“Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is…so delightful,” Kirk sang with a flourish as I got into the car. “And since we’ve no place to go…”

I rolled my eyes as I shut the passenger seat door against the wind. “It’s not even Thanksgiving yet, Kirk. You know I do all my holiday shopping online specifically so I don’t have to hear the speakers at Nordstrom’s spewing out sentimental crap months ahead of schedule.”

Kirk smiled and shook his head as he pulled the Jaguar out of my driveway. “First of all, Ebenezer Scrooge, Christmas is my favorite holiday, so you’re going to let me have this, and more importantly, when it’s going to snow this much, this early, I’m allowed to break out the carols.”

“I should have told everyone to work from home today,” I groaned. “I just checked my weather app and the predictions are only getting more and more dire.”

“Eh.” Kirk shrugged. “It’s not supposed to start until seven, and everyone should be home by then. If it starts looking worse, we can let people off early.”

I turned down the car stereo until it was barely audible and leaned my head up against the window. “Only we would get stuck with a historically bad blizzard during the most critical stage of the Wordsworth acquisition.”

“Oh yeah…” Kirk said. “I almost forgot, you told the investors that you and Samantha would have the report about the acquisition tomorrow, correct?”

I frowned. “Correct.”

Kirk raised an eyebrow. “So…it’s almost done, right?”

I stayed quiet and shrugged.

“Johnathan!” Kirk scolded. “That’s way too much work to be done in the course of one day, especially when a blizzard could hit at any moment. What, was Samantha slacking off or something?”

I looked down. “Not…exactly.”

“Johnathan, you know that if that report is a day late, or is lacking in our usual quality at all, we could lose a lot of business.”

“I know, I know, I just—”

“What has been up with you lately, man?”

A more truthful answer, one even I was still uncomfortable admitting, nearly flew out of my mouth, but I paused just in time. “Stuff has been busy.”

Kirk looked at me skeptically. “If you say so.” He turned the radio back up as a weather announcer came on. “Shit, now they’re saying ten inches,” he said, pretending to seem concerned, but hiding a hint of a smile. Kirk hailed from Buffalo, and any amount of snow filled him with hometown nostalgia. I’m glad Kirk was happy, but I sure wasn’t. Seattle doesn’t usually get this much snow, and never this early. You would think a city so close to Canada would know how to handle its snow, but the unfortunate truth was that even a couple of inches could drive the city to a standstill. Seattle was filled with steep hills which made driving within the city limits on slippery surfaces incredibly dangerous. This blizzard would turn the city into a ghost town. I might have to force my employees to work from home for the rest of the week.

I sighed and ran my fingers through my hair as Kirk parked his car. Today was beginning in the worst kind of way. I already had severe anxiety because of Samantha and the report deadline approaching, but now this blizzard was making everything far worse.

I trudged into the office, gripping my coffee cup with unusual force. I walked right up to Sabryna’s desk and stared at her blankly.

“Johnathan?” she asked, looking extremely concerned. “You alright there?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said, suddenly coming back to my senses. “It’s just um, that report that Samantha and I were supposed to give to the investors is due tomorrow, and we’ve barely made any headway on it, and there’s this blizzard, and I already have a headache, and—”

“And you’re wondering if there’s anything I can do?” Sabryna said with a hint of mockery.

“Uh…” I broke into a bashful smile. “Maybe?”

Sabryna shook her head. “I can make you some tea or get you an aspirin, but I can’t control the weather, Torver. Or write that report, unless you give me a raise.”

I sighed. “I know, I’m just grasping for miracles here,” I joked.

“This is on you and Ms. Doyle.” Sabryna stopped to think for a minute. “Actually, given Samantha’s penchant for punctuality, I’d say it’s more on you.”

I felt myself blush a bit. “No comment.”

Sabryna rolled her eyes and smiled. “Earl Grey? Chamomile? Matcha?”

I smiled. “Chamomile sounds great right now, thanks.”

“You got it boss,” Sabryna said, shaking her head at me with a look of somewhat amused concern.

“I’m definitely gonna need it once Samantha gets here,” I joked.

Sabryna broke out into a guilty smile. “Uh, Johnathan…”

I looked at her questioningly. “What?”

“You know Samantha Doyle has been in the conference room working on that report since six o’clock this morning, right?”

I stared at Sabryna blankly. “Shit…” I said. “Shit.”

I abandoned the chamomile tea Sabryna had started steeping to a cold and undeserved demise as I rushed into the conference room.

“Hi!” I said awkwardly as I pushed open the conference room door to find Samantha typing notes peacefully into her laptop with a cup of coffee balanced between her fingertips.

“Good morning Johnathan,” she said, taking a delicate sip of her coffee and keeping eyes locked on me. She bowed her head a bit as she put the cup down, as if acknowledging an opponent. “I thought you would get here earlier, considering the deadline is tomorrow, and of course, the weather reports.”

