Thirty Minutes Before the Vows

Dinner was loud and warm and full of the kind of organized chaos that happens when two large friend groups meet for the first time over an open bar. Keisha sat across from us and spent most of the first course giving me a look that required no translation. Santiago’s colleague Marco, who I’d met once at a conference in Seattle, held court at the end of the table with a story about Jamal’s bachelor trip that kept getting interrupted by his own laughter. The food was good—short ribs and roasted root vegetables and a bread basket that Santiago pushed toward me without being asked because he had apparently noticed, at some point, that I always reach for bread first.
That small thing undid something in me.
“You didn’t want to come,” he said, when the table had gotten loud enough to give us a pocket of privacy.
“I wanted to come for Jamal,” I said. “I just didn’t expect—” I stopped.
“Me,” he said.
“The seating arrangement,” I said.
He almost smiled. Almost. “Emi.”
I had not heard him say my name in two years. We were always “Ms. Suzuki” and “Mr. Herrera” in meetings, always last names in email chains, always the careful professional distance that I had told myself was appropriate and had never quite believed.
“I’ve been waiting,” he said, “for you to stop being afraid of the conflict of interest.”
I set down my fork. “Excuse me?”
“The title,” he said. “The VP position. You’ve been treating it like a wall.”
“It is a wall.”
“It’s a door,” he said. “One of us walks through it. The other one congratulates them. And then we figure out the rest.” He said it simply, like it was obvious, like two years of careful distance had been an elaborate misunderstanding he had been patiently waiting for me to correct.
I looked at him for a moment. The candlelight caught the line of his jaw, the steady way he was watching me. Outside the windows, the mountain was dark now, just a shape against the sky.
Keisha refilled her own wine glass and looked deeply elsewhere.
“You make it sound easy,” I said.
“I make it sound possible,” he said. “Easy was never on the table.”
This was the thing about Santiago that I had been trying not to think about for two years: he was precise. Not cold, not calculating—precise. He said what he meant. He meant what he said. In Chicago, he had told me that he thought most networking events were a form of mutual performance, that he found them exhausting, that he had only stayed at that dinner because the conversation had gotten interesting. He had looked at me when he said it. I had known exactly what he meant.
And then the restructure had happened and I had decided that knowing what someone meant was not enough of a foundation when there were quarterly targets and budget lines between you. I had decided that wanting something and being allowed to want it were two different things, and I had been very disciplined about keeping them separate.
Sitting next to him in a lodge in Aspen with pine smoke in the air and someone’s wedding still warm in the room, I understood, clearly and all at once, that I had been wrong about which one was the wall and which one was the door.
I had not been afraid of the conflict of interest.
I had been afraid of wanting something I couldn’t control the outcome of.
The distinction mattered.
“I owe you an apology,” I said. “For two years of opposite sides of the room.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “I could have crossed the room too.”
“You should have,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I should have.”
At the front of the room, someone clinked a glass and Jamal stood up to say something about his wife, his voice going rough on the last word, and the whole table turned to watch. I felt Santiago’s hand find mine under the table, deliberate this time, not a ceremony reflex but a choice.
I turned my hand over and held on.

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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: Contemporary, Romances

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

August 5, 2026

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