The Space Between Lanterns

“You’re stalling.” She says it lightly, the way she says most things, but she doesn’t look away. The lantern light catches the side of her face in shades of gold and deep orange, and Devon thinks, not for the first time, that this is an unreasonable amount of beauty for a person to carry into a conversation about sugarcane juice.
“I leave in three hours,” he says. He doesn’t know why he says it. She knows. Everyone knows.
She is quiet for a moment. On the canal, a small wooden boat drifts past carrying a cluster of floating candles in paper cups — offerings, or wishes, or both. The flames tremble but hold.
“I know,” Ines says. And then, carefully: “I was thinking. The fern is yours. If you want it back. When I get home.”
Devon looks at her. “You’re keeping the window.”
“I’m keeping the window.”
It is the most oblique conversation he has ever had, and he understands every word of it perfectly. She is telling him she is coming back to the desk beside his. She is telling him she intends to stay. She is asking, in the way that Ines asks things — sideways, gently, with room for him to decline — whether that is something he wants.
Aisha’s laugh carries back to them from somewhere ahead, bright and unsuspecting. Marcus is telling a story, audible even at this distance, something about a motorbike and a basket of mangoes. Chiara is photographing a lantern the color of a persimmon.
Devon finally drinks the sugarcane juice. It is warm now, slightly too sweet, and he finishes it in one long pull and sets the empty cup on a vendor’s table as they pass. Then, without planning to, he falls into step beside Ines, close enough that their hands brush once, twice, and on the third time neither of them moves away.
The lanterns sway above them in the dark, amber and rose, and the canal carries its small fires quietly toward the sea.

0 likes

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

Full author profile

Categories: Romances, Slow Burn

Tags: 10min stories, contemporary romance, emotional fiction, Hoi An, night market, short story, slow burn, travel romance, Vietnam, workplace romance

August 6, 2026

10min-stories