“No,” I said. “You’re right. That was irresponsible of me.”

Samantha stared back at her laptop, unsure of how to respond to my sudden acquiescence.  “Look Johnathan, about the other day…I’m sorry.” She squirmed a bit in her seat as I gazed up at her. “Implying that you were being more generous with these negotiations than you were intending was…not professional. At all.”

I shrugged, unsure of how to respond as well. “Thanks,” I said. “But what’s done is done.” I pulled my laptop and some files out of my briefcase and sighed. “Now we just have to focus on getting this report done before the storm hits.”

Samantha smiled over her coffee. “It’s not too bad. Most of it is writing the data analysis sheets up and making our circumstances look as pretty as possible. If we budget our time correctly, we can probably finish this by the late afternoon and get home safely.” Samantha shuffled the batch of papers in front of her to even them out. “Now can you hand me the graphs and pie charts and stuff? You printed them out, right?”

I froze in my seat. “Um.”

“It’s okay, just email them to the printer and—”

“I didn’t…” I bit my cheek as Samantha stared at me with terror in her eyes. “…I didn’t actually get around to making the graphs yet.”

I watched as Samantha’s eye’s widened. “You what?”

I got the same feeling I used to get when I would neglect my science homework as a kid to go and play baseball with my friends, day after day, until my grades plummeted. She was giving me that same disappointed and annoyed look that the teachers would give me as they cycled around my desk to see that once again, I could not produce a worksheet from my backpack.

Samantha shook her head and looked down. “You know, it amazes me sometimes that I’m the one who went bankrupt and not you.” She laughed incredulously. “I mean, do you get away with this stuff all the time? Because I certainly don’t. What, do you just charm your way out of these things?”

I stayed silent.

“I’ll take that as a yes, then,” Samantha said as I fumbled with my pen. There was no way to fight back on this one. She was clearly right and I was wrong. Her accusation was not too far from the truth, either.

“Well don’t just sit there,” Samantha said. “We’ve got five days’ worth of work to do in one. Get started on the charts!”

I smiled at her in defeat. “Yes, boss.” She rolled her eyes and continued working.

The tension in the room was palpable as I compiled the data from the Torver Group and Wordsworth in a series of graphs, a series of neat pie charts and tables that showed the details of our earnings for the year. I could feel it when Samantha looked over at me, and every time I glanced up towards her I felt like she would feel it and accuse me of something. The air in the room was thicker than usual. It was full of unspoken arguments and the leftover bitterness of the shouted ones, of the spoils and wounds of our wars and all the greed and pain that lingered with them.

We had worked out a system where I would compile our data into graphs and email them to Samantha, and she would write the accompanying report, being the better writer out of the two of us. It wasn’t the hardest work, but there was a hell of a lot of it, and by the time lunch break came around, the monotony of the work combined with the unflinching tension in the atmosphere made me feel as exhausted as I usually did at five o’clock.

“…It’s noon,” I said, nervously looking up towards Samantha, who had the posture of a duchess and the focus of a general as she typed away.

“Mmhm.”

“It’s noon, Samantha. We should eat.”

“There’s no time to get anything,” she said. “We’ll deal.”

I rolled my eyes at her stubbornness. “Nonsense. I’ll have Sabryna call in a pizza. No time wasted, okay?”

Samantha nodded. “Very well.”

“What toppings do you like?”

“Anything.”

“You sure?”

“Yup,” Samantha said. “As long as it’s not anything weird like anchovies or something, I should be good.”

I stumbled out of the conference room and made my way over to Sabryna’s desk.

“Hey,” I said. “Can you order me an extra-large Hawaiian pizza?”

Sabryna stared at me. “Sure. You alright?”

I scoffed. “Why would I not be alright?”

“You look like you’ve been under police interrogation for five hours.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yeah, you do.” Sabryna shook her head. “When you’re stressed you start running your hands through your hair, and it gets all poofy like that, see?”

I peeked in the mirror. “We all have bad hair days.”

Sabryna smiled. “That Samantha Doyle is driving you insane, and it barely even sounds like you’re talking in there.”

I saw myself blush in the mirror and quickly turned around. “Just get the pizza, okay?”

“Okay…”

I quickly walked back to the conference room, where Samantha was still working diligently. “Pizza order is in,” I said, wishing she would at least look up and acknowledge me for a second. “We still have another five hours of this crap to finish, so we may as well get some fuel in us, right?”

“I suppose,” Samantha said. “Email me the last pie chart you did.”

I sent it and squirmed in my chair uncomfortably. Five hours. That was a long time. Three movies. A football game and a half. A school day, not counting lunch. And those things all sounded a hell of a lot easier than whatever this was.

