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I realize, with the sort of private clarity you only get in the middle of a desert of beer cups and a pamphlet-strewn folding table, that the world can reduce itself to one precise sensation: the brush of his fingers across my wrist.
It happens in the heat. Outside the corporate hospitality tent—our little square of shade that smelled of sunscreen and the lemony citrus cleaner our office admin insisted on—Julian reaches past me for a stack of branded guitar picks. He is dressed like an executive who has been roped into festival duty: navy blazer over a white tee, cuffs rolled once, hair dusted with festival grit. He moves with that economy of men who are used to being the center of things—quick, efficient gestures, a smile that measures the room faster than anyone else. The fingers that touch me are cool against the hot skin of my wrist and for a moment he doesn’t withdraw them.
“Do you always organize chaos this well?” he asks, and his voice finds that amused cadence that means he’s sharpening a joke to use later. He has the sort of mouth that could be dangerous; it curves so easily into mischief. His eyes—hazel with a rim of green—catch mine and hold, the way a conductor holds tempo until a musician follows.
I swallow, aware of the heat pressing against the canvas of the tent, of the bassline slipping through the canvas with a lazy pulse. “Only on days when I’m forced into manual labor. And only when I have to deal with your endless insistence on branded merchandise.” My words are light; my pulse is not.
This is how we begin—this is how it has always begun when Julian Price and I orbit each other at the office: with a barb wrapped in a compliment and a touch that could be claimed as purely professional. But there’s history. There’s an almost-they-were-more-than-that that shimmers along the edges of every interaction.
I work for a mid-sized marketing firm that helps local bands and non-profits find their audiences. I am an account manager by day, which means I spend my life smoothing rough edges, translating musicians’ grandiose language into deliverables, and making sure the spreadsheets rhyme with reality. Office life grants me a thousand small intimacies—shared elevator rides, late-night brainstorming sessions over the takeout we hide in the supply closet. Everything is measured: budgets, deliverables, the temperature in the conference room. Julian—the director of partnerships—measures people differently. He measures possibility.
He’s been my counterpoint for three years: the bright to my steady, the man who says what needs to be said in a disarmingly casual way. He’s also the man who once kissed the inside of my wrist in a downtown bar because he claimed it smelled like a song. That was before I moved my office chair across the room and kept my distance as a rule. That was before we learned better. Or maybe we learned nothing at all.
The festival is our annual chaos. We staff the company booth for exposure, to hand out water bottles stamped with our logo, to schmooze the right people while the band on the main stage plays songs that make teenagers slide their shoulders together in unison. The tent is my domain; I am the person who corrals volunteers, decants cooler water into mason jars like a ceremonial act, and apologizes for the heat in a tone that makes people forgive anything. Julian wanders through like he owns the festival's invisible map, creating opportunities out of stray conversations.
When we first arrived, the sun was still generous and forgiving. We staked out a corner of the tent and pinned up posters. He teased a volunteer about the man-bun—gentle ribbing that later would cause the man to grin sheepishly—and I made a mental list of supplies. The festival fed my eyes in odd ways: banners snapping like flags, the smell of grilled onions and frying batter, the distant guitar that came off as a promise, the way dust rose in lazy spirals whenever someone stomped to the beat.
We had a plan: stick together, keep the booth lively, not let any of the musicians walk off with samples. But plans fracture in the heat. People drift. Drinks change hands. The band on the side stage launched into a song that seemed to hollow my chest and make breath a scarce commodity. That was when a hum—an electric thread of recognition—ran between us, and I felt it the way you feel the first notes of a song before you hear the chorus.
It’s easy to love Julian’s laugh. It bubbles up, irreverent and a little dangerous, like a trickle of good whiskey. He uses it to make me unsettle my resolve. He uses it to remind me that his curiosity is endless and that he loves to prod at a seam just to see what falls out.
Between one volunteer and the next, he leans on the folding table and we talk like two people who are practiced at talking around what matters. Bands, logistics, the latest office politics. He asks me what I’ll do after the festival; I tell him about a friend who’s opening a pop-up supper club. He feigns interest and then pins me with those steady hazel eyes. “You should bring me a seat at that table,” he says. “I’ll tell you if the food is for real.”
