ROHAN
She corrects my site schedule on Monday.
She doesn’t make a thing of it. Just puts a Post-it on the edge of my desk that says Phase 2 overlaps Phase 3 by 11 days — check your contractor sequence. No signature. Like it came from no one.
I stare at it for a moment. Then I check the schedule. She’s right.
I write back on another Post-it: Noted. Thank you. — R
She reads it without expression and puts it in her desk drawer. I don’t know why that makes me want to smile.
We don’t talk about the fact that we are, technically, competing for the same senior position that the firm posted internally last week. Everyone in the office knows we’re both going for it. I found out she’d applied on the same day I submitted my own application, and I’d sat with that information for a long, quiet moment before deciding it changed nothing about how I wanted to work.
What it changes is harder to name.
There’s a version of this where we are straightforwardly rivals, where every shared glance is a calculation, where the Post-its are strategy. I know that version exists. I’ve worked in offices where that’s how it goes.
This doesn’t feel like that.
This feels like something I don’t have a clean word for yet.
—
We end up working late on the same Wednesday, which is not planned and feels, somehow, inevitable.
The office empties out. The overhead lights switch to their dim after-hours mode. Outside the tall windows, Edinburgh is doing what Edinburgh does in November — rain that can’t decide if it wants to be fog, the castle just visible as a dark shape against a darker sky, the street below glowing amber from the lamps.
I’m trying to resolve a structural issue that has been defeating me for three days. Rohan is doing something on his laptop that involves a lot of quiet frowning.
At some point he says, “Do you want tea? I’m making tea.”
“Yes,” I say, before I can decide whether I should.
He comes back with two mugs. Sets mine on my side of the neutral zone without being asked. Sits back down. Goes back to frowning at his screen.
I wrap my hands around the mug. It’s the right temperature, somehow. Not too hot.
“How did you know how I take it?” I ask.
“I’ve been watching you make it every morning for three weeks.” He says it so simply, like it’s a perfectly ordinary thing to admit, and then he looks up and something shifts in his expression — a slight recalibration, as if he’s only just heard himself. “Because you’re right there,” he adds. “I wasn’t — I just paid attention.”
The rain taps against the glass.
“I know your coffee order too,” I say. I don’t know why I say it. “Flat white, no sugar, always the first one of the day and then you switch to water.”
He looks at me for a moment that is several seconds longer than a professional exchange requires.
“Meera.”
“Rohan.”
We both look away at the same time. There’s something almost funny about it, and I feel the laugh before I let it out — small, surprised, helpless.
He laughs too. Quietly. Like he was holding the same one.
—
ROHAN
After that it’s different. Not dramatically. Not in any way I could point to and explain. But the eight-inch neutral zone stops being a border and starts being just the space between two people who are close to each other.
We talk about the work, mostly. But we also talk about other things. She tells me she grew up in Glasgow and came to Edinburgh for university and never quite left, the way the city has a way of keeping people. I tell her I did the reverse — Edinburgh first, then Glasgow for seven years, now back. She says that’s suspicious and I say I’m a suspicious person and she says she knows.
There’s a version of this where the promotion is the whole story. Where everything between us is shadowed by the thing we’re both reaching for, the thing only one of us can have.
I’m not going to pretend it isn’t there. It’s there. We both know it’s there.
But there’s also this: the way she tucks her pen behind her ear when she’s thinking hard. The way she says “no, but actually” when she’s about to agree with me. The way the office feels different at seven in the evening with the rain on the glass and both of us still here, and how I’ve started finding reasons to stay a little later than I need to.
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