Ten on a Friday

I have been lying to myself for six months, and Friday is the night the lie performs best. Just one more file. I say it to the empty floor, and the empty floor, to its credit, doesn't laugh.

Ten o'clock. The windows have gone black, the kind of black that hands you back a smaller version of yourself. The copier talks in its sleep two rows over, a soft, patient sound, like it knows something about me and is too professional to say. My paper-cup coffee went cold an hour ago. I drink it anyway. Cold coffee is a penance, and some part of me believes I've earned one.

The office has a tidy name for nights like this — after hours — a phrase that makes lonely sound like a schedule you keep on purpose. Every other desk is dark. Every other monitor is off. Someone's cardigan hangs off a keyboard. Hers. The gray one Team Lead Jieun is always forgetting; for half a year that cardigan has been the floor's weather vane. Gone by seven, and the night is ordinary.

Tonight it hung there. And past the dark rows, one room was still white — her office, behind the glass wall that supervises the rest of us. It is always the first light to die when overtime ends. We all track it. Nobody admits to tracking it. Tonight it burned like a lamp in the window of a house I had no business walking toward.

I want it on the record that I hesitated. I want it on the record because no one will ever check.

Her door stood half open. She had her elbows on the desk, head bent over a screen that needed nothing from her. The first button of her blouse was already undone. I noticed that immediately, and I hated the speed of my own eyes.

You're still here?

She said it before I could knock. When she lifted her head, there was something unguarded in her face — a version of Jieun the daytime never lets out of its cage.

I just… didn't want to go home today.

I looked at her monitor instead of answering: the last file, sent and confirmed at nine-fifteen. Done. Nothing left to be late for, either of us. Neither of us moved.

Her ring flashed thin in the monitor's glow when she pushed her hair back. I knew its story the way a whole team knows things no one tells them — two years married, a husband in Singapore since Tuesday, a flight home booked for Sunday. She turned the band once with her thumb, the way you touch a bruise to confirm it's still there.

She said it the way you'd mention the weather. Then she stood, and the office became a smaller, warmer room.

One Elevator Running

We took the long way to the lifts, past the cardigan she did not pick up. At this hour only one elevator runs; the building saves what it can.

By daylight she smells like meetings — paper, perfume applied with discipline. At ten on a Friday she is warmer than that. Skin-warm. The slit in her skirt climbed higher than the dress code, and my eyes were too slow coming back up. I watched the floor numbers instead. My shoes sounded like I was alone in the world. The hall lights switched on in lazy sections above us. Her breath was close — close enough to tell she wasn't as calm as her voice.

In the elevator's mirror I watched myself not look at her. The doors opened on the lobby: the night guard's empty chair, the glass doors, the street. Freedom, technically. I reached for the call button, and her hand arrived first. Not on the button. On mine.

You can press 1. Then this stays overtime. The Friday we almost had.

Her fingers slid past mine; the ring was cool against my knuckle. The panel lit. Not one. Eleven.

Or you can come back up. And it stops being overtime.

Continue this scene in After Hours →

The elevator rose the way my pulse did — too fast, and refusing to apologize. Neither of us watched the numbers this time.

Her office. The glass wall that supervises us all day had turned to black mirror with the city dark. From the corridor you'd have seen only the ghost of the corridor, and no reason to look twice. I heard the lock go — a small brass sound, the loudest thing that had happened all week. Then the sofa. That gray sofa I have sat on for a hundred performance reviews, suddenly the most dangerous piece of furniture in the city. She crossed to it ahead of me, unhurried, as if the room had been waiting for this the way the copier waits — patient, humming, already knowing.

The sofa… here.

She said it like an instruction and a question at once, and her eyes put the whole choice in front of me — hers as much as mine. That is the part I need written down somewhere. Nothing about this night was taken. It was offered, and I was willing, and we both knew the exact weight of what willing costs a person like me.

I locked the door. They can't see through the glass.

And the shame I'd carried since six o'clock — the cold coffee, the averted eyes, the careful not-looking — went out of me like the last of the daylight. What replaced it was simpler and far worse: want, plain as a lit window. Somewhere over the sea, a plane was carrying her husband east while I stood very still in front of a woman who had already decided.

Her hand found my tie and did not pull. That was the cruelty of it. She let the silence do the pulling, and I leaned in, and somewhere between the lock and the light, Friday quietly stopped being overtime.

The ring was cold against my jaw. Nothing else was.

That is where my confession runs out. Everything after lives on the eleventh floor, behind glass that shows no one anything — and on every Friday since, I have never once pressed 1.