“It’s for real,” I say. “And you’ll be eating family secrets before you even taste the first course.”
He hums. “I like family secrets.”
He says it like a promise. The phrase sits between us like an invitation.
We fall into a rhythm—our old office rhythm—full of sparks that we both catalogue for later. There are flickers: a grazed shoulder while passing a cooler, a longer than necessary exchange of a pen. A volunteer asks me for water and I’m handing it over when Julian’s hand closes over mine like a clamp, warm and unexpectedly possessive.
“Keep it together,” he whispers, not quite a joke. “We have three hours before the keynote panel starts and I'm not letting you faint on my watch.”
It’s ridiculous and tender. In my head I’ve already made a montage—scenes of us back at the office, side-by-side at meetings, him leaning over my desk to point at a slide, his breath hot at my ear—and I force it back into a file labeled 'Maybe, someday, not now.'
And then the first near-miss happens.
It’s late afternoon. The sun has surrendered to a warm haze and the crowd thickens. A band with a brass section plays something that makes the air taste like citrus and adrenaline. We’re supposed to network with the talent buyers who stop by, hand out merch, smile for photos. A small group forms around our tent; I’m chatting to a woman about sponsorships when Julian appears behind me—not with the casual timing I’ve come to expect, but like someone who had precisely timed his trajectory to cross mine. He bends, ostensibly to pick up a box, and leaves a hand on the small of my back. The contact is deft, deliberate, like someone who knows exactly how long to touch before it registers as anything other than a helpful assist.
I feel the electricity in a way that is congressional and private all at once. My body remembers the taste of that bar kiss—the press of lips so quick it could have been a mistake. My mind catalogues risk: HR, spreadsheets, the rumor mill. This is why we don’t let things happen, I tell myself. This is why boundaries exist.
And yet when he murmurs, “You look like a song I want on repeat,” I laugh, a small, startled thing. It’s the kind of line he can throw out and watch my face to see if it sticks. It sticks.
The festival at night becomes a different creature. Lights string overhead like constellations knocked down and tied to poles. The music swells and becomes insistently tactile. My clothes—the same black summer dress I’d chosen for the way it skims my hips—start to collect the warmth of the crowd. Julian’s blazer is off; his hair is less tidy, his sleeves rolled higher. He moves with the confidence of a man who is used to being looked at and to looking in return.
We work the tent with a choreography that is as practiced as any dance: me managing the message and keeping the volunteers in line, him charming the right people and steering stray conversations back to us. Yet even as we perform our assigned parts for the festival, it’s in the intervals—the seconds between the applause and the next song—that the game sharpens.
“Want to play something after this?” he asks during a lull, leaning against the post that holds up the tent. The way he says it is casual. His eyes ask permission without asking.
“Play?” I repeat, because I like to make him work for his mischief. “What sort of game?”
“The kind where rules are negotiable,” he says. “Where we hide from competition and from responsibilities and see who breaks first.”
“You’re playing with fire,” I say, and my tone is a dare and a warning at once.
He smiles. “I know.”
That night, as the festival strains toward its close, he corners me in the breakroom that volunteers use—an actual, utilitarian room with folding chairs, a hand-painted sign that says 'STAFF ONLY,' and the rare luxury of a window that opens onto a mud-splattered backstage. The air in there is cooler, laced with the scent of someone's half-eaten coffee and floral perfume. He shuts the door with a soft click. The game fades away and something more urgent pushes in its place.
“You could get us fired,” I say.
“You could,” he answers, and his voice is a low invitation. He steps closer until the brim of his breath stirs the hair at my temple. He smells like citrus and sweat, like sunlight pressed into clothing, like a cologne that has been deliberately softened by the day. “Or we could risk it.”
We stand there measuring each other—me with my choreographed restraint; him with this patient hunger. I remind myself of the spreadsheets, of the professional consequences, and yet I find my hands reaching up instead of keeping the ledger of disadvantages. I curl my fingers to his jaw—the motion is a claim, and it makes his eyes go an instant darker.
