The day after Sophie and Prince had somehow managed to fill my Sunday with more warmth than I'd felt in a long time, Monday arrived with its usual indifference.
I was at my desk by eight thirty, coffee cooling beside me, inbox already demanding things from me.
The morning had passed in the particular blur that Mondays specialize in, meetings, follow ups, a spreadsheet that refused to cooperate, and by early afternoon I had settled into that quiet focused rhythm where the world narrows to just the task in front of you.
The office hummed softly around me. Keyboards. A phone ringing two desks over. The faint sound of someone's lunch being heated in the kitchen down the hall.
Then my phone vibrated.
I glanced at it automatically, expecting a work notification.
It was Joe.
Hey. Thinking of you. Can we meet tonight?
I set the phone down. Picked it up again. Read it twice.
Something about seeing his name in the middle of an ordinary Monday afternoon did things to my composure that I was not going to examine too closely.
I typed back, Of course. Same place? and had barely set the phone down when it buzzed again.
Yes. Can't wait to see you.
And then, a moment later, a second message.
I want you to crave me the way I crave you.
I stared at that one for a considerably longer time.
A knock at my door pulled me back to earth.
"Come in."
The door opened and Lily, one of the newer staff members, stepped in with a folder of documents that needed my signature.
She was sharp and quietly observant, the kind of person who noticed things without making a production of it, and she took one look at my face and paused.
"Everything okay?" she asked, setting the folder on my desk.
"Fine," I said, perhaps a fraction too quickly.
Lily sat down across from me with the calm patience of someone who had nowhere urgent to be.
"You have the look of someone whose phone just said something interesting."
I laughed despite myself. "Is it that obvious?"
"A little." She smiled. "You don't have to tell me."
I hesitated. Then: "There's someone. His name is Joe.
He just sent me something that was—" I paused, searching for the word. "Bold."
"Bold how?"
I turned my phone screen toward her briefly.
Lily read it. Her eyebrows rose. Then she looked back at me with an expression of calm assessment.
"He means it," she said simply.
"You can tell that from one line?"
"I can tell from your face," she said. "You're not unsettled because it was too much. You're unsettled because it wasn't."
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
She stood and picked up her folder. "Talk to him tonight. Be honest." She paused at the door.
"The ones who say what they mean are worth keeping."
Then she was gone, leaving me alone with Joe's message glowing softly on my screen.
Crave me the way I crave you.
I pressed my lips together, signed the documents she had left behind, and tried very hard to focus on work for the remaining two hours.
I mostly failed.
The café was exactly as it always was, warm and unhurried, the smell of coffee and something faintly sweet, soft music underneath the murmur of conversations.
I pushed the door open and the little bell chimed above me, and I spotted him immediately.
Corner table by the window. A book open in front of him, though he looked up the moment I walked in, like he had been tracking the door without appearing to.
He smiled when he saw me. Not the performative smile from that first day in the café, this one was quieter. More certain.
The kind that had settled into something real over the past weeks.
"Hey," he said, as I slid into the seat across from him.
"Hi." I nodded at the book. "Still Hemingway?"
He glanced down at it. "There's something timeless about him.
He understood how to sit inside a moment." He looked back up at me. "How was your day?"
"Long," I said honestly. "Better now."
His eyes held mine for a beat. "Good."
The waitress came. Cappuccino for me, espresso for him, the small ritual that had established itself without either of us deciding on it, the way good things tend to.
We talked. The conversation moved the way it always did with Joe, easily, without the self-consciousness of people still performing for each other.
He told me about his afternoon. I told him about Lily's unsolicited but surprisingly accurate wisdom. He laughed at that, genuine and warm.
"She sounds perceptive," he said.
"Annoyingly so," I agreed.
Then, quieter: "Your message," I said. "This afternoon."
He didn't look away. "I meant it."
"I know." I turned my cup slowly in my hands. "That's what I'm sitting with."
He leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table. "Tell me what you're thinking."
"I'm thinking—" I paused, choosing carefully. "I'm thinking that I'm getting less scared. Slowly." I met his eyes. "And that feels significant."
Something shifted in his expression, soft and unhurried, like light changing in a room. "It is," he said quietly. "It is significant."
We stayed until the café began its gentle wind down, chairs shifting, the music lowering, the evening crowd thinning out.
Neither of us rushed it. When Joe finally glanced at his watch and sighed, I felt the familiar reluctance of someone not ready for a good thing to end.
He helped me into my coat, his hands resting on my shoulders a moment longer than necessary, and we stepped out into the cool night together.
"Walk you home?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
We took the long way without discussing it.
The city was quiet at this hour, just the soft amber of streetlights and the occasional car passing.
Joe's hand found mine somewhere in the first block, easy and unhurried, like it had always belonged there.
We talked less than usual, comfortable in the kind of silence that doesn't need filling.
When we reached my building he slowed, and we stopped at the bottom of the steps. The light above the door cast everything in a warm, low glow.
I turned to face him.
He was already looking at me, that steady, unhurried attention that I had stopped trying to deflect weeks ago.
Up close in the quiet of the night, with no café buzz around us and nowhere else to be, he felt different. More present somehow. More real.
"Thank you for tonight," I said softly.
"Thank you for the message back," he replied. A small smile. "You could have ignored it."
"I thought about it," I admitted.
He laughed quietly. Then the laugh faded into something stiller, and he took one small step closer.
Not closing the distance entirely, just… reducing it.
Enough that I could see the exact expression in his eyes, careful and warm and asking something without words.
My breath caught.
His hand came up slowly, fingers brushing along my jaw, barely a touch, the way you'd handle something you didn't want to startle.
My heart was doing something complicated and loud in my chest.
He leaned in.
I leaned in.
And then his phone rang.
The sound cut through the quiet like something deliberate, almost cruel in its timing.
We both pulled back slightly, blinking, the spell not broken exactly but, interrupted. Reset.
Joe stilled. I felt him exhale slowly, the kind of breath that takes effort to keep steady, before he glance at the screen.
Something crossed his face. Unreadable. Gone before I could name it.
"Timing," he murmured, more to himself than to me.
"I have to take this," he said quietly. "I'm sorry."
"It's fine," I said, and stepped back to give him space, my heart still doing that complicated thing in my chest.
He turned slightly, voice low as he answered. The conversation was brief, yes, I'll call you back, not a good time, and when he turned back to me his expression had settled into something careful.
"Sorry," he said again.
"Don't be," I said. And I meant it. Mostly.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, his thumb grazing my cheek as he dropped his hand.
"Goodnight Ella," he said quietly.
"Goodnight Joe."
He stepped back. I climbed the steps. At the door I turned back once, he was still there, hands in his pockets, watching.
He waited until I was inside before he left.
I stood in my hallway in the dark for a full minute, back against the door, hand pressed flat to my chest like I could slow my heart down from the outside.
"Almost."
We had been so close.
I pushed off the door, went to the kitchen, poured a glass of water I didn't drink, and stood at the counter replaying those few seconds on a loop, his hand on my jaw, the lean, the headlights.
My phone buzzed.
Joe: "Next time."
Two words. I stared at them until my vision blurred slightly.
Then I smiled, slow and helpless and entirely to myself, and typed back:
"Next time."