory.“Youhave a promising eye, Hayes. Thiscould be developed into a marketable asset.”The words were right there, safe and sterile on his tongue.
But he looked at Leo, at the genuine anxiety in his expression, and the carefully constructed words of dismissal felt like abetrayal. Leo hadn't shown him an asset. He had shown him a secret. And a secret, Julian was discovering, demanded another in return.
He set his coffee mug down on the counter with a soft click. The sound was unnaturally loud in the quiet room.
“I used to play the cello,” he said.
The words came out of him feeling foreign and clumsy, like a language he hadn’t spoken in fifteen years. Leo’s eyes widened slightly, his surprise evident. He didn’t press, just waited, giving Julian the space to continue or retreat.
“My parents were both academics,” Julian continued, his gaze fixed on a point somewhere over Leo’s shoulder, looking back in time. “Everything was about measurable achievement. Competitions, grades, rankings. I was technically proficient at the cello. First chair in the youth orchestra. I won several regional competitions.”
He could feel his posture stiffening, his hands instinctively wanting to find his pockets, to close himself off. He fought the urge.
“But I never felt… I never felt what your artlookslike,” he admitted, the confession costing him more than he had anticipated. “When I played, I was just executing a series of complex instructions perfectly. I could replicate the emotion the composer intended, but I never felt it myself. I was just a very sophisticated machine for producing music.”
He paused, the silence stretching. This was a mistake. This was oversharing. This was unprofessional.
“There was a national competition when I was seventeen,” he forced himself to finish, the memory still carrying a faint, metallic taste of shame. “I was playing a Bach suite. In themiddle of the performance, I had this… moment of dissociation. I was playing all the right notes, my form was perfect, but my mind was completely blank. I was just watching my hands move. And I realized I was a fraud.”
