AFTER HOURS – EPISODE 4 – THE SLIP
The Monday after was merciless.
The kiss—quiet but devastating—lingered on Olivia’s lips as if it had happened minutes ago instead of days. Every idle moment replayed it against her will. The soft pull. The tentative hunger. Jasper’s breath mingling with hers in the hush of the parking garage. It haunted her mercilessly. Not simply because it had happened, but because she couldn’t decide if she regretted it. The memory followed her everywhere — clinging, invasive. When brushing her teeth. When folding laundry. When reaching across the bed where Aaron slept, inches away, yet worlds apart, breathing slowly and unaware.
She couldn’t look at her husband without guilt curling sharp and immediate behind her ribs. Aaron remained as he always was: gentle, predictable, safe. He poured her coffee that morning with a smile that did not touch his eyes, then disappeared behind his laptop in a haze of muted domesticity. Their routine wrapped her like a wool blanket in summer — familiar, smothering, unbearable in its ordinariness. She sipped quietly, tasting bitterness that had nothing to do with the coffee. Everything about her life felt too quiet now. Too clean. Too untouched by the wild thing that had bloomed between her and Jasper when lips met lips and restraint had shattered.
At work, normalcy became theater. She wore it like expensive perfume — designed to project, to mask, to veil the truth in something pleasing and faintly false. Polished. Proper. Professional. She joked with Maya, commented on the weather in emails, and nodded in meetings, but beneath the surface, every nerve thrummed raw. She knew Jasper would be there. She dreaded and craved it in equal measure, caught in the masochistic thrill of seeing him and pretending nothing had shifted while everything had.
And he was. There, at his desk, as though nothing monumental had occurred between them. As though their mouths had not collided in hungry confession two nights before. His head was down, hair mussed, sleeves rolled. Focused. Unbothered. Effortlessly himself. It infuriated and relieved her all at once. The coolness of his posture was a necessary cruelty, a salve she hadn’t asked for but needed desperately. Still, it stung. Still, it taunted her.
“Morning,” Olivia said, her voice taut and brittle as she passed his desk, forcing herself to sound casual.
Jasper looked up slowly, his eyes warm — too warm — locking with hers like he could read the ruin beneath her crisp blouse and tight smile. “Morning, Liv.”
Liv.
He said it softly, intimately. Not Olivia, not Ms. Keller — Liv. It vibrated through her like a forbidden touch, like a lyric from a song you can’t shake, even when you beg your mind to let go. She felt it land low in her stomach, where her restraint lived and died in chaotic cycles. Where longing tangled with fear.
The day stretched, unbearably civil. Emails. Client calls. Shared meetings. Every glance a gamble. Every brush of shoulders in narrow hallways loaded with unsaid words. They pretended, exquisitely, to be nothing more than colleagues. But each shared glance carried subtext heavy enough to buckle knees. By mid-afternoon, even Maya seemed to notice Olivia’s distracted haze.
“Earth to Olivia,” Maya teased gently over lunch, breaking Olivia’s trance as she stared at the condensation trailing down her untouched glass. Olivia laughed — too fast, too forced — and murmured about lack of sleep. No one asked more. No one could.
When the sun dipped low, bleeding gold across their emptying office, the air changed. The city outside hushed itself, lights flickering on across windows like silent voyeurs to what came after hours. Olivia lingered longer than necessary, as did he. Again.
She was organizing presentation files, hands clumsy with exhaustion and expectation, when Jasper approached quietly from behind. His voice, low and close, prickled every inch of her skin.
“You missed this,” he said, offering a stray document.
Her fingers grazed his as she took it — an accident that wasn’t. The touch was fleeting but lethal. A silent detonation. Skin met skin for a heartbeat too long.
Olivia turned too fast, and in doing so, her hip collided softly with his. The contact startled them both, closer now than either expected. Their bodies aligned by pure chance and yet… neither stepped back. The space shrank between them until breathing became a negotiation.
It held.
That nearness.
Her apology came automatically. “Sorry,” she whispered, though she made no move to create distance. Her apology was hollow, born more from habit than desire.
“Don’t be.” Jasper’s voice was velvet-wrapped gravel. His eyes flicked down, lingering where her lips parted. “I liked it.”
Something fragile cracked then — not loudly, but enough to break rules that once felt ironclad. Olivia’s breath stuttered. She should have walked away. She didn’t.
Her hand found his forearm, light but unmistakable. Jasper’s mouth twitched faintly, as though reining himself in became suddenly impossible. He shifted imperceptibly closer, and Olivia mirrored him like a flower leaning toward the sun.
“Olivia,” he murmured, her name falling between them like a plea and a warning. It wasn’t just a name anymore. It was invocation.
She didn’t pull away. Instead, her thumb grazed his skin, slow and reverent. It was such a small slip — innocent to any outsider — but they both knew. This wasn’t accidental anymore. This was want, thinly veiled and rapidly unraveling.
Jasper’s knuckles brushed along her side, testing her boundaries, daring her. She shivered, breath hitching in betrayal of her restraint. Her pulse thrummed violently, a siren song only he could hear. She tilted closer, tension stretching between them like a string threatening to snap.
Their eyes met — locked — tangled in the unsaid. The room contracted, folding inward until it was only them, and the dizzying edge they stood upon. Inches apart, dangerously close to tipping into something they could never undo.
For one long, suspended moment, Olivia thought they might. Jasper’s lips parted slightly, as if tasting the invitation that hung between them. Her breath tangled with his. Her heart beat loud enough to drown out every warning.
But then footsteps echoed from the hallway — Maya’s voice, cheerful and oblivious, breaking the fragile hypnosis. Reality slammed back like a door kicked open.
Olivia jerked back, heat rushing to her cheeks. Jasper straightened, running a hand through his hair as if shaking off whatever almost happened. The spell fractured, but not cleanly. Threads of it clung, whispering promises for later.
“I should… finish up,” she mumbled, retreating hastily, needing distance like oxygen, her legs unsteady as she stumbled toward normalcy.
Jasper didn’t argue. He only watched, eyes stormy and unspoken as she fled back to her desk, where safe distance and shallow breaths awaited her. But even from across the room, Olivia could feel him — that steady, dangerous gravity that didn’t ease just because she was no longer within reach.
But that slip — that impossible, electric slip — had already happened.
And they both knew.
The line wasn’t blurred anymore.
It was broken.