Overtime (And Under the Desk)

The hallway outside our offices always smelled faintly of burnt coffee and toner, with the fluorescent lights giving off the same tired hum they’d made for three years.

“Do you remember that one time you told me I was like your office sister? In front of everyone?”

I watched confusion curl into suspicion on Dante’s face. He knew that smirk well enough by now. Three years of sitting twenty feet apart had taught him to read it from across a room, and I’d cornered him in the hallway wearing it on purpose.

His eyebrows lifted. “Yeah?”

“You think I don’t know what that was?”

“What was what?”

“You putting me in the safest category possible.” I folded my arms and leaned back against the wall. The air conditioner hummed overhead, carrying phone chatter and the shuffle of someone’s chair. “I just need to set the record straight. You are not my office brother.”

Dante’s mouth pulled into an amused smile. “Good to know.”

“I think I could live with office step bro, though.”

For a second, he genuinely had nothing. His mouth fell open, and the expression was so offended that I started laughing before he managed to speak.

“No. Absolutely fucking not.” He pointed at me, fighting a grin that ruined whatever authority he was going for. “You did not just step-bro me at work.”

“I did.”

“Jesus Christ, Isabel.”

He dragged a hand over his face and turned away, shoulders shaking while he tried to pull himself together. My laugh carried farther down the hallway than I meant it to, and I dropped my voice the second I caught movement through the glass of a nearby office.

Dante caught it too, and neither of us needed to say anything. Three years of working together had made that part automatic.

When he looked back at me, the smile was still there. “I’m trying to have an actual conversation with you, and this is what I get? Internet brain rot?”

“You’re pretending you don’t know what it means?”

That took some of the laughter out of him. He settled one hip against the wall, casual enough that anyone passing would think we were wasting time between meetings. “Please. I’m a marketing guy. I spend half my life online.”

“So you do know.”

“Oh, I know.” His voice dropped a little. “What I didn’t know was that you had the nerve to actually say it to my face.”

“Maybe you underestimate me.”

“I definitely did.”

The copier started up in the workroom behind us, filling the silence with its mechanical shuffle. Dante didn’t leave. Neither did I.

“You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” he said.

“Doing what?”

“Pushing.”

The word changed something.

I glanced toward the far end of the hallway, where a coworker stepped out of one office with a stack of folders and vanished into another. A phone rang behind a closed door. Everything around us was painfully ordinary, which made the conversation feel considerably less so.

“I am always trying to push the boundaries,” I admitted, lowering my voice. “Just a bit closer every time.”

Dante’s fingers tapped against the wall beside his thigh. “Yeah. I noticed.”

I’d expected another joke. Not that. “That’s a dangerous fucking game, Isabel.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not doing it all at once.” He shifted his weight, bringing him slightly closer without making it obvious. “You just keep doing little shit. A comment here. A look there. Standing a little too close to me.”

“You’ve been keeping track?”

“Hard not to.”

The answer came quickly enough to put a smile on my face.

Dante caught it immediately. “Oh, don’t look so proud of yourself.”

“I’m not.”

“Your face says otherwise.”

“You’re one to talk. Your ears are red.”

His hand started toward one before he realized what he was doing and dropped it again. That made me laugh.

“It’s hot in this hallway.”

“It’s freezing in here.”

“You’re fucking annoying.”

“And yet you’re still standing here.”

I gestured toward the open hallway behind him. “You could leave.”

“I could.”

“Go ahead.”

He didn’t.

A door opened somewhere nearby, and both of us glanced toward the sound. One of our coworkers stepped into the hallway, gave us a distracted wave, and headed in the opposite direction. I waved back like Dante and I were discussing absolutely nothing worth overhearing.

The footsteps faded around the corner. Dante was still there. I lifted my eyebrows.

“God, you’re cocky today.”

“Am I wrong?”

“Didn’t say that.”

That caught me slightly off guard, and the quiet satisfaction on his face told me he knew it.

“Yeah,” he said. “Not as much fun when I do it, is it?”

“I’m having a great time.”

“I’m sure you are.”

I could have left it there. I’d already pushed enough to get more out of him than I expected, and the hallway wasn’t exactly private.

Instead, I took a small step toward him and let my arm brush his.

It was barely anything, the drag of my sleeve against his, small enough that anyone passing wouldn’t have looked twice, but Dante noticed, his fingers stopping mid-tap against the wall.

We were coworkers. People brushed against each other all the time.