“Where’s the negotiation?” I ask.
“You propose the terms,” he says, “and I will find the parts I like.”
I savor the audacity of it, the way he tries to handness the power back to me, as if he trusts me to set the rules and then break them with him. “Fine,” I say, because I am tired of being sensible today. “You have until the end of the festival. If I let you kiss me in the loading bay, you have to promise to then leave me alone when we’re back in the office.”
He laughs—a short, incredulous sound. “A Faustian bargain. I accept.”
We shake on it like two idiots. The laugh around it is a shared conspiracy.
The days that follow are a series of delicious trials. We exchange small challenges and passes—he slides a napkin across the table with a doodled guitar on the corner and a single, deliberate word: 'Later.' I respond by leaving him a herbed biscuit from the food truck I manage to snag, wrapped in a sheet of branded paper. He takes it, eats it like it's treasure, and returns my gaze in a way that marks me.
We are adults with jobs and reputations, and yet we are also people who cannot resist the pressure of the suspended moment. The cat-and-mouse game is one of timing and misdirection. Sometimes he pursues openly: an open-handed brush at my lower back, an extended hold on my hand as he walks me to the tent entrance. Sometimes he withdraws—he becomes maddeningly professional during a panel, humorously stern in a meeting about vendor contracts, and perfectly attentive in a way that keeps me tethered to the notion that perhaps this could be more.
And then everything goes sideways.
On the penultimate night, a problem with a headline act forces our team to the center of a logistical tangle. An artist misses soundcheck. The promoter panics. The tent becomes a command center; the fluorescent lighting makes everyone look exhausted and urgent. I am coordinating a replacement pickup for an amplifier when Julian materializes beside me, his expression closed in a way I’ve only ever seen when he’s trying to solve something important.
“Can you take me?” he asks. He’s breathing a little hard. His face is alive with tension and, beneath it, a hope that seems crowding the edges of his professional mask.
“Where?” I ask, because my stomach has folded around a sudden, private alarm.
“The pavilion,” he says. “Back stage. Now.”
We climb into the company van—old, with a radio that tries to tune itself to every station—and the road shutters us from the sound of the crowd. It’s dark, crowded with lights that smear like watercolor past the window. The proximity inside the van chafes against us. I can feel the heat of him like another passenger.
At the vendor entrance, there is a bottleneck. Security waves us through with a half-hearted scowl. We move quickly through a back corridor that smells of diesel and damp fabric. I let him lead, because he seems to know the path like a sentinel. He’s close enough that our elbows brush and my pulse finds the percussion of the stage in my throat.
The pavilion is a small prayer to privacy: a green room with a sofa that has seen better days, a table scarred by years of backstage margaritas, and a view out to the whirlwind of the festival that makes everything feel both absurd and very small. There’s a hum—equipment cooling, voices carrying just beyond the curtain—and Julian leans back against the wall, breathing like he’s just finished a set himself.
“This is ridiculous,” I say, and the words are equal parts complaint and plea.
“You think?” he replies. He’s quiet; he lets the silence swell.
I find myself telling him about my father—how he taught me to make roux slow enough that the house smelled like patience. He listens like he’s collecting spices, attentive to proportions, not bragging, but with a genuine hunger to understand the recipe that made me. I tell him about the job softness I cultivated after a heartbreak, how I put up numbers as armor. He tells me about his discomfort with small talk, how performance terrifies him and seduces him in equal measure. We exchange secrets like notes. The intimacy grows not through contact but through these disclosed small combustions of memory.
When he goes to open the mini-fridge, I move to the couch. He follows slowly, like someone who’s conducting a delicate negotiation. The light from the window brushes his profile and makes him look almost soft. I find myself saying, impulsively, “Do you regret anything?”
He takes a fraction of a heartbeat too long to answer. “I regret not pretending to be a reasonable man sooner,” he says. “And I regret that we let things become this complicated.”
He sits beside me, not too close. The space hums with possibility. The rules we made—funny and foolish—seem suddenly both childish and necessary. “What if the rules change?” I ask.
