Thirty Minutes Before the Vows

The ceremony started at four o’clock, and it was already three-thirty when Santiago Herrera knocked on the door of my shared lodge room and told me we had a problem.
I opened the door still holding one earring. He was standing in the hallway in a charcoal suit that fit him like an argument, his dark hair slightly damp from the mountain air outside, and he looked exactly the way he had looked for the past two years at every company event where we had managed, through careful choreography, to be on opposite sides of the room.
The problem, it turned out, was that we were both seated at Table Four.
“My assistant booked the travel,” he said, leaning against the doorframe. “Your assistant booked the travel. Apparently neither of them knew the other one existed.”
“Neither of them knew we existed in the same company,” I said, which was almost true. Keisha Amara, my assistant, knew exactly who Santiago was. She had been telling me for six months that I was being ridiculous. I had been telling her for six months that she didn’t have the full picture.
The full picture was this: Santiago Herrera was the head of the West Coast division. I ran the East Coast team. We had met at a product launch in Chicago two years ago, had spent an entire conference dinner talking about everything except work, and had parted ways at the elevator bank at midnight with a look that I had spent approximately four hundred hours trying not to think about. Then, three weeks later, the company had restructured and we were suddenly competitors for the same quarterly targets, the same budget lines, the same VP title that was eventually going to open up. And whatever had almost started in Chicago quietly folded itself away.
We were professionals. We were perfectly civil. We were very, very good at standing on opposite sides of rooms.
And now we were both at a ski lodge in Aspen for the wedding of our mutual colleague Jamal Fofana, who had met his fiancée at a company retreat three years ago and apparently felt the whole company deserved to witness the result. The lodge was beautiful in a way that felt unfair—dark timber beams, stone fireplaces, floor-to-ceiling windows with the white mountain outside pressing its face against the glass. It smelled like pine and woodsmoke and something warm I couldn’t name.
Santiago was still waiting for me to say something useful.
“We’re adults,” I said. “We can sit at the same table.”
“Of course,” he said.
Neither of us moved.
Keisha appeared at the end of the hallway, already in her bridesmaid dress, holding a bouquet and pointing at her watch with the focused energy of someone who had given up on subtlety. “Emi. We have twenty-two minutes. Put the earring in.”
I put the earring in. Santiago stepped aside. We walked down the hallway toward the ceremony room without touching and without quite looking at each other, which took more effort than it should have.
The ceremony was held in a long room at the back of the lodge where someone had lined the aisle with white pine branches and small candles in glass jars. The mountains were visible through the back wall of windows, going blue in the late afternoon light. Jamal stood at the front looking like a man who had just understood something important, and when his bride appeared in the doorway, the room made a sound that wasn’t quite a gasp but was close.
I cried a little. I was not expecting to cry. I blinked it back and stared at the candles and felt Santiago shift in his chair beside me, and then felt, very carefully, his hand settle over mine on the armrest.
I didn’t move.
He didn’t move.
We stayed like that through the vows.

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: Contemporary, Romances

Tags: 10min stories, Aspen, contemporary romance, enemies to lovers, short story, ski lodge, slow burn, wedding romance, workplace romance

August 5, 2026

10min-stories