Samantha looked hot today, as much as I hated to admit it. She wore a tight black pencil skirt with matching black pantyhose, set off with a slightly unbuttoned white blouse and dark beige heels. Her dark hair was gathered behind her head with a topaz hair clip that matched her earrings. I was surprised that I noticed that her lipstick was slightly different today as well. It was a slightly darker shade…her usual dark pink was now bordering on seductress red.

God, maybe I was more attracted to her than I thought.

I spent the next twenty minutes training my eyes to look only at my screen, and not towards Samantha. The strange thing was, even when my eyes weren’t looking at her, somehow it still felt like I was, and worst of all, that she could sense it. I looked fiercely at the screen until the spreadsheets of numbers blurred before my eyes.

I jumped at a knock at the door.

“Pizza,” Sabryna said unexcitedly, dropping the box in the middle of the table.

“That was fast,” I noted.

“Not really,” Sabryna said. “Twenty minutes seems kind of like a slow delivery speed for being smack in the middle of the city.”

I shrugged and opened the box, picking up a slice of pizza and depositing it on a paper plate.

Samantha’s eyes narrowed. “That pizza isn’t all Hawaiian, is it?”

I froze and looked at her skeptically. “…Yeah?”

“God, Johnathan, you like Hawaiian pizza? Out of all the pizzas you could have ordered, out of all the vegetable and meat combinations the world has to offer, you decide the best course of action is to put ham and pineapple together on a pizza?”

I quickly chewed the food in my mouth so I could answer. “Um…yeah.”

Samantha put her head in her hands. “Jesus,” she laughed. “Okay, I have never hated you as much as I do right now.”

I shrugged. “You said anything except anchovies.”

“I said nothing weird! That’s beyond weird! That’s an abomination!”

I chuckled. “I cannot believe you’re anti-Hawaiian pizza.”

“I’ll pick the pineapples off, it’s fine,” Samantha joked. I watched as she deposited the little yellow triangles into a napkin. “Now let’s get back to work, okay?”

I smiled and cracked my laptop back open, starting on my second slice as I worked. The pizza and our brief conversation had ruined the comfortable silence we had maintained for a while, and now it was broken once again. Opportunities to speak hung tantalizingly in the air around us. I hated how conscious I was of Samantha’s presence as I worked. I could barely focus, and she wasn’t even doing anything remotely interesting. I noticed the way she crossed and re-crossed her legs, the starts and stops of her typing, the way she would stroke the side of her neck when she paused to think. I noticed myself pulling at my hair again. Just one afternoon and the report would be in, and I could sit down in front of my wide-screen and relax.

When two o’clock hit, I excused myself to get my afternoon coffee and went out to the break room, where Kirk tended to get his coffee at around the same time. Sure enough, he was standing in the corner of the room browsing the selection of Keurig cups.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” Kirk replied. “You check the latest report? It’s up to twelve inches now.”

“Jesus,” I said, ripping open a sugar packet. “I totally forgot about the blizzard.”

Kirk grinned. “Who wouldn’t, being stuck in a room with Samantha Doyle all day?”

“Shut up,” I said, punching his arm playfully. “Anyway, I was going to ask, can you look over the report really quick before we send it in? I’d like a fresh pair of eyes to read over it first. I’m already feeling pretty braindead.”

“No problem,” Kirk said. “Have a good rest of the day with your girlfriend.” He winked and I rolled my eyes, and shocked myself a little bit when I noticed I was smiling.

The afternoon drudged on. I felt an even greater sense of panic when I realized I would have to figure out how to deal with everyone’s work for the next week if we ended up having to close the office due to the snow. There was still an incredible amount of work to do before we had to leave the office, and we were honestly pushing it a bit. The tension de-escalated a little bit as I acclimated to it, and I stopped being so paranoid about Samantha noticing me when I looked over.

“Okay,” Samantha said, looking up at the wall clock. “Now we’ve got about four hours of work to do in two. I don’t know how exactly we’re going to manage this.”

I shrugged. “Maybe if you had gotten all those good vitamins and nutrients from those pineapples you picked off you’d have more energy,” I joked.

Samantha met my eyes and laughed. “Maybe you’re right.”

The next two hours were a blur of furiously typing numbers into spreadsheets and Samantha mumbling under her breath as she read over her sentences. We were both in a state of hyper-focused energy, the kind of academic fight or flight you get during a final examination. When I emailed the last file to Samantha, I exhaled and threw my fist in the air.

“Yes!” I said, high-fiving Samantha. “Finally.” I took a deep breath and tried to shake myself out of work mode and relax now that the period of panic had passed over. “You write that last bit, I’m going to call Kirk in to look over everything.”

“You got it,” Samantha said, and I was relieved to see that she looked happy.

I brought Kirk in, and tried not to notice the grin on his face as he walked in…once again, he was far too giddy about the awkward situation I had been placed in than he was about checking over our report.

