The Lightning in His Eyes

The office was dead quiet at 2 AM, the kind of silence that made you feel like the last person on earth. Maya rubbed her temples, feeling like a zombie moving through the motions of another deadline. The quarterly report wasn't going to write itself, and neither was the resignation letter she'd been drafting in her head for six months.

Then she saw it: a flash of lightning through the floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating Richard's office. He was still there too.

Richard. The man who'd made her life both unbearable and intoxicating for the past two years. The office gossip called him a bull—stubborn, aggressive, impossible to reason with. They didn't see what Maya saw: the way his hands shook sometimes when he thought no one was watching. The way he'd stayed late every night since his divorce, as if the fluorescent lights were the only company he could tolerate.

She knocked on his door frame. He looked up, eyes red-rimmed.

"You're still here," he said, voice rough.

"So are you."

Another flash of lightning, closer this time. The storm had been building all evening, much like the thing between them—all electricity and potential damage, dangerous and inevitable.

"I'm done, Richard," she said. "Not just tonight. With this. With us dancing around whatever this is."

He stood up slowly. "You're the best thing about this place, Maya. The only thing that doesn't feel like walking death."

"Then do something about it."

The bull himself, brought to his knees. He crossed the space between them in two strides, and when he kissed her, it was everything she'd imagined and nothing she'd expected—gentle, desperate, like a drowning man finding air.

Outside, the sky tore open with lightning so bright it turned everything white. For the first time in years, Maya didn't feel like a zombie at all. She felt terrifyingly, wonderfully alive.