The coat check ticket was still in Marcus’s pocket at eleven, the cardboard gone soft from his thumb. Number 247. Elena had handed it to him at the door of the party with a look that lasted half a second too long, and then spent the next four hours finding reasons to be in the same part of the room as him.
At nine she was at the open bar with a gin and tonic and a lime wedge she kept turning between her fingers. At ten she was at the dessert table, and he was too, and they split a chocolate mousse with two spoons and a conversation about the Q4 deck that neither of them was having.
At eleven they stood by the elevators with the city forty floors down and the confession almost happening. She could feel it in the shape of his silence. Three years of standing next to each other in meetings, of Tuesday coffees he brought her without being asked, of the seat she saved for him at every all-hands, of the way they both laughed a beat early at each other’s jokes.
“It’s loud in there,” she said.
“It’s the same volume as out here.”
“You’re not helping.”
He looked at her. Then he took his phone out, and looked at her again, and put it away with the decision unsent.
At 11:47 her phone buzzed in her hand.
cleanup crew at 12. my desk. 40th floor.
She stood in the elevator lobby with her thumb over send for what felt like a full minute. Then: ok.
He replied in forty seconds.
The party noise stopped being noise when the fire door closed behind her. Just a hum now, a party in another building. The floor was dark except for the exit signs and one corner where a monitor had gone to sleep but not off, its little light blinking.
Marcus was at his desk. He had taken his tie off and it hung over the back of the chair like a shed skin. Tinsel from the photo booth was stuck in the cuff of his shirt.
“You actually came up,” he said.
“You asked.”
“I thought you might have been agreeing to be polite.”
“Marcus.” She walked past him to the window. “I have been trying to get you to ask me something for three years.”
The city was down there in its grid, cars moving like white blood cells, the river black. She could see both of their reflections in the glass, faint, overlaid on the city — her in the green dress she’d bought for a party she didn’t want to attend, him in his shirtsleeves with his tie off.
“Then I should have asked sooner,” he said, behind her.
He kissed her with his hand already in her hair, the way you kiss someone when you have been thinking about it for a year and have run out of patience with yourself.
They went over the desk together and everything on it went onto the floor: the quarterly report, the budget binder, the pen cup that hit the carpet and did not break. Her skirt was pushed up. His belt made a sound in the quiet that was almost funny. He broke the kiss to laugh, forehead against hers.
“Condom,” he said. “Wallet. Give me a second.”
“Don’t you dare have an expiry problem right now.”
He fumbled the foil open and then looked at the date and laughed again, a real laugh, half panic. “It’s fine. It’s last week. Is that—”
“Marcus. Get up here.”
He had her on the desk with her heels against his hips and the window behind her. The glass was cold through the thin dress where he pushed her into it. She could feel him shaking a little. So was she.
“Tell me if—”
“Marcus,” she said, and pulled him in by the back of the neck.
It was not the kind of sex that happens in offices in films. No sweeping of important papers, no slow cinematic pace. The desk edge cut into the back of her thigh and the pen cup was somewhere under it and the chair had gone sideways.
He got a hand under her and pulled her to the edge, and she got her heel up on the arm of the chair to make room for him, and he pushed into her slow, watching her face the whole way, which she had not expected and could not look away from.
“Okay?”
“If you stop to ask me that again I will throw the binder at you.”
He laughed, and then he wasn’t laughing, and the desk moved an inch across the carpet with the first real stroke and neither of them did anything about it. She had one hand flat on the cold glass with the city behind it and the other around his wrist, and she could feel his pulse there, going as fast as hers. The green dress was hiked to her waist and his shirt was still on, buttons open, and his tie was on the floor somewhere and neither of them had noticed it fall.
“Harder,” she said. “The floor’s empty.”
He fucked her harder. The reflection in the window was a bad angle and she watched it anyway — two people who worked forty floors up doing something they would have to be careful about on Monday, her heel slipping off the chair arm, his hand flat between her shoulder blades, his mouth open against her throat and saying her name like it was costing him something.
She came with her eyes open, watching them do it in the glass, and it went on longer than she expected and she made a sound she was going to think about at her desk for the rest of her life. He felt her clench around him and said something that wasn’t a word, and then he was coming too, three strokes later, with his forehead down against hers and his hand fisted in the back of her dress.
For a while neither of them spoke. The monitor in the corner blinked its little light. Somewhere below, the cleanup crew was running a machine over the fortieth floor.
Her thighs were slick and shaking, and the back of her thigh had a red line across it from the desk edge that would be a bruise by morning. The tights were ruined. She could feel him leaking out of her onto the desk and she did not get up.
“Your phone is on the floor,” he said eventually. “It’s ringing.”
“It’s my sister. She can wait.”
“The screen says 12:41.”
Elena laughed, and then couldn’t stop laughing, and Marcus started too, both of them half-dressed on a desk with the city doing its indifferent thing outside.
Monday came anyway.
She wore the gold hoops she always wore on Mondays, and he brought her coffee at 9:15 like he had every week for eight months, and the world did not end.
“The earring,” he said quietly, setting the cup down. “The one from Friday. I found it in my coat pocket at the dry cleaners.”
“So that’s where it went.”
“I didn’t know what to do with it.”
She looked up at him. The Monday lights, the smell of coffee, the ordinary Tuesday-that-was-now-Monday.
“Ask me to dinner,” she said, “and I’ll take it back in person.”
He blinked. Then smiled — the one that creased the corner of his left eye, the one she had been cataloguing for three years.
“Dinner,” he said. “Thursday. Not the office.”
“Not the office,” she agreed.
He went back to his desk. She put the earring question away until Thursday, and the Q4 projections still had two cells highlighted, and neither of them mentioned the desk.