“They will,” he says. “But only if you let them.”
There’s a tremble in my hands I don’t like. It’s not fear this time; it’s more fragile—like the first time you let someone touch a scar you thought would never be touched again.
We kiss because restraint finally feels like an act of denial too cruel to continue. It is not the hurried press of a stolen moment. It is deliberate, exploratory, an unearthing of a geography we both know by memory. His mouth is warm and precise; when he slides his palm down my spine, he finds the bottom hem of my dress and clamps his fingers there for a second as if to anchor himself. I let him.
We move slowly from contained consent to more adventurous liberty. He lifts my dress and the fabric folds like a curtain falling. His fingertips trace the outline of my thigh with reverence, with a hunger I recognize as honest. There is a tenderness to the way he kisses the inner part of my knee, like a man who knows the map of someone’s body could be a book of prayers.
We take our time. First, there is the slow undressing of restraint: fingers in shirts, a whispered comment about how ridiculous we’ve both been. We steal kisses that are punctuated by laughter and the softest of curses. We explore with the curiosity of two people who have catalogued each other in spreadsheets but never in skin.
The first time he tastes me—when he parts me with his tongue—it's like someone coaxing flavor from a reserved sauce, gentle at first and then more insistent, as if he is hunting for the right balance. Heat unwinds from me in waves. The sofa is an awkward paradise; we rearrange ourselves like two people learning which positions suit which sort of need. Julian's hands are skilled and playful; he knows the difference between quick ignition and a slow burn. He teases and reveres with equal measure.
“I’ve wanted this like a bad radio song,” he murmurs against my shoulder, a private confession that jarred like a cymbal in me.
“You mean the thing you skip and then hum under your breath afterward.” I laugh; it’s a small, delighted sound that swells between us.
We undress fully at some point, appliances of restraint stripped away with a speed that feels both desperate and inevitable. Skin meets skin and is hot with festival memories—garlic, fried dough, dust, cheap beer. I think about those little moments in the office, about the inside-of-the-wrist kiss, and wonder at how much boldness it takes to bring everyday life into a room like this.
The sex begins like a mapping and becomes a language. We move through a sequence that rewards patience: long kisses, hands learning the slope of hips and the smallness of ribs, a tenderness at the base of my throat where he kisses a place I didn’t know I had permission to give. He breathes my name like a measurement. His hips find mine with a practiced ease, driven by a steadiness that rocks me like a tide and the flash of something wild.
He knows how to make me come with a steadiness that is almost cruel—just enough to make me teeter on the brink and then pull back like a tide refusing to abandon the shores. I discover the way he murmurs under his breath—phrases that in the office would be casual, said over files and coffee—become intimate mantras in the dim light of the green room: “You’re brilliant,” he says, “You’re reckless in the best ways.” There’s music in his mouth, companioned by the bass thump from the stage that punctuates everything like a metronome.
We shift positions like dancers who have to improvise, and with every motion the world outside slips further away. When he enters me, there’s a small, fragile gasp, a sound that fills the room and my chest. The first time is slow and deep and unhurried, like a tide finally allowed to roll in. His hands bracket my hips, firm and sure, and the rest of the universe contracts into the press of us.
“God,” he says once, low and broken, and I feel the confession like a shiver.
We move together in a rhythm that is at once urgent and gentle, a paradox that somehow fits the whole of our dynamic. He is both the man who could give me lunch recommendations and the one who can make me see constellations in a stranger's hand. There is laughter between thrusts—a bright, disbelieving chime that reminds me how much we have been pretending.
At one point, when the music from the stage shifts into a familiar chorus, we pause. The band plays a cover that my father used to whistle cooking dinner, and the combination of everything—noise, heat, the closeness—makes me feel like a child at the best table. He kisses the corner of my mouth, then the underside of my wrist, then my temple, as if he’s reading different textures like a chef tasting seasoning.
