Hot Desking

A Sapphic Rivals-to-Lovers Workplace Romance

by Blair Lennox

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Tropes You’ll Love

Rivals to Lovers
Grumpy / Sunshine
Forced Proximity
Locked In Overnight
Only One Bed
Workplace Romance
Secret Relationship
Ice Queen Melts
She Falls First / She Falls Harder
Grovel

She filed a noise complaint about me. Then we got locked in together for the night.

Jordan Kai has one plant, one pen, and one rule: no chaos within ten feet of her desk.

I am the chaos.

I’m Pia Moretti — freelance designer, three monitors, zero volume control — and the ice queen at Desk 14 has hated me since the day I said good morning too loudly. She thinks designers make “pretty pictures.” I think she’d be gorgeous if she ever unclenched.

Then the biggest client in the building hires us both. Four weeks, one campaign, and only one of us walks away with the contract.

Then an ice storm hits on deadline night, the smart locks crash, and it’s just the two of us on the sixth floor until morning.

Then she finds my sketchbook. The private one. The one with her in it.

By sunrise I know exactly what Jordan Kai sounds like when she loses control — and that she plans to pretend it never happened.

New rule: after hours only. No one finds out. Work comes first.

We’re going to break every word of it.

Hot Desking is a high-heat sapphic workplace romance with rivals to lovers, grumpy/sunshine, one very long night, glass walls, a grovel, and a guaranteed HEA. No cheating. Extremely open-door.

✓ What to Expect

🔥 Heat Level: 5/5 — Extremely open-door
💕 Pairing: F/F (sapphic)
💋 Both leads are out and experienced — no bi-awakening arc
😂 Banter-heavy — the argument never stops, even during sex
💖 Guaranteed HEA
🚫 No cheating

Content Warning

This novel contains explicit F/F sexual content, strong language, and workplace conflict. It is intended for readers 18+.

Read Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE — PIA

The good light at the Switchyard lives at exactly one hot desk, and I am nine minutes late for it.

Nine minutes is nothing. Nine minutes is a rounding error. But the pod by the freight windows on the sixth floor is the only spot in this whole renovated rail depot where the morning comes in sideways and warm instead of straight down from the eleven thousand Edison bulbs management installed to let us know we’re creative, and there’s a UX guy named Preston who has been eyeing it for a month.

So I take the stairs.

“Pia. Pia. It’s February.” Sam is behind the front desk with a mug that says WORK, UNLOCKED. in the building’s insufferable font, which they hate more than I do. They point at my drink. “That has ice in it.”

“It’s a lifestyle.”

“It’s twenty-one degrees.”

“I run hot. Morning, Theo. Morning, Biscuit.”

Theo waves from Desk 9 without looking up. Biscuit—a corgi who’s technically not supposed to be here and has never once been asked to leave—thumps her tail against the leg of his chair. I say hi to the twins from the podcast startup, to Marguerite who does something with grant compliance and always has cough drops, to the two guys from the crypto thing who I think might just be one guy. Sam calls me the mayor. Sam also calls me a hazard, so I don’t let it go to my head.

I round the brick pillar into the pod and the desk is empty. Sideways light. Warm floor. Mine.

And across from it, at Desk 14, is Jordan Kai.

She’s already there, because she’s always already there. She probably slept here. She probably doesn’t sleep; she probably plugs into the wall. Black trousers, white shirt with the sleeves rolled twice—exactly twice, I’ve counted, it’s a whole thing—grey cardigan draped over the back of her chair like it’s waiting for a cue. Headphones on. One plant. One pen. One woman typing with the serene focus of a nun transcribing scripture, if the scripture were headlines for a regional credit union.

Her hair is black and cut blunt at the collarbone, and she tucks the left side behind her ear when she’s thinking, and I know this because I have spent an unreasonable amount of the last five weeks watching her think.

She does not look up.

I set down my coffee, my bag, my laptop, my second laptop, my tablet, and the rolling cart I keep in the storage closet under a sticky note that says PIA’S DO NOT and start building the cockpit. Three monitors. Cable management I will describe as “aspirationa.” A ceramic hand I use to hold my rings. Sam once told me my setup looks like I’m trying to land a plane, and honestly, some days.

Jordan’s eyes flick up. Once. Down.

Good morning to you too.

Here’s what happened five weeks ago, so you understand the situation.

I was pitching a boutique gym in the Rail District—small job, cute job, the kind I could’ve knocked out in ten days and used to pay two of the three invoices currently sitting in my inbox like unexploded ordnance. I went to the kitchen to refill my water, and Jordan Kai was in there on a call, one hip against the counter, and I heard her say, in that voice like a scalpel that went to private school:

“No, I need a designer. Not someone who makes pretty pictures.”

The gym went with a designer she recommended. A guy named Colin. Colin uses drop shadows like he’s paid per shadow.

I have never mentioned it. I have never said one word about it to her, because I am chill, I am fun, I am the mayor of the sixth floor, and the mayor doesn’t start fights. The mayor just says good morning a little louder than she needs to and takes her client calls at her desk with the speaker on.

Which. Speaking of.

My phone buzzes. Marguerite’s cousin’s bakery. I’ve been trying to land it for two weeks. I tap the green button and set the phone face-up on the desk.

