Rain That Can't Decide - Page 3 of 3

Rain That Can’t Decide

On a Thursday in December, the decision comes.
I get an email at four-seventeen. Rohan gets one at four-seventeen. We both read them at the same time, which I know because I look up from my screen and he’s already looking up from his.
He got the position.
I sit with that for a moment. It doesn’t feel the way I expected it to feel. It feels smaller than I thought, and something else feels larger, and I’m not ready to examine that too closely yet.
“Congratulations,” I say. I mean it. That surprises me too.
“Meera —”
“No, genuinely. You’re good at this. You should have the job.” I pause. “Also, your Cairn Street cost modeling was better than mine and I’ve been quietly furious about it for eight months.”
He stares at me. Then he laughs — a real one, unguarded, the kind that changes his whole face. “Your community consultation section was better than mine and I’ve thought about it every time I’ve written one since.”
We look at each other across the eight inches.
“This is a strange situation,” I say.
“Very strange,” he agrees. “Do you want to get dinner?”
The question lands between us, simple and enormous.
There are reasons to say no. He’s about to become my senior. The firm has policies, unwritten ones, the kind that live in the air of a place. We’ve been circling each other for weeks with careful, deliberate restraint, and dinner is the opposite of restraint, dinner is a door opening, dinner is saying yes to something that doesn’t have a clean professional name.
I know all of this.
“Yes,” I say.
—
ROHAN
We go to a small Italian place on Victoria Street — the kind that’s been there for twenty years, red-checked tablecloths, candles in old wine bottles, a menu that doesn’t need to be fashionable because it’s always been right. The rain has stopped. The cobblestones outside are wet and gleaming.
We talk for three hours.
Not about the office. Not about the promotion, or the neutral zone, or the careful politeness of the last month. We talk about everything else — the buildings we love, the ones we’d tear down if we could, the project she has filed away in a notebook that she’s never pitched to anyone, the one I built in my head at twenty-three that I still think about.
At some point she says, “I think I was angrier about Cairn Street than I let myself feel at the time.”
“You were allowed to be angry.”
“I know. I’m saying I’m not anymore.”
She looks at me steadily when she says it. The candle between us makes the light warm and unsteady, and I’m aware of how close the table is, how the restaurant has gotten quieter around us without either of us noticing.
“Meera.”
“I know,” she says, before I can figure out what I was going to say. “I know it’s complicated.”
“I was going to say I’m glad you’re the one at the desk next to mine.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then: “So am I.”
We walk back through the Old Town afterward, past the lit-up close mouths and the dark weight of the castle above us, and somewhere on the Royal Mile she slips her hand into mine like it’s something we’ve been doing for years.
It isn’t simple. I know that. The morning will still come with all its complications attached — the new title, the policies, the things that don’t have easy answers.
But her hand is warm in mine, and Edinburgh is beautiful in the cold, and for now, this is enough.

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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, contemporary fiction, Edinburgh, enemies to lovers, forbidden romance, short fiction, short story, slow burn, workplace romance

August 3, 2026

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