The Case for Us

The cityscape blurs into watercolor smears beyond the fortieth-floor windows—all those lives being lived while Kaia sits frozen at her desk, caught in the gravitational pull of James’s office light down the hall. (Like a moth to flame, except moths don’t spend months constructing elaborate justifications for their inevitably fatal attraction.)

Her cursor blinks in accusatory morse code: *you’re-not-work-ing, you’re-not-work-ing*. The Peterson brief sprawls across her screen, legal jargon swimming before her eyes—a perfect metaphor for her current state, all these carefully constructed arguments dissolving into want.

Time feels elastic after hours, stretching and compressing like a universe bending around a massive object. Which is what this thing between them has become: enormous, unavoidable, warping the space-time continuum of their meticulously maintained professionalism into something dangerous and electric.

She catches her reflection in the darkened window—cheeks flushed, pupils dilated—and catalogs the physiological responses like evidence in a case she’s building against her better judgment. *Exhibit A: elevated heart rate. Exhibit B: shallow breathing. Exhibit C: the way her skin feels too tight, like it’s trying to contain something infinite.*

The walk to his office is thirty-seven steps (she’s counted, repeatedly, obsessively). Tonight each one feels like crossing a threshold, like quantum particles collapsing from possibility into certainty.

He looks up when she appears—always up, never startled, like some part of him is perpetually aware of her proximity—and something molten pools in her chest at the sight: reading glasses sliding low, sleeves rolled with precise intention, the controlled chaos of papers spreading across his desk like the physical manifestation of her scattered thoughts.

“Kaia.” Her name in his mouth is a complete legal brief: argument, evidence, and conclusion all wrapped in two syllables.

“I was just...” The lie evaporates unfinished. They’re both too smart for pretense, too aware of the chess game they’ve been playing where every casual touch is a calculated move toward this moment.

He stands—fluid, deliberate—crossing the room in measured steps that somehow contain both restraint and hunger. “Were you?” His voice carries that familiar trace of amusement, the tone that simultaneously infuriates and intoxicates her. “Just what?”

(There should be a word for this—this exact point when years of legal training in constructing airtight arguments crumbles in the face of pure want.)

“Testing a theory,” she manages, pulse thundering in her ears like waves against a crumbling seawall.

“And what theory would that be?” He’s close enough now that she can see the faint stubble along his jaw, smell the lingering notes of coffee mingled with something uniquely him—a scent her lizard brain has cataloged as *dangerous* and *necessary* in equal measure.

Instead of answering, she rises on her toes (a motion she’s rehearsed in her mind so many times it feels like muscle memory) and presses her mouth to his.

The kiss reconstructs her understanding of time: there is before and there is this, and the demarcation between them is sharp enough to draw blood. His hands find her waist as hers tangle in his hair, and some distant part of her brain notes with satisfaction that it’s just as soft as she’d imagined.

They break apart breathing hard, foreheads touching, sharing the same electrically charged air. “We should—” he starts.

“Later,” she interrupts, surprising herself with the authority in her voice. “Some cases require less deliberation than others.”

His laugh is low and warm against her neck. “Counselor,” he murmurs, “I believe you’re leading the witness.”

“Object all you want,” she whispers back, fingers tracing the strong line of his jaw. “The evidence speaks for itself.”

When he kisses her again, it feels like winning a case she didn’t know she was arguing—like justice and mercy wrapped in the same breathless verdict. His hands map the geography of her spine as she presses closer, eliminating any remaining space between precedent and possibility.

“Take me home,” she breathes against his mouth—a motion to proceed that requires no deliberation.

He answers by lacing their fingers together, and they leave their half-finished briefs behind like abandoned closing arguments, stepping into a night that promises to rewrite every law they’ve ever known.

—

Monday arrives with all the subtlety of a summary judgment, harsh fluorescent lights replacing the forgiving darkness that had made everything seem possible seventy-two hours ago. Kaia’s been rehearsing this moment since she fled his apartment at 3 AM Saturday morning (not that she’s counting the hours, except she absolutely is, with the kind of precision usually reserved for billable minutes).