“Hi! Yes, it’s Pia. No, you’re not bothering me at all—”

The headphones come off.

It’s an entire choreography. Jordan Kai removes one earbud, then the other, sets them down parallel to her pen, folds her hands on the desk, and looks at me the way you’d look at a raccoon that has gotten into your kitchen and is now making eye contact.

I hold up a finger. One sec.

“—yes, absolutely, I’d love to send over some—”

“There are phone booths.” Her voice is not loud. It doesn’t have to be. “They have doors. It’s the whole concept.”

I smile at her. Wide. Gap-toothed and weaponized. “Can I call you back in five? Great. Great. Talk soon.”

I end the call. Eleven seconds. I checked.

“Morning, Jordan.”

“Pia.”

“Sleep okay?”

“I have a call in four minutes.”

“In a booth?”

“In a booth.”

“With a door.”

She puts the earbuds back in. It’s a dismissal so polite it should come with a receipt.

Here is the problem, and I’m going to be honest about it because it’s just us: I would like to hate her. Hating her would be so easy and so clean. She’s a snob, she thinks I make pretty pictures, she has recommended Colin.

But she has these forearms.

And she does this thing when she edits where she mouths the words. Silently. Reading her own copy back for rhythm, lips barely moving, and it is the single most distracting thing that has ever happened in a shared office space, and I include the time the crypto guys brought in a smoke machine.

I open Figma. I do not look at her mouth.

At 10:15, Sam appears at the pillar looking like they’re delivering a subpoena.

“So. This isn’t from me.”

They hold up a laminated sign. It’s already got the adhesive strips on the back. It says, in a font that I will go to my grave calling Papyrus-adjacent:

QUIET ZONE
PLEASE TAKE CALLS IN BOOTHS

“Sam.”

“Someone submitted a form.”

“Someone.”

“The form is anonymous. It’s a very anonymous form. I built it that way so people could report the guy who microwaves fish.” Sam presses the sign to the brick at eye level and smooths it down with the flat of their hand, apologetic and thorough. “I’m just the messenger.”

“Kill the messenger.”

“Can’t. I’m the only one who knows the wifi password.”

Across the pod, Jordan Kai has not stopped typing. She has not looked up. There is nothing on her face at all.

Except she read the sign. I watched her eyes do it, left to right, twice, and I watched her upper lip do something microscopic—the same thing my sister does when someone puts the fork on the wrong side of the plate. She hates the font too. She hates the font so much. She just hates my speakerphone more.

“Nice sign,” I say, across the pod.

“I didn’t make it.”

“But you ordered it.”

“I have no idea what you’re referring to.”

“It’s Papyrus.”

The typing stops. For one full second. “It’s not Papyrus. It’s—” She catches herself. Starts again. “I have no opinion about the font.”

“You have an opinion about the font.”

“Noted.”

Noted. That’s the word she uses. I’ve heard her say it to clients, to Sam, to the guy who microwaves fish. Noted. It’s what you say when you’ve decided something matters and refuse to admit it.

Sam looks between us and backs slowly out of the pod like a person leaving a room with a bear in it.

Lunch is a granola bar over the sink, because the alternative is opening my email, and my email has a message in it with the subject line Invoice #0113 — following up (again!!) that I sent to a boutique hotel chain eleven days ago. I know it’s there. I can feel it, the way you can feel a spider in a room.

I open it anyway. I’m an adult.

Nothing from the hotel. A cheerful automated reminder from my bank about a “potential low balance.” A newsletter I don’t remember signing up for about mindful invoicing. And, at the very top, an all-member email from Sam with the subject LATCH IS LIVE — Please Read!!! (seriously).

Nobody reads all-member emails. It’s a law of nature. I skim: something about the new smart-access system, app-based keys, firmware update schedule, your fob will stop working on March 1st, the elevator will be tied to the app, blah blah, a GIF of a cat opening a door. I archive it. I’ll download the app when my fob stops working, which is what everyone will do, and Sam knows it.

I pull a sticky note off the pad and do the math again, the way you press on a bruise.

Rent. Minus the invoice that hasn’t come. Plus the two that might. Minus the software subscriptions I keep meaning to cancel. The number at the bottom is a number I’d describe as fine, in the same tone I’d use to describe a haircut I was going to grow out.

Eighteen months ago I walked out of Whitlock Creative with a cardboard box and a speech about my future that I’d rehearsed in the shower. Four years I’d given that place. Four years and one hospital rebrand—my hospital rebrand, my system, my type, my color story that I built from the actual light in the actual atrium of the actual pediatric wing—and Dana Whitlock stood in front of a room of executives and said we and our and I and never once said Pia.

In my exit interview, she told me designers at my level are replaceable.

She said it kindly. That was the worst part. Like she was doing me a favor. Like she was telling me the truth about the weather.

So now I’m Moretti Studio. The website says studio. The studio is a hot desk with good light and a rolling cart I have to fight a UX guy for.

I stick the note to the bottom of my center monitor and go back to the bakery’s logo, and I make the bread look so warm you could put your face in it.

Around three, the pod goes quiet the way it does when everyone’s hit the slump at once, and I do what I do in the dead half hour. I pull the black Moleