Office After Hours

The copy room on the fourth floor is a coffin with a window. No ventilation, fluorescent lights that hum like a trapped wasp, and a Xerox machine the size of a small car that jams every third job. I know this because I've spent more time in here during the past six weeks than at my actual desk. I know the exact angle of the blind spot created by the filing cabinet and the door. I know that if you stand just to the left of the paper tray, anyone walking past the narrow glass panel in the door sees nothing but the back of a head and a ream of 24-pound bond.

I know the taste of Marcus Chen's mouth when he's been drinking the office coffee, which is burnt and terrible, and I don't care.

Right now his hand is under my blouse, palm flat against the small of my back, fingers spread like he's trying to memorize the shape of me. My own hands are tangled in his tie, which is a nice tie, navy blue with tiny silver dots, and I've already ruined the knot. He doesn't seem to mind. He's got me pressed against the edge of the collating table, the metal lip digging into my thighs through my skirt, and his mouth is on my neck, just below my ear, where he's learned that I make a sound I can't control.

"Someone's coming," I whisper.

He doesn't stop. "No they're not."

The door is closed. The blinds are drawn. The sign on the outside says OUT OF ORDER, which is a lie we've been maintaining for three weeks. The machine works fine. We just needed an excuse.

This is the problem with Marcus. He's reckless in a way that should terrify me, and instead it makes me want him more. He's the kind of man who walks into a meeting five minutes late with no apology and somehow leaves with everyone thinking he's the most prepared person in the room. He's good at his job in a way that feels like sleight of hand. He makes everything look easy, including this, whatever this is.

I'm not supposed to be here. I have a performance review at two. I have a spreadsheet due to Priya by end of day. I have a boyfriend who thinks I'm in a meeting with the vendor relations team. His name is David. He's a nice man. He teaches middle school history and he makes me dinner on Sundays and he's never once looked at me the way Marcus is looking at me right now, which is like I'm the only thing in the building that matters.

"You're thinking too loud," Marcus says against my throat. His breath is warm. His teeth graze my skin and I arch into him without meaning to.

"I'm always thinking."

"I know. It's one of the things I like about you."

He pulls back just enough to look at me. His eyes are dark brown, almost black in this light, and his hair is disheveled in a way that's going to be impossible to explain when we walk out of here separately. He's got a smear of my lipstick on his collar. I reach up to wipe it away and he catches my wrist, presses a kiss to the inside of it, right where my pulse is hammering.

"We should stop," I say.

"We should."

Neither of us moves.

This started six weeks ago at the holiday party. Not the actual party, which was at a bar downtown with bad appetizers and a secret Santa exchange that got passive-aggressive, but the aftermath. A group of us went back to the office to keep drinking because someone had a bottle of whiskey in their desk. I don't remember whose idea it was. I remember Marcus and I ended up in the break room at two in the morning, arguing about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. I remember him laughing at something I said, really laughing, head thrown back, and I remember thinking that I'd worked with this man for two years and never noticed how his whole face changed when he smiled.

Then he kissed me. Just like that. Mid-sentence. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I kissed him back.

The next morning I told myself it was a mistake. A one-time thing. We were both drunk, both lonely, both caught up in the weird intimacy of a late night in an empty office. It wouldn't happen again.

It happened again three days later. In the stairwell between the third and fourth floors. I was coming back from lunch and he was coming down and we just stopped. Stood there on the landing, not touching, barely breathing. Then he said my name. Just my name. And I was done for.

Now here we are. The copy room. The supply closet on the second floor. The parking garage after everyone else has gone home. Once, memorably, the roof, which was cold and windy and probably visible from the building across the street, but neither of us cared.

I don't know what we're doing. That's the truth of it. We haven't talked about it. We haven't defined it. We just keep finding each other in empty rooms and pretending that's enough.

"Priya's going to notice," I say. "She's been giving me looks."

"Priya gives everyone looks. It's her face."

"Marcus."

"Okay." He steps back, runs a hand through his hair, tries to fix his tie. It's hopeless. "Okay. You're right. This is the last time."

"That's what you said on Tuesday."

"Tuesday was different."

"How?"

He looks at me. That look. The one that makes me forget every sensible thing I've ever known. "Tuesday I hadn't seen you in that dress yet."

I'm wearing a gray pencil skirt and a cream blouse. Nothing special. But he says it like I'm wearing couture, like he's genuinely awed by the fact that I got dressed this morning, and I feel my face go hot.

"You're impossible," I say.

"I know."

He kisses me one more time. Quick. Almost chaste. Then he's at the door, hand on the knob, checking the hallway through the narrow window.

"Clear," he says. "Wait two minutes."

"I know the drill."

He pauses. "Dinner tonight?"

"We can't."

"I know. But I'm asking anyway."

I should say no. I should say we need to stop, actually stop, not just say we're going to stop while continuing to do exactly what we've been doing. I should say that I have a boyfriend and he has a girlfriend, or whatever the situation is with him and whatever her name is, the woman he mentioned once and never again. I should say that this is going to end badly, that someone is going to find out, that we're both going to get hurt.

Instead I say, "I can't tonight. David's making lasagna."

"Tomorrow."

"Marcus."

"Tomorrow," he says again. "The parking garage. Level three. I'll bring wine."

He's gone before I can answer.

I stand there in the humming quiet of the copy room, leaning against the collating table, trying to remember how to breathe normally. My blouse is untucked. My hair is a disaster. There's a red mark on my neck that I'll need to cover with concealer before my two o'clock.

I should feel guilty. I do feel guilty. But it's a distant kind of guilt, like a noise from another room. What I feel mostly is alive. Awake. Like I've been sleepwalking through my life for years and someone just shook me hard enough to wake me up.

The door opens. Priya pokes her head in.

"Hey, the machine's been out of order for weeks. What are you doing in here?"

I grab a random stack of papers from the table. "Looking for the Henderson file. I thought I left it in here."

"Did you?"

"No. Must be at my desk."

She looks at me for a beat too long. Priya's been my work wife for three years. She knows my tells. She knows when I'm lying and when I'm not, and right now she definitely knows something.

"You okay?" she asks. "You look flushed."

"I think I'm coming down with something."

"Uh-huh." She doesn't believe me. I can see it in her face. But she doesn't push. That's not her style. She just steps back and holds the door open for me, and I walk out into the hallway like nothing's wrong, like I haven't just spent twenty minutes with my tongue in a colleague's mouth, like I'm a normal person with a normal job and a normal life.

The fluorescent lights buzz overhead. Somewhere down the hall, someone's printer is spitting out pages. The Henderson file is exactly where I left it, on my desk, under my coffee mug.

I sit down. I open the spreadsheet. I type a number into a cell.

Tomorrow. Level three. Wine.

I don't know if I'll go. I don't know if I can stop myself.