“Lemme see,” Kirk said. “Give me your laptop.”

I handed it over and drummed my fingers on the arm of my chair impatiently. I amused myself by thinking about all the television I would have the opportunity to catch up on when I got home. And the food. So many options…Game of Thrones and curry? Black Mirror and an ice cream sundae? What the hell, I deserved it. Oh, and also, I could—

“Um, guys…” Kirk said nervously.

“Yeah?” Samantha and I said simultaneously.

“Er…” Kirk grimaced awkwardly. “Johnathan, you might want to check what spreadsheet of data you were making those graphs from.”

I grabbed the laptop. “The what?” I could already feel myself panicking as I opened the document on the screen.

“No!” I yelled, slamming my hand on the table. “Are you kidding me? We’ve been working on this all day! Shit!”

Samantha looked at Kirk. “I’m sorry, what happened?”

Kirk sighed. “Johnathan was using the data from two years ago instead of last year.”

Samantha groaned. “You’re kidding, right?”

I held my head in my hands and tried not to freak out. “I’m afraid so.”

For some reason, my mind was hardly considering how to fix the problem. At the moment, all I could think about was how much Samantha would probably hate me for making her do all that work for nothing.

However, she seemed surprisingly calm. “It’s snowing,” Samantha said, taking a second to stare dreamily out the window.

“Crap,” said Kirk. “What now?”

I tried my best to regain focus, and then remembered how important my leadership was to my company in moments like this. “Kirk, go home. Tell everyone to get home and drive safe. Tell them to bring any important papers in case we have to work from home tomorrow. I’ll email everyone with an update soon.”

Kirk looked at me with concern. “Are you guys sure you’re okay?”

“No,” I said. “But it’s fine.”

Kirk smiled at me kindly and then shut the door.

“Fuck,” I said, burying my head in my elbows. “We’re completely fucked.”

Samantha sighed and kicked off her heels. “So, what do we do?”

I chuckled. “After all this, you’re asking me what to do? After I messed up that bad? How are you not completely furious with me right now, Samantha?”

She shook her head and laughed. “I’m far too exhausted to be furious.”

“True…” I said, and a long silence followed as the snow outside turned heavier.

“We can do this,” Samantha said confidently. “We just need a thorough plan.”

“Okay,” I said, fully ready to roll up into a ball and let her do all the work.

“Well I guess,” Samantha said. “We take all this home and stay up late working and emailing back and forth. To be honest, there isn’t much difference in the data between the two years, so a lot of my written portion of the reports can be recycled. And I can use my extra time to make new graphs. If we budget our time correctly, we could be done before midnight.”

“Impressive,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “Now let’s hope it works.”

Twenty minutes later, we were all packed up and ready to go on our way. It would be a grueling evening ahead, but once we had the report in, all the work will have been worth it.

“Have a safe drive, Samantha,” I said as cheerily as I could as I locked up. “And again, I’m sorry about my mistake. I really do owe you.”

She smiled and sighed. “It’s okay. What’s done is done.”

We smiled at each other for a small moment, and it was probably the warmest smile that had ever been shared between us. It was a magically brief bit of friendship because, in that moment, we had shared a whole day’s worth of well…total and utter disaster.

And that was when the lights flickered out.

Samantha turned to me with a look of horror on her face and suddenly began pacing around the office in nervous, frantic circles, holding her head in one of her hands.

“Look, Johnathan, let’s think this through, maybe—”

“Those files are on the computer, Samantha!” I raged. “All the writing you already did on the report is on the computer. All the data! Everything!” I crumpled up a brochure that was lying on the table and threw it at the table. After everything that had already happened today, this? This?!

Samantha just stared at me, waiting for me to calm down.

“You know,” I said, walking up to her slowly. “If there’s any time for you to yell at me, this is it. If I had done all this earlier, all this…” I threw myself down in a chair. “…I wouldn’t have gotten you stuck in this mess.” I stared at her with a hint of confusion. “By the way, why aren’t you mad?”

Samantha laughed in the kind of uproarious way that only shows itself when life has gotten truly apocalyptic. “It won’t accomplish anything anymore, I suppose,” she said in defeat. “I figure my best shot for the company is to keep the peace.”

“Well,” I said, bending a staple I had found on the table frustratingly with my fingers. “I certainly can’t argue with that.”

Samantha stared out the window at the falling snow. “So what now?”

“We stay.”

“We what?”

I felt my frown morph into the grin of a madman as I revealed my plan. “You can do what you want, Sam, but the only offline copies of the data we need are in this office, and that’s the only way we have a chance to get the report in, and that’s if the power’s back on by morning. I’m staying.”

“It’s going to snow ten inches!” Samantha exclaimed.

“Twelve,” I corrected with a smile. “And if you truly do want what’s best for Wordsworth, and your employees that you supposedly care so much about, then I suggest you get ready for a long night.”