He brings me to the edge more than once. I come with him holding me close enough that I can feel the beat of his heart in a way that is terrifying and soothing at once. He shudders when I call his name, a sound that is equal parts command and surrender. The room sways and we orbit each other in a private galaxy of breath and skin.
After, we lay entwined, listening to the tail of the festival like a giant exhale. He traces idle, precise circles on my back with the pad of his finger. The sweat dries slowly on our bodies and the cool air moves in through the window. He looks at me as if trying to memorize the angle of my jaw, the way my hair falls against my shoulder.
“This will complicate things,” I say, because the ledger of consequences is a stubborn thing.
“It already is,” he replies softly, and there is no attempt to make it otherwise.
We fall asleep briefly—shallow, clinging—and when we wake there’s a warmth between us that is more than residual lust. There’s an intimacy that is careful, messy, necessary. He tells me, with the kind of honesty that surprises me, that he’s been thinking about leaving—about moving to the West Coast to take a role that would let him build the sort of partnerships he really wants. I tell him about an idea I’ve shelved: starting a supper series that marries sound and food, a pop-up where the menu shifts with the playlist.
Our conversation is more confessional than it should be, and I realize that amid the bodies and lights and noise of the festival, we have found a quiet that makes room for truth.
Morning arrives with the kind of clarity that dissolves hangovers into lists. We slip back into the world like astronauts easing out of a capsule—brittle, blinking, a little disoriented. The tent we return to is a theater of the mundane: coolers to be emptied, boxes to be packed, volunteers to be thanked. In the daylight the sex we had feels both like a private performance and a shared secret. People hug us and the festival bloats with cheerful exhaustion.
There is a stretch of time, between the last performance and the final load-out, where we are both doing simple things—folding banners, logging inventory. The office will be waiting; the spreadsheets will again become a lawful thing. HR policies will become a rumor cautiously avoided. We exchange small looks that speak a language of compromise.
“I don’t want this to be a thing that ends because we’re cowards,” he says quietly when we load the last box into the van.
“We can try to be brave about it,” I answer. The words feel like a pact.
We return to the office the next Monday like actors re-entering a stage set. People nod, the coffee machine hisses, and there is a smaller, more private choreography between us now—gentle handholds in elevators, coffee refills that turn into longer lunches, scheduling a meeting and having it dissolve into a walk along the river.
We keep the line between professional and personal shakily intact, not because we are trying to hide, but because there’s a respect for what we built at our desks. We call each other by the little nicknames that only the office allows; we make note of deadlines and office gossip like lovers who note anniversaries. The risk is not gone, but it is acknowledged. We know that sometimes love and work can be stitched together—not seamlessly, not without bumps, but enough to last.
The festival remains a bright marker in my memory: a weekend where music kept the air taut and where we discovered that a ledger can track more than numbers—it can also track the risk-reward of a gamble on desire.
Sometimes, in the quiet of my kitchen, I make a roux the way my father taught me: low and slow, breathing patience into it. I taste and think of that night—of Julian’s soft thumb at the crook of my wrist, of the way he called my name as if summoning a particular spice. I remember his laugh, and the way the bass from the stage pressed a rhythm through our bones.
And sometimes, in meetings, when Julian slides a pen across my desk, his fingers barely brush mine and the old game returns. We play with the balance of eager and restrained, cat and mouse and both. He keeps asking me to be brave. I keep finding reasons to oblige.
At the end of it all—when the last box is packed and the city exhales—we decided that some rules are worth rewriting. We rewrote them in small, deliberate acts: a dinner on a Tuesday, a hand held under a conference table, a weekend that becomes a road trip. None of it was easy. But the music still hums in the seams of our days. The festival taught me that some melodies are worth hearing on repeat.
The last image that holds like glue is absurdly ordinary: Julian standing by the office window, the afternoon sun catching the new scar at his brow from a mishap on stage—the one he told me about in the green room—and laughing at something I’d said a week earlier in a staff meeting. He turns to me and slides a folded napkin across the ledge. On it, in a hurry of ink, he’s drawn a small guitar. Under it, one word: Later.
I smile, tuck it into my pocket like a talisman, and, for once, I don’t make him wait.