Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc

The thing about wanting your colleague was that it didn’t stop just because you told it to. Sophie had been telling hers to stop for approximately eleven months, two weeks, and — she checked her watch — four days, and it had ignored every single instruction.

Marcus set his coffee down on the table across from hers, and she felt it like a shift in air pressure.

“Late night?” he asked.

“Deadline.”

“Same.” He pulled out his chair. “You have blueprint lines on your face.”

“I fell asleep on the plans.”

“Very dedicated.”

“Deeply pathetic.”

He smiled. She had a whole catalogue of his smiles by now — she hadn’t meant to build it, but here they were. This one was the private one, the one he didn’t give to clients or the partners or the whole-team lunches. This one was just for the late evenings when it was the two of them and bad office lighting and takeout from the Thai place downstairs.

They’d been assigned to the same project eight months ago. The Ryland commission — a conversion of a Victorian warehouse into residential apartments. It should have been straightforward. It had not been straightforward, because Marcus had opinions and she had opinions and their opinions rarely matched and also she couldn’t stop noticing the way he looked at structural problems like they were puzzles he was personally delighted by.

“Look at this,” he said, pushing his sketchbook across the table. “Tell me why it’s wrong.”

She looked. She saw immediately why it was wrong. She also saw, in the bottom right corner, a small sketch that had nothing to do with the Ryland commission — a woman sitting at a drafting table, chin resting on her hand, dark curls falling forward.

She looked up.

He was watching her.

“Marcus.”

“The load-bearing issue. Second floor, east wall.”

“I see it.”

“Tell me the fix.”

She didn’t tell him the fix. She was very busy having a cardiac event.

“That’s me,” she said, pointing to the sketch.

He didn’t pretend otherwise. “Yes.”

“Why?”

He leaned back in his chair and looked at her with the same steady openness he applied to everything, and said, “Because I look at you the way I look at good architecture. I can’t stop finding new things worth looking at.”

Somewhere in the building, a lift dinged. Outside, the city moved. Sophie sat very still with her heart running away from her and thought about company policy and their partnership track and the eleven months she’d spent being sensible.

She picked up her pencil.

She drew a line through the east wall on his sketch — the clean correction, the load redistributed.

Then she wrote her home address on the corner of the page.

“The fix,” she said, sliding it back.

He looked at the address. He looked at her.

“I’ll need to review this further,” he said carefully.

“Come by at eight,” she said. “Bring the Ryland file.”

He did not bring the Ryland file.

She had not expected him to.

He showed up at eight with a bottle of red wine and his sketchbook and that particular smile she didn’t have a name for yet — she was already working on it — and she opened the door and thought: eleven months is a very long time to be sensible.

She was done being sensible.

She let him in.

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So you made it to the end… which probably means you’re the kind of person who enjoys a little romance with their coffee. If you’re in the mood for more stories about messy feelings, stubborn attraction, and women who absolutely refuse to settle for boring love, you can find all my books here.

Fair warning though. One story tends to lead to another. I’ve seen it happen. Repeatedly.