Samantha stood her ground for a moment and watched me carefully, and eyed me up and down as if trying to decode my thoughts. She slipped her beige heels back on her feet and walked up to face me, her head held high.

“Very well,” she said with that regal smile of hers. “Let’s do this.”

 

***

Within twenty minutes, Samantha and I had both downed some energy drinks Cassidy had in the fridge that probably contained an illegal amount of caffeine, and were rolling open endless file cabinets trying to locate the data sheets that just hours earlier we had accessed with just a few clicks of a mouse.

“You know,” I said, sucking on a fresh paper cut. “I don’t know why it never occurred to me to ask Sabryna how her filing system works. Would have come in handy,” I said, shutting another drawer with a rolling thud.

Samantha smiled at me sympathetically. The office looked otherworldly. I had left the blinds up so we could watch the progress of the snow through the windows. Samantha and I had dug through the office to find anything that lit up, so a motley assortment of right-side-up flashlights and candles of all shapes and sizes gave the room a warm glow. It had a very romantic feel to it, like an old Italian restaurant.

Oh, crap.

After we had collected all of the files that were pertinent to the report from their various hiding places around the office, we opened them up and organized them on the large conference room table, which was looking more chaotic than it ever had in the lifespan of our digital age company. Samantha and I were both filled with the artificial frenetic energy only pure will and caffeine can get you, and our hands shivered with it as we stacked and passed papers around the table, and the soft glow of the flashlights made it seem as if our task had an even more extreme importance.

“This reminds me of college,” I said, copying down some data. “I can’t remember the last time I planned to pull an all-nighter to finish a project on time.”

Samantha laughed. “Not me. I had all my papers done two days ahead of time.”

“I bet you had a 4.0 GPA too.”

“Maybe,” she smiled.

“So, you never pulled any good pranks? Went to any good parties?” I joked. “I suppose you were always back in your dorm asleep by ten p.m.”

“I did blackmail the head of the math department once.”

I stopped writing. “You what?”

Samantha smirked. “Let’s just say he was behaving very inappropriately towards one of my friends, I threatened to tell the dean, and then I just happened to mention how it would be really, really awesome if she got the department’s most prestigious internship.”

I scoffed. “Figures.”

“What do you mean, ‘figures’?” Samantha laughed.

“I mean, you have the opportunity to blackmail some pervert who you probably could have gotten a couple hundred bucks out of, and you ask for an internship? And not even for yourself?” I exclaimed.

“She was probably going to get it anyway, I just wanted to secure her spot,” Samantha said matter-of-factly.

“Never mind,” I joked. “You’re just as lame as you were before.”

“Haha.”

“I’m kidding,” I said. “You’re a good friend, and clearly a badass.”

Samantha smiled, clicked her pen, and kept writing.

The work went faster than I would have expected it to. We had spent so much time earlier that day doing nearly the exact same thing, just with the aid of computers and a different set of numbers. Samantha and I talked as we worked to suppress our anxiety and boredom, and I liked listening to her stories and seeing her eyes light up with interest as I told mine. The exhaustion and chaos of the day had loosened Samantha up—her stories had a different quality to them now. They ranged from silly to self-deprecating, and I loved every word of them. She talked about her elementary school T-ball team and the cartoons she never missed as a kid, or all the times she had to pick up her drunk sister from parties. She told me her favorite crayon color and the cocktail she liked to order only when she was sad. I worked along, happy to see her opening up so beautifully, and I shared my stories in return. After the hell we had been through that day, we had silently both agreed that there was no going back: we were friends now, whether either of us liked it or not.

The clock ticked along as we worked, the metronome that kept our stories in rhythm, and we worked until our hands cramped up and our brains fogged. But as the minutes passed, a thought kept sneaking through my mind, unannounced:

You know, this really isn’t half bad…

 

***

“There!” Samantha said, shrieking with joyful laughter. “That’s about all we can do without power.”

I grinned, filled with the kind of joy you only feel after such a condensed period of stress. “I cannot believe we pulled that off.”

“Eh, not quite yet,” Samantha said. “Hopefully if the power’s back tomorrow we can get all the reports typed up and get the graphs all digitized and nice looking…” she kicked her heels across the room triumphantly. “We can just use the format of the one we messed up earlier. It shouldn’t take more than an hour, and then we’re gold.”

“Oh, thank god,” I groaned, and spun my chair around in circles in a way the CEO is probably never supposed to do. “Hold on,” I said, getting up and running into my office. I rummaged through my desk drawers until I found it: my emergency stash.

I returned with a sneaky grin on my face and walked up to Samantha in her chair, who was already looking at me with suspicion. “Whiskey?” I said, smirking at her with delight.

