The Desk Next Door

“You two are in the same water,” Basil said to me on my second evening there, handing me a cold glass of something that tasted like tamarind and lime, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the desk where Nabila was still working even though it was past six. “Professionally speaking. Might be worth knowing.”
I looked at her across the room. She was frowning at her screen, one hand resting flat on the desk beside her keyboard, a posture I had already come to recognize as her thinking posture, the stillness before she started typing fast. I said nothing and finished my drink.
The second week was when things shifted.
It started with a question she asked me about port clearance documentation for a carrier out of Puntarenas — a technical question, professional, completely above-board. I answered it. She thanked me without looking away from her screen. I went back to my own work and spent the next forty minutes replaying the twelve seconds of that exchange in a way that was completely disproportionate to what had actually happened. The following morning she brought two coffees from the place down the road, the one with the red awning and the surfboards propped against the wall, and she set one beside my laptop without a word. I said thank you. She said nothing, already reading something on her phone. But the coffee was exactly how I took it, which meant she had noticed, which meant she had been paying attention, and that fact sat in my chest like a warm stone for the rest of the day.
We started talking in the evenings, when the building emptied out and the light went copper and long across the floor. Nothing that crossed any line. We talked about the work, about the logistics industry in East Africa versus Central America, about the particular absurdity of our respective companies’ expense report systems. She was sharp in a way that made me sharper, the kind of person who disagrees with you carefully and specifically rather than broadly, so you always know exactly where you stand. I liked it more than I wanted to admit.
Then Elspeth arrived.
Elspeth Larkin was Nabila’s former colleague, and she came to Dominical for what she described as a working holiday, which in practice meant she worked for two hours in the morning and spent the rest of the time in the water or on the beach or at the bar at the bottom of the hill. She was warm and loud and immediately likeable, and within twenty-four hours she had decided that Nabila and I were obviously in love and that her role was to facilitate this at every available opportunity. She was not subtle. She would arrive at the co-working space, glance between us with an expression of theatrical significance, and find reasons to leave us alone together that were transparent to everyone in the room including Nabila, who bore it with a patience I found both admirable and, in its steadiness, quietly heartbreaking.
“She does this,” Nabila said to me one evening, after Elspeth had manufactured an urgent phone call and disappeared. We were standing at the window, the sun already below the tree line, the ocean a deep and restless blue. “She means well. She just — she doesn’t understand that some things aren’t available.”
I looked at her. She was looking at the water.
“Aren’t they?” I said.
She was quiet for a long moment. The ceiling fan turned. Somewhere below, a wave broke and pulled back over the stones. “We’re working in the same contract space, Alistair. If either of our companies found out we were — if there was any suggestion of —” She stopped. Pressed her lips together. “It would look like a conflict. For both of us. And I have spent four years building a reputation that I am not willing to put at risk for —” She stopped again.
For what, I wanted to ask. But I didn’t. Because I understood. Because I had the same four years, the same reputation, the same company that would ask questions I didn’t want to answer.

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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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