Forbidden Sparks

Holland

The first thing I registered was pressure behind my eyes, the kind that makes everything feel woolly and distant, like someone’s clouded your world with a thumb. I forced my lids open and found I wasn’t at the rental desk like I had just been moments before. The chaise beneath me was black leather, cool and strangely unfamiliar, and an end table sat within easy reach, a glass of water sweating beads onto the lacquer. The room smelled like cedar and old paper—expensive, deliberate.

A voice answered the small confusion in my chest before I could ask a single question. “The water is for you. How are you feeling?”

It was husky, even softer than the rumor of Remy’s voice from the lobby. The sound bunched my nerves like a fist. Panic flared quick and hot, a heat behind the sternum: where the hell was I?

I pushed myself up slowly, hands bracing on the chaise. The office spread before me in shades of dark wood and soft light. Books lined a shelf, neat as a captain’s log. A heavy desk anchored the room and behind it, Remy sat, leaning back in his chair like he was carved to fit it. He wore half-languid amusement as if my fainting had been an entertaining interruption in his day.

“I— I’m fine,” I blurted, head spinning as I tried to get my bearings. My voice came out small and suspiciously tremored. I felt ridiculous suddenly—like an actress who’d missed her cue.

He tilted his head and a sly grin softened his face. “You passed out and I picked you up off the floor. I’m sorry again about knocking you to the ground yesterday.” His apology was smooth, practiced. “I shouldn’t have barreled through that door like a bull.”

“How did I make it up here?” I asked, the question tumbling out before the heat could settle. My mouth tasted like pennies.

Remy shrugged as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. “I brought you. I thought you should rest in a quieter place until you woke.” He ran big hands across his short-cropped hair, and for a second the gesture made him look boyish instead of dangerous. He didn’t have much hair—just cropped light red that caught the office light—but it suited him, gave him an edge.

“Oh.” I blinked, trying to pin the moment to something sensible. “Thank you,” I murmured, embarrassed by how grateful I felt for something as simple as a glass of water.

Cameron’s voice—a thin thread from my memory—came back then: never go upstairs. Don’t flirt with the owner. There’d been a warning wrapped in a joke. And yet here I was, in the forbidden wings, sitting in the man’s office who Cameron had implied was to be avoided on pain of job loss. The contradiction tugged at me.

Remy watched me with eyes that appraised like a mapmaker. Crystal blue—clear, cold, and the sort of shade that reads as an emotion more than a color. “Cameron told me you're doing well,” he said. “Holland Williams, right?”

“Yes. I’m Holland.” My lips shaped the name like a talisman. “Nice to meet you, Mr.—”

“Please, call me Remy.” He flashed an easy smile and, for everything Cameron had said about a temper, the smile was disarming.

He asked a few of the standard questions—where I’d come from, what job I’d held before—but his tone threaded curiosity with something else: a hunger that was almost tender. I gave him safe answers. I’d learned in the last life not to give out the whole ledger in a single sitting. He didn’t need to know the drawer, the knife, the nights I counted ceiling shadows until dawn. He didn’t need the messy parts. “I moved here from a small town south of here,” I said. “I worked at a rental company before.”

Remy nodded. “And long-term goals?”

I surprised myself by answering without thinking. “HR,” I said. “Eventually. It’ll take time but it’s what I want.”

“That’s a solid plan.” He inclined his head in approval. For a moment he looked like a man who spent his time watching people bloom or wither depending on the water they were given. He sounded sincere, and something in me warmed at the attention. Not the cheap, leering kind but the deep, attentive kind that listens to sentences you didn’t realize you’d said aloud.

The office rewarded my eyes with easy things to look at—a few tasteful sculptures, a heavy globe, and a painting that made the room hold its breath. It was a wolf, rendered in oils, stepping through a fog-damp forest. The brushwork was fierce, the eyes of the wolf luminous with an inner light. I caught myself staring until Remy’s voice threaded through the moment like a seam.

He asked what had happened—before I’d blacked out. The truth was that I didn't know. I do know I was working on the computer but then nothing after that. I didn't want to sound like a crazy person. “I was in the lobby. I must have hit my head.”

“If you like, you can use the office phone in here to call home if you want to get a ride since you passed out again,” he offered. “Or I can walk you down myself to get your phone.”

“No, I—” I began, flustered, the idea of facing any more people right then translating into nausea. “I can walk down. I’m fine.”

For a heartbeat, his eyes darkened. A shadow rolled across his features, and the crystal blue deepened into a stormier shade. “You don’t have a husband, then? A boyfriend who waits for you at home?” The question landed soft but sharp.

“No,” I said quickly, then laughed because my throat was thick. “No husband. No boyfriend. Didn’t you hear? I’m newly single.”

His face didn’t relax. If anything, the muscles around his jaw tightened. “I see,” he said, the single syllable a kind of measuring. “About the sensation you felt yesterday, the sparks—do you want me to explain it?”

I blinked. My skin prickled with memory. The touch on the small of my back in the lobby had been more than contact—it had been a live wire straight to my center. “You felt it?” I heard myself ask, stupid and hopeful and terrified of what the answer might be.

