The Desk Next Door

She was already gone when I found the note.
It was tucked under the corner of my laptop, folded twice, the edges pressed flat with the kind of deliberate care that meant she had thought about leaving it for a while before she actually did. I stood there in the open-plan workspace above the surf school, the ceiling fans turning slowly overhead, the salt air coming in off the Pacific through the slatted windows, and I read it twice. Then I set it down and looked out at the water and tried to remember how to breathe.
That was this morning. It feels like a different year.
—
Three weeks earlier, I had the best desk in the building.
That is not an exaggeration. The co-working space in the surf town of Dominical sat on a low bluff above the beach, a converted open-air structure with wide plank floors and views of the Pacific that changed color every hour. Most of the desks faced the interior courtyard, which was pleasant enough, all bougainvillea and the sound of the owner’s dog sleeping in the shade. But the far-left corner, the one with the window that faced the water directly, the one where the afternoon light came in at exactly the right angle and turned everything gold — that was mine. I had claimed it in January, my third week in the country, when I was still figuring out the rhythms of working remotely in a place where the ocean was always visible and always asking you to come in. I had set up my monitor, my little plant, my worn copy of a logistics textbook I kept for the feeling of it more than for reading, and I had told myself: this is where I work now. This is fine.
I am Alistair Rivington, and I work in international freight optimization, which is exactly as dry as it sounds and exactly as interesting as you make it. I had been sent to Costa Rica by my company to lead a regional coordination project for six months, which in practice meant I spent my mornings on calls with port managers in Caldera and my afternoons building route models that no one would read until Q3. I was good at it. I was focused. I had no intention of being distracted by anything.
And then Nabila Osman arrived and took the desk next to mine.
She didn’t ask. That was the first thing. The space had been empty for weeks — the previous occupant, a developer from Montreal, had left in February — and I had quietly expanded into it the way you do when no one is watching, spreading a second monitor cable across the partition, stacking a few folders on the adjacent surface. When I came in on a Tuesday morning in late March with my coffee and my noise-cancelling headphones and the low intention of getting through six hours of clean work, she was already there. Seated, laptop open, a pair of earbuds in, a small framed photo placed on the corner of what was now, apparently, her desk. She was wearing a linen shirt the color of sea glass, her dark hair pulled back with a kind of casual precision that I immediately and irrationally resented, and she did not look up when I sat down.
I moved my cable back to my own side without saying anything. She didn’t acknowledge it. We worked in silence for two hours, and I told myself that was fine. That it was professional. That I was not, in any way, aware of the exact cadence of her typing or the way she exhaled softly when she was reading something that frustrated her.
I found out later that she worked for a competing freight consultancy. Not a direct competitor — our companies occupied different parts of the supply chain — but close enough that there were projects where our interests ran parallel and occasionally, quietly, against each other. Her name was Nabila Osman, she was based in Nairobi, and she had been sent to Costa Rica to audit a regional carrier contract that, as it turned out, overlapped with one of mine. I did not find this out from her. I found it out from Basil Marwan-Saleh, who ran the co-working space and who had the particular gift of knowing everyone’s business without appearing to pay attention to anyone.

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About the Author

Clara Vance — a former corporate strategist, expert in the tension that builds between two desks. Her hobby? Morning coffee chats in the office where she collects ideas for her stories.

— Clara Vance

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Categories: Forbidden, Romances

Tags: 10min stories, Clara Vance, contemporary romance, Costa Rica, forbidden romance, professional tension, short story, slow burn, travel romance, workplace romance

August 28, 2026

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