“Jesus, I should have known,” Samantha said, grabbing the bottle from me and taking a swig. “You were definitely the handsome guy in high school who talked everyone into all their bad ideas.”

I smiled. “Maybe.”

Samantha handed me the bottle back and I took a large drink myself. The office was another world tonight, a different place. It was dark and glowing with a different energy that followed different laws. It would have been a strange sight to our employees to see their bosses so friendly and so relaxed. The two of us spun in office chairs in the middle of the room, laughing. Laughing because the grand scheme of our negotiations didn’t matter today. We were both thrown onto the same sinking ship, so for now staying afloat was all that mattered.

There was a lingering question in the air that neither of us dared to speak aloud just yet…what now? Last time I checked, the snow had piled up as much as had been predicted, and the whole city had gone dark. Samantha and I both lived in hill-covered suburbs outside the city, so getting home would be a dangerous affair for either of us. We could be stuck here for days…and I took another sip of whiskey each time the reality dawned on me again.

Samantha was deep into a story about a time one of her friends walked into the wrong apartment, and I felt bad about it, but under the haze of the whiskey I could barely concentrate. I just stared at her talking. I liked the way her eyes lit up and how she laughed melodiously at all the funny parts. I didn’t even realize until the whiskey started to run through my veins just how much I had tried to resist this…how much I had taken any hint of a feeling I had started to develop and crushed it under my foot before I could recognize it.

There was a possibility I was falling for her.

Okay, okay. I think I was.

I knew I was.

“So, by then,” Samantha continued, and I jumped to a start as I woke up out of my haze. “Rosie had sat down on the couch and noticed that there was this really advanced math textbook on the table, and she knew that Jared was completely inept at that sort of thing, so she—”

“Samantha.”

She looked up, her cheeks warm and flush from the whiskey, and stared at me, waiting for me to say something. I hadn’t planned on saying anything, I realized. I just had an urge to say her name aloud.

“Yes?” she asked, and I nearly lost my breath as she took the topaz clip out of her hair and I watched dark brown waves cascade over her shoulder.

“Let’s dance,” I said impulsively.

Samantha burst out laughing. “How drunk are you, Johnathan? Besides, there’s no music anyways.”

“Never fear!” I said, mocking the voice of a cartoon superhero, as I stumbled out of my chair and ran into Sabryna’s supply closet. “Battery radio,” I said grinning, holding up the clunky box like a trophy.

“Aren’t you clever,” Samantha said sarcastically, with a wry smile lighting up her face. Even as I fumbled with the controls and tried to find a radio station that wasn’t exclusively snow coverage or polka, she looked completely unconvinced that I would ever actually get around to taking her hand and getting her to join me. She simply spun around in lazy circles in the office chair, her head hanging back from the whiskey, the exhaustion, or perhaps pure amusement at my battle with the radio.

I finally found a station that came in clearly enough, and an old ballad played, filled with the sultry melancholy of trombones and the gentle, scratching softness of songs that have only survived through old records.

“Come on,” I said, swaggering up to her chair with a mischievous smile on my face. “I dare you.” I held out my hand to her, waiting with a nervous lump in my throat as she simply stared at it, contemplating.

Samantha smirked and put her hand in mine, and I pulled her out of the chair and suddenly into my arms.

“Scared?” I asked, giving her a teasing smile.

“Never,” she said, putting her arms around my neck.

“Good,” I said, looking down for a second and blushing. “Because I might be, just a bit.”

“That’s okay,” Samantha said, and when she smiled at me I lowered my hands to her waist, trying not to go insane with the feeling of her curves under my hands. Samantha caught her breath and stepped closer. “New things will do that to you,” she whispered.

We swayed back in forth in a slow rhythm, circling from the center of the room to the large window, where the streetlamps illuminated the snow-covered world outside. We maintained steady eye contact, but it was different from the times we had looked into each other’s eyes before…this time there was no search for weaknesses, no predatory wait for the perfect moment to strike an attack…we held each other’s gazes softly, sweetly, as if we were seeing each other for the first time.

“This feels like another world…” Samantha whispered to me as we danced next to the window, and I understood exactly what she meant. The city was completely deserted and the office was empty, as if we were the only two people left in Seattle. This place, this strange, snow-covered, lamplit paradise we had entered had different rules. I could dance with Samantha Doyle on the edge of midnight next to the copy machine and somehow it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

The spell broke when Samantha let out an awkward yawn just as the third song started to play. “You know, Johnathan,” she said, yawning again. “This is nice, but it’s been such a long day. I’m kind of exhausted.”

“Me too,” I said, and bit my lip awkwardly when I remembered we were pretty much trapped here.

“Is there anywhere here I can sleep?” Samantha asked, and I thought carefully. Despite the office being state of the art in terms of technology, the minimalist, feng shui approved design didn’t leave many options for napping. At an office like ours, there wasn’t usually time.