Remy’s expression split into something that I couldn’t classify. There was humor, embarrassment, and an odd vulnerability that made my mouth go dry. “Yes,” he said softly. “I did.”

The words crashed in my chest. For a full second the ridiculousness of the situation—the new hire and the boss and the forbidden office—seemed like a joke. Then Remy leaned forward, fingers steepled, and the charm shifted into something earnest. “Holland… I don’t say this often, and I know how this will sound, but I think… we might be soulmates.”

My laugh came out like a bark. “Soulmates?” I repeated, because the obvious answer was to panic or to put the moment in the joke bin. “That’s— Remy, that’s a good one.”

There was a flash across his face—hurt so subtle I could have missed it if I wasn’t paying attention—and for a beat the room went a few degrees colder. He laughed with me but it was thin. The laugh didn’t reach his eyes. “Yeah,” he said, but without humor. “It wasn’t meant to be comedic.”

Something in the way he said it made my chest tighten. Soulmate was a loaded word. It was the kind of thing that made your chest hurt whether you believed in it or not. And there was no possible way to catalog him into a list of sensible things. The man in the lobby had been all punch and presence. The man in the office seemed softer. I was suddenly aware of another scar that creased his face—thin, pale, a line that made his jaw look like it had been mapped by decision. It made him look dangerous in a way that didn’t announce itself until you were close enough to see the fine threads of it.

We stood to leave at the same moment. The notion of staying longer in the office felt ludicrous—staying felt like accepting an invitation into a chapter I wasn’t ready to read. “It was nice talking to you, Remy,” I said, the words formal because everything else felt too fragile.

He walked me to the door and I misjudged a step. My left foot snagged an unseen edge and my balance pitched. Remy’s hand came out instinctively—fast, sure—and closed at my forearm. The palm of his hand covered skin that had been raw with adrenaline. The contact should have been simple, functional, an extension of courtesy. Instead the world folded into a live hum that threaded through my bones.

Electricity, again. Fire that wasn’t heat but pleasure, a thrilling ache that made my knees steady as if by command. I’d never felt anything like it before. The sensation was not only between us but in me, and it pushed a pressure behind my eyes so sweet that I nearly laughed and cried at the same time.

Remy’s grip tightened, not enough to hurt, but enough to ground me. He inhaled sharply and I could see color wash his face, the way someone looks when they’re carrying more than one truth in their chest. “You felt it,” I said, because for once I didn’t want to mince around it.

“You did, too,” he said, quiet and raw. “Good. Bad. I don’t know. But we felt the same thing.”

There was an urgency under his voice now that shifted the moment from charming to precarious. He released my arm and took a step back as if to give me space and to assert that boundaries, however thin, existed.

“Holland. We have to talk.” He looked towards the desk, eyes hardening like flint. “But not here. Not now. Come back in after work. Don’t tell Cameron about this. Don’t tell anyone. Understand?”

My mind tried to catalog the reasonable responses—no, I’d call HR, I’d refuse to be yanked into something I didn’t understand. That rational voice was a whisper layered over heat and a pulse I’d never managed to calm. “Why?” It came out softer than I wanted it to be.

“Because not everyone needs to know,” Remy said. “Some things here are delicate. You fainted. You were vulnerable. I don’t want you talked about. And…I’d rather show you than explain. Some things don’t translate on paper.”

He sounded like someone who’d been burned by translation before—someone who’d learned the hard lesson that language is often a poor vessel for certain truths. He was guarding something, or someone. The office seemed to contract around that guarding as if the walls were witness to a secret he didn’t want the building to gossip about.

I considered the power imbalance—the owner and the new hire, the forbidden staircase and Cameron’s warnings. I thought of Robbie and the drawer and the way men could twist kindness into knives. The moment trembled like a fragile truce.

“I’ll come back after work,” I said finally. The words felt foolish and brave at once. I wasn’t naïve. I’d been tricked into sticking around before. But something curious in me—call it stubbornness, call it a test—prompted me to say yes.

He nodded once, sharp. “Good. And Holland?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t be late.”

The rest of the day moved like something half-remembered. I went through motions—the register, the paperwork, the polite smiles to customers—but the world around me had a soundtrack now: a low, persistent hum that echoed the touch of his hand on my arm. When I closed up the counter that evening I felt both ridiculous and electric, like a person who’d learned a new word and was eager to try it out in sentences.

When I walked toward the stairwell, the banister looked different—less a rumor now, more a promise. The door at the top sat closed, seal of a room that had, for reasons I couldn’t yet understand, chosen to let me sleep on its couch. I ran fingers along the dusty railing and felt the faint impression of someone else’s past—prints worn into wood by hands who had come and gone.

Maybe I’d been foolish to agree. Maybe this was the worst idea I’d had since moving here. Or maybe, against all my better judgment and every scar that lined my stubborn heart, I was standing at the edge of something that would change the geography of my life.

As I took the first step, I told myself I was just curious. Curiosity is safer than desire. Curiosity is a tool. It allows you to observe rather than to leap. It allows you to keep both feet on the ground.

But the spark in my skin kept reminding me otherwise—an insistence that heat, once struck, rarely dies down quietly.