Deadline

The rest of the team had left at ten. By midnight, Meera and Vikram had finished the deck, killed two bottles of energy drink, and were sitting across from each other at the conference table with no more work between them and nothing to pretend to be doing. The city glittered through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The office was quiet in the way that large open-plan spaces go quiet late at night — full of the small sounds of ventilation and distant traffic and the absence of forty other people. "We should get going," Meera said. She didn't move. Vikram looked at her across the table. He was her counterpart on the client side, technically not her colleague — they'd been thrown together on this pitch for three weeks, the kind of sustained proximity that normal work doesn't create. She'd noticed things about him that she hadn't meant to notice: the way he thought out loud when something was bothering him, the particular quality of his attention when she was speaking, the fact that he'd brought her coffee exactly right on the third day without asking. "Meera," he said. "Don't," she said. Not because she didn't want him to. Because she knew once he said it there was no going back to pretending she hadn't noticed all of it. He came around the table anyway. He didn't touch her — just stood close, looking down at her, and the air between them felt like something she could have put her hand through. "Tell me to go," he said. "And I'll go." She looked up at him. Said nothing. He kissed her slowly, with his hands on either side of her face. She felt the tension she'd been holding for three weeks come undone somewhere in her chest and she made a soft, involuntary sound against his mouth and reached up and fisted her hands in his shirt. He pulled her up from the chair and against him and she could feel that he wanted this as badly as she did — the hard press of him against her hip, his hands moving down her back with intent. She pulled back just far enough to breathe. "Lock the door," she said. She heard the click, and then his arms were back around her and they were moving toward the small private office at the end of the floor, the one with the couch that nobody really used. Her blouse was half-unbuttoned by the time the door closed behind them. His was open. She pushed it off his shoulders. He was good with his hands — she'd somehow known he would be. He took his time, learning what she responded to, watching her face with an attention that made her feel both seen and unravelled. She bit her lip against the sounds she was making, and he said, low and close to her ear: "I want to hear you." So she stopped biting her lip. When they finally came together on the narrow couch with the city lights visible through the high window, she wrapped her legs around him and moved with him and the urgency of it was nothing like she'd let herself imagine during those three careful weeks. She came with her face buried in his neck, trembling, and felt him shudder and go still against her a moment later. They lay tangled together in the quiet office. "Pitch lands in eight hours," Vikram said eventually. "I know." "We should probably go home." "Probably," Meera said. Neither of them moved for another twenty minutes.