Vincent Akopov, the man who has starred in my most private fantasies for five years, is looming tall over his desk.
His dark hair falls in perfect disarray across his forehead, those distinctive silver streaks catching the overhead glare like lightning trapped in midnight. His jaw—that impossible sculpture of angles and shadows—clenches beneath the trimmed precision of his beard. The sleeves of his charcoal button-down are rolled to the elbow, revealing forearms mapped with veins that branch under his skin.
His presence devours the room. Consumes the oxygen. Consumes my oxygen.
It’s the reason—well, one of many—that Vincent is always the one I go to in my lonely, late night imaginings. Ol’ Reliable to get me to the metaphorical mountain peak.
The man doesn’t occupy space—he owns it, warps it, makes you forget there was ever anything else here before him.
But there is something before him.
Something bent over before him, rather.
To be specific, that something is a woman.
The woman, whom I presume can only be the missing Vanessa, has her cheek plastered to the desk surface, so she doesn’t see me. That’s probably for the best, because I’m slightly preoccupied by the fact that her skirt is hiked up around her waist, her panties twisted around her ankles, and more tortured moans keep sputtering past her lips as Vincent thrusts into her from behind.
I make a sound somewhere between a gasp and a squeak.
The woman, lost in her pleasure, doesn’t notice.
But Vincent does.
He turns his head, his movement unhurried, lazy, uncaring. The muscles of his back bunch and flex under the thin silk of his dress shirt.
And our eyes meet.
Time grinds to a complete and total halt.
His eyes are bluer than I remembered. Like glacier ice. Like the Caribbean waters in those vacation brochures I always collect but never act on, because vacations are for people who have fun, people who have sex, people who aren’t drowning under the unbearable weight of crushing medical debt and loneliness.
In other words, not for me.
I wait for shock. Or, if not that, for embarrassment. At the very least, I’m bracing for him to bellow at me to get out because he’s trying to fuck, goddammit.
I get none of that.
Instead, his lips—wet and glistening with things I don’t dare think about—curve into a predatory smile.
Then he winks at me.
“Oh” is the only thing I say, the only thing I can say, like all the other words in the English language have burned up in smoke.
The papers go tumbling from my suddenly numb fingers and scatter across the floor like oversized confetti. In my haste, I trip and bump the door a second time.
It rocks all the way open, rebounds off the wall, and then, with some insane comedic timing from a universe that apparently thinks this whole thing is funny in the extreme, it swings back and closes in my face.
Click.
Gone is the view. Vanessa’s moans are back to the muffled but admirably enthusiastic volume they were at when I first exited the elevator. It’s just me out in the hallway again, as if that whole thing never happened.
But it did, didn’t it?
He winked.
The papers sigh as they settle around my ankles. My heart is hammering against my ribs so hard I’m sure the entire building can hear it.
He winked.
What does that mean? Is it a wink like Don’t tell? Or is it a wink like You’re next, if you want to join?
No. Don’t even go there, Row.
Men like Vincent Akopov don’t notice women like me. I know that from bitter, first-hand experience.
I’m the girl that guys always befriended to get close to my prettier friends. The dependable one. The “you’re like a sister to me” one.
And besides, I remember how Vincent looked at me the day I was hired. He saw me. Saw in me. Saw through me.
Then he glanced away as if I’d suddenly ceased to exist.
As if, by tearing his gaze away without remorse, he was telling me, You are insignificant.
I drop to my knees and try to scoop the papers back into proper order, or at least something close to it. But I’m shaking like a lunatic. I feel like one, too.
I peek up at the door. It’s still closed, stubbornly and resolutely.
Did I imagine the whole thing?
No. Impossible. The memory of those blue eyes is too vivid. The amused sneer of his lips. The heat in his gaze when he looked at me.
I clutch the now-disorganized folder to my chest and back away. As I go, the sounds from behind the door grow louder.
I’ve spent five years watching Vincent from afar. In the cafeteria. At company events. Once, memorably, at the gym in our building, where I nearly fell off the treadmill when he walked in wearing no shirt and running shorts that left little to the imagination.
For those counting at home, that means five years of constructing elaborate fantasies in which, via some heaven-sent miracle, Vincent suddenly noticed me. Where we had a meet-cute straight out of a rom-com. Where he looked at me the way he’d just looked at me through that door.
Except that, in those fantasies, I was confident. Sexy. Not a sweaty, stammering mess with ink on my fingers and a coffee stain on my blouse that I tried to hide this morning with a strategically placed scarf.
I flee toward the elevator, my cheeks redder than ever.
Vanessa’s cries reach a crescendo just as the elevator doors seal closed between us.
Only then can I breathe. I lean against the mirrored wall, my reflection showing a woman I barely recognize. Eyes wide. Cheeks flushed. Lips gaping.
Then I laugh, a hysterical sound that bounces off the elevator walls and returns to my ears magnified, intensified, worse and more terrifying in every way.
He winked. I can’t stop asking myself the same question: What could that mean? In what universe was that wink an invitation?
The universe where my mother hadn’t gotten sick, maybe. Where we hadn’t lost our house paying for her treatments. Where I’d been able to take that design internship in Paris instead of the first steady job with health insurance I could find.
A universe where Vincent Akopov would see past the quiet marketing associate who blends into the wallpaper and notice the real me instead.
The elevator dings as it mercifully descends below the thirtieth floor. It’s like the journey I took to get here, but played backwards. Déjà vu all over again, but in reverse.
By the time the elevator kisses the ground, I do what I’ve always done: left the hope behind me.
It’s safer than asking what if.