The elevator ride to the fortieth floor feels like watching opposing counsel destroy her star witness. Each ascending number ratchets her anxiety higher: *thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine—God, when did this building get so tall?* She’s arrived precisely twenty-three minutes earlier than usual, a tactical maneuver designed to minimize contact that instead leaves her feeling like a coward citing procedural technicalities.

(She’s analyzed Friday night with the same obsessive attention she typically reserves for depositions, rehashing every moment, every touch, every awkward fumble and miscommunication until the memories feel worn smooth as river stones. The way his hands had shaken. The way she’d gone cold and distant. The terrible, haunting silence afterward.)

The office is blessedly empty—or so she thinks until she rounds the corner and nearly collides with James emerging from the break room, coffee mug in hand. Time stretches like hot glass, then shatters: a study in the relativity of professional mortification.

They do an awkward dance of mutual avoidance, both stepping the same direction twice before freezing in place. His coffee sloshes dangerously close to the rim. She clutches her laptop bag like a shield.

“Kaia.” Her name in his mouth sounds different now—clinical, careful, like evidence being handled with latex gloves.

“James.” (When did his name become so difficult to pronounce? Four weeks of bar exam prep were easier than these two syllables.)

The silence that follows could be submitted as an amicus brief on the topic of human discomfort. She maps his appearance with unwanted precision: tie slightly askew (unusual for him), dark circles under his eyes (did he sleep as poorly as she did?), shoulders tense beneath his perfectly pressed shirt (the same shoulders she’d—*no, absolutely not going there*).

“I was just...” They both start simultaneously, then stop. A perfect demonstration of the legal principle of mutual embarrassment.

He clears his throat. “About Friday—”

“The Peterson brief is on your desk,” she interrupts, words tumbling out with the desperate energy of a client volunteering privileged information. “I finished it over the weekend. All the citations are updated, and I added a section on recent precedents that might—”

“Kaia.” Softer this time, almost pained.

“—be relevant to our argument, particularly regarding the statutory interpretation of—”

“*Kaia.*”

She forces herself to meet his eyes, immediately regrets it. Because there it is—everything they’re not talking about, laid out like evidence in a case neither of them knows how to try.

“We should probably...” He runs a hand through his hair (she knows exactly how that hair feels now, a piece of evidence she desperately needs stricken from the record).

“I have a client meeting,” she lies, already backing away. “We can... later. Maybe. If there’s anything... professional... to discuss.”

She retreats to her office with as much dignity as she can muster (which, if quantified, would barely fill a motion in limine). Through her open door, she watches him stand there for a long moment, coffee growing cold in his hand, before he turns toward his own office.

The day stretches ahead like an endless deposition, every hour a careful dance of strategic avoidance and professional necessity. She throws herself into research with the kind of manic energy usually reserved for pro bono cases, as if enough case law can build a wall between Friday night and Monday morning.

But every time footsteps pass her door, her heart executes a series of complex maneuvers that would violate several workplace safety regulations. Each distant phone ring triggers a fight-or-flight response worthy of academic study. The coffee maker’s gurgle sounds accusatory.

(She’s already drafted and deleted seventeen emails to him, each one an exercise in saying nothing while meaning everything. The eighteenth attempt sits in her drafts folder, cursor blinking: *"Regarding the matter of Friday night..."* Like their catastrophic attempt at intimacy can be reduced to a case number and filed away.)

When 5 PM finally arrives—the longest billable hours in legal history—she begins the delicate task of packing up without being noticed, each file and notebook lifted with trembling care. But as she reaches for her coat, a post-it note slides from between the files on her desk. Her breath catches at the familiar handwriting:

*Re: Friday night

Motion to continue discussion?

My office @ 5:30pm*

She stares at the yellow square for so long the words begin to blur, her pulse keeping time like a court reporter’s stenotype. Outside her office, the elevator chimes its end-of-day rhythm as the firm empties out. Soon it will be just them again, in the same after-hours quiet that started this whole mess.

The post-it crinkles as her fingers close around it. Some cases, she realizes, require a second hearing.