Except I’d done it deliberately, and he knew I had.

Neither of us moved away.

“That’s the goal,” I said quietly.

His brow furrowed. “What is?”

“This. Seeing what happens.”

Dante straightened off the wall, but instead of putting distance between us, the movement dropped him directly in front of me. His cologne cut through the sterile office smell, and I became very aware of exactly how little space was left.

“Isabel.”

The way he said my name was warning enough.

I tilted my head. “What?”

“You keep doing this, and eventually one of us is going to fuck up.”

There was no teasing behind it now. He said it plainly, almost matter-of-factly, which made it land harder than some dramatic threat ever could.

“And then?”

“Then it isn’t cute office banter anymore.”

For three years we’d lived comfortably inside that excuse. Every comment could be a joke. Every lingering look could mean nothing. We could flirt until one of us got too close, laugh it off, and go back to our separate offices without ever admitting there was something underneath it.

This was the closest Dante had ever come to admitting it himself.

So naturally, I pushed again. “Where’s the end of the road for the cute office banter?”

He gave a short laugh, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t?”

“No.” His thumb rubbed absently against the edge of his pocket. “That’s kind of the fucking problem.”

The answer settled between us while the copier behind me finally went quiet. Without the mechanical noise filling the hallway, the space suddenly felt smaller. My arm was still touching his, and this time I was the one who let it fall away.

Then the obvious thought arrived, dragging reality back into the conversation.

“What about your brand-new girlfriend?”

Dante looked away, and for the first time since I’d started this, he seemed genuinely uncomfortable. I immediately knew I’d found the part of the conversation neither of us could turn into a joke.

“What about her?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to.

Dante rubbed the back of his neck. “I know I have a girlfriend.”

“I would hope so.”

He gave me a dry look. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

He hesitated while the office continued around us. Someone laughed behind a closed door. A chair rolled across tile. Farther down the hall, the elevator dinged and opened.

Finally, Dante gestured between us. “This. It’s getting a little too real.”

“Flirting?”

“Obviously.”

“And?”

He took his time answering. “And I know it’s not exactly harmless anymore.”

For once, I didn’t have something clever ready. “Okay.”

Flirting with Dante had always been easy when whatever existed between us belonged entirely to the two of us. It was a private game built out of insults and looks and jokes that could always be explained away if either of us needed an exit.

His girlfriend changed that. She gave the game edges. Consequences. Made it capable of hurting someone who wasn’t standing there.

I stepped back, restoring some of the professional distance that should have been between us all along.

Dante noticed, but he didn’t try to close it again.

A coworker appeared at the far end of the hallway, and the change in both of us was immediate. I straightened while Dante reached casually toward his back pocket. By the time the man got close enough to hear us, we looked like exactly what everyone in the building assumed we were: coworkers killing a few minutes in the hallway.

“Hey,” he said as he passed.

“Hey.”

Dante gave him a nod.

I waited until he disappeared around the corner before looking at Dante again.

Three years of practice, and I wasn’t sure why that thought bothered me now.

“I should probably do the thing they pay me for.”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “Novel concept.”

“Fuck you.”

“Look at that. You’re back.”

I shook my head and started toward my office, my footsteps tapping softly against the tile. I made it several yards before the urge became impossible to ignore.

I looked back.

Dante hadn’t moved. He was still standing where I’d left him, watching me walk away, and when he realized I’d caught him, he didn’t bother pretending otherwise.

I raised an eyebrow, and his mouth formed one word.

Don’t.

I turned around before I did something stupid in a hallway full of people who still thought we were just coworkers.

My office window looked out over the parking garage, which was about as unglamorous a view as corporate real estate offered, but the morning light still cut a pale stripe across my desk.

By the time I reached my office, the ordinary rhythm of the workday had already started swallowing the moment. I sat down, woke my computer, and stared blankly at whatever I’d been working on before Dante derailed my morning.

My phone buzzed against the desk. I shouldn’t have checked it. I did.

Don’t start something you won’t finish.

No name. I didn’t need one, and I bit back a smile as I typed.

Who said I was finished?

Send.

I put the phone facedown and turned back to my computer.

The copier started again. Someone called down the hall. A phone rang twice before somebody answered it. Everything around me had gone completely, boringly back to normal.

My phone stayed silent. Maybe Dante had finally gotten smart. I knew him better than that.

He was deciding, and that was fine. Let him.

Author's Corner: Who do you think will make a move first? Dante or Isabel? Let me know in the comments.