“Oh!” I said, walking out towards the reception area to the huge white leather couch that sat in the corner. “It has a pull-out bed, if I remember correctly.”

Samantha and I removed the cushions, and sure enough, we were able to pull out a bed with a thin, bent-up mattress. We took a couple of blankets from a storage closet and the pillows from the chairs in the reception area and arranged them neatly. It would have to do.

“Where are you going to sleep?” Samantha asked as she got under the covers. She was going to bed in her work clothes, but I guess she didn’t really have another option right now.

“There’s another couch like this in Cassidy’s office,” I lied. “I’m going to turn in myself.”

“Okay,” Samantha said, yawning. “Goodnight Johnathan. Thanks for the dance.”

“Anytime,” I said, and we smiled at each other in a way that made it hard to leave.

Shit. I didn’t have anywhere to sleep. But it’s not like I could just invite myself into bed with Samantha. I wandered through the different offices until I found my best option, a couch in Kirk’s office. It was too short for me to lie down all the way, so I laid down with my feet out on a chair. I figured I was so tired that I could sleep on the floor and be out in an instant.

I was wrong.

It turned out that even after a horrific day of stress and hard work, no one is immune to the effects of really powerful energy drinks. Including me. Despite my exhaustion earlier, I kept tossing and turning on the hard, creaky springs of the couch, obsessively going over everything that had happened with Samantha. The whiskey had worn off, and now things were starting to come into perspective. We had danced. We had flirted. And it was good too.

I flipped the too-firm pillow from the reception area over and sighed. I wondered how long I would have to sleep on this stupid couch and live off of people’s leftovers from the break room fridge.

“Liar,” came a voice from behind me.

“Ah, hello,” I said, rolling over to see Samantha, her skirt wrinkled and her hair in slightly frizzled, tousled waves, standing over me with a grin.

“This doesn’t look like a pull-out bed in Kirk’s office to me.”

“Yeah, well,” I coughed. “He must have moved it out.”

Samantha smiled at me knowingly. “Come share with me.”

My eyes widened and my heart began to race the second the words left her mouth.

“Oh, calm down,” Samantha said. “It’s nothing scandalous. That bed is probably queen sized, and we can put some pillows between us.”

“Um,” was all I managed to get out when Samantha grabbed my arm to pull me off the couch and into the other room.

“Here,” she said, creating a border down the center of the bed with some of the smaller pillows and grabbing some extra blankets. “You’re all set.”

Samantha smiled up at me and I’m smiled back at her as innocuously as I could muster. Oh, shit, I was going to have to share a bed with Samantha, and oh god, there were about a million ways this could go terribly wrong.

“Hopefully we can both get some rest after drinking those weird energy drinks Cassidy got from Norway, or wherever,” Samantha said, as we both cautiously got under the covers on our respective sides of the bed. “I can still feel it in my system, you know?”

“Yup,” I said. “Goodnight, Samantha.”

“Night.”

Oh, God. Here we go.

With the exception of the emergency security lights, that were now dimming, we were in total darkness. However, I could still see Samantha’s outline under the covers. Even across the barrier of pillows, I could feel the heat radiating from her and smell the jasmine and vanilla scent of her shampoo. Up close, and with nothing else to think about but her in the dark, I was starting to go crazy.

Samantha possibly had started to drift off, and occasionally made a sort of light, breathy, yawn that bordered on erotic, and I had to focus to keep myself from getting too aroused. I rolled away from her and sighed. I hated this feeling, this anxiety that someone could be around me and all of a sudden, I could lose control of myself…my feelings, my body, my power. Samantha was the first person I had met in a long time who had challenged my authority, and I realized maybe that’s why I couldn’t stand her so much when I first met her.

I sat up on the side of the bed and held my head in my hands and groaned. Shit, how was I going to sleep in this bed for the rest of the night without losing my mind? I was about to go back to the other couch when…

“Are you awake, Johnathan?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, lying back down next to her. “Just those energy drinks, I guess.”

“Me too,” Samantha complained. “It’s like your body is exhausted but your mind is awake. It’s a weird feeling.”

“Weird indeed,” I added, and a long silence followed.

“Johnathan,” Samantha said, bringing her face up close to mine. “It’s important to me that you know that I don’t hate you. I could never hate you, okay?”

“I’m glad,” I said, and my words tumbled on out before I could think. “Because I really like you, Sam, you know that?”

Samantha smiled at me, her eyes still bright and lovely even in the near dark of the office, and she raised her hand to my cheek, stroking my face slowly as she looked into my eyes.

“I thought you liked Amy,” she said, laughing a bit.

“Amy?” I said, laughing. “Your assistant, that Amy? I mean, she’s certainly not bad looking, but…” I swept one of my hands through Samantha’s hair and cradled the back of her head. “But no one quite infuriates me like you, Samantha.”

“And,” Samantha said with a breathy gasp. “I assume infuriates is a good thing.”

I suddenly pinned Samantha down on the mattress and looked in her eyes. “Oh, darling, you have no idea.”

I kissed her ravenously, sighing at the feel of her plush lips moving against mine, and only then did I really understand how much I wanted her, how much I wanted this. Samantha responded enthusiastically, running her long fingers through my hair and tugging me closer to her. With that one kiss all of our walls came crumbling down, the dam that we had built with our fights and petty arguments could no longer sustain the desire we had both denied for so long, the frantic need we had for each other that had always slowly bubbled underneath the surface. I ran my hands across her body, I couldn’t get enough of her, I would never be able to pull her close enough. Samantha got to work on the buttons of my white work shirt, discarding it on the office floor with a flick of her hand.

Samantha sighed as I ran a hand up her leg. “I can’t believe we’re…” she traced her fingers across the golden expanse of my chest. “I can’t believe I’m…after everything.”

“Do you still want to?” I asked.

“Oh god, Johnathan,” she said, pushing herself back up and crawling into my lap. “Yes.”

As we kissed, I reached up under Samantha’s skirt and tore her pantyhose off, ripping them on the way down.

“Oops,” I said with a smirk, holding the ripped pair up for her to see and then tossing them behind me. Samantha barely seemed to notice and pulled me down to her again.

We kissed each other with the kind of aggressive enthusiasm only two people who had once been bitter rivals could conjure up. I found the zipper on the back of Samantha’s black pencil skirt and slid it off her legs to find a practical, but still ridiculously sexy, pair of dark red lace panties underneath. We continued to slowly strip each other down until Samantha was left in her mismatched lingerie, her red panties and black bra, and I was left with just my gray silk boxers. We kept kissing each other madly, and neither of us could resist flipping each other over from time to time in our endless war for dominance, the war that had covertly followed us into the bedroom.

Suddenly Samantha pulled me up, and I smiled eagerly as she dragged me out of bed and into the conference room where we had labored the early part of the day away.

“What are you doing?” I laughed, still shaky with breath from her kisses.

Samantha ran one of her neatly manicured hands over the tent in my boxers and backed herself onto the mahogany conference room table. She laid herself down slowly, spreading herself across the middle of the table, and I knew what she wanted.

“It’s…always been a fantasy of mine…” Samantha explained, the dark wood highlighting all the curves of her porcelain skin.

“The doing it on a table, or the me doing you on a table?”

Samantha shook her head and giggled. “This always comes back to your ego, Torver, I swear.”

I crawled onto the table and leaned over her, looking into her eyes with a cocky smirk. “Tell me.”

She pulled me down to kiss me. “Fine, yes.”

I shook my head in disbelief, still laughing. “You loathed me, Sam, and you fantasized about this? The whole time you hated me you’d spend hours fantasizing about me fucking you on the conference room table?”

“Hours? Please, Johnathan, don’t flatter yourself,” Samantha scoffed.

“You sure?” I whispered, raising an eyebrow.

Samantha ran a hand down my chest. “If you’re so confident about this, why don’t you just get on with it then?”

I slipped her panties off and flung them away. “Fine,” I said, smirking at her and kissing the inside of her neck. “We’ll see how long you fantasize about this when I’m finished.”

Samantha let out a desperate moan as I entered her, and I gasped as I began to move inside her. I covered her hand with mine, roughly pinning it against the cold wood of the table. After all these days of fighting and feuding and flirting at this very table, finally she was really mine, and I was hers.

If you had told me on the day I met Samantha Doyle, not all that long ago, that I would eventually fall for her, that I would let her into my mind, let her drive me insane with need for her, I would have never believed it. But here I was. Here I was with this very same woman, making love to her, tangling my fingers in her dark hair and running my hands over her breasts, listening to her sigh underneath me.

Just when I felt like I was starting to come close, Samantha flipped me over and got on top of me. I groaned as she rode me harder, and then faster. The sight of her moving over me, her body illuminated by the candlelight and throwing all sorts of scandalous shadows across the wall, was a sight I wasn’t going to forget anytime soon.

I brought my fingers down to Samantha and she moaned, still riding me with a vengeance. I felt her coming undone around me and I gasped at the sensation, throwing my head back until all I could see was the falling snow from out the window.

“I’m getting close,” I said, pleading her to continue.

“Hm…” Samantha said, running her hands across my stomach. “I’ve gotten all I need from you.” She smiled mischievously. “I could just stop here.”

I sat up in a single motion and pinned Samantha down underneath me. “I don’t think so,” I said, and she grinned.

I buried my face in her neck and kept moving inside her until I finished with a groan of pleasure. Samantha sighed as I rolled off her, and we spent what felt like an eternity staring up at the ceiling in joyous disbelief.