He should have stepped back as Gellert drew closer still, but his feet seemed a bit rooted. Part of him was simply too curious. Of all the cold comforts this place had to offer, that he knew precisely where he stood, or didn't stand, with Gellert was one of them. This Gellert did not love him and never had. Didn't care for him and never had. Barely knew him, even.
But Gellert looked at him, and touched him, in ways Albus felt, feared, he knew all too well. Possibility hung on a thin thread-- because what a perfect control it would prove, to know that he was little more than a stranger to Gellert. It could tell him, couldn't it, if Gellert was able to do and say all that he had without caring at all. All he had to do was hold his ground, and see how far Gellert would push. How much he would show. How much he would--
But when the shiver rushed up his spine and his arm yielded goose flesh, he knew what his mind was doing. He didn't need Gellert to touch him to know what Gellert was capable of. It would have been an indulgence, and that he wanted to at all was precisely why he couldn't. The smaller questions it would answer weren't worth the risks it would expose. Even then, Gellert's words sounded so distant that he barely heard them at all. But he did hear them.
Swallowing around the way his mouth had gone a bit dry, Albus managed to take a step back, though he rather quickly felt the desk pressing in behind him. The statement could be innocent, even if Gellert wasn't.
The evasion not so much louder than a whisper, Albus said, "My judgement in the matter is hardly objective." That much, Albus knew to be true. Surely, part of him thought, it was better to be closer to Gellert - figuratively speaking - to better able keep an eye on him. But Albus hardly knew if that was anything more than his desire to be close to Gellert twisting itself into something that sounded like reason. Albus might not have had the fortitude to seek Gellert out in his own time, and he was quickly become certain that he didn't entirely have the will to avoid him in this place. This wasn't about reason, it was about wisdom, and Albus felt sorely lacking.
Point in fact, he'd somehow permitted his fingers to curl gently around Gellert's. Quickly, without trying to seem rushed, he tried to disentangle their hands. "I need time to think about it," he said, almost distractedly, before he looked back to Gellert's eyes. Looking at him wasn't the hard part; looking away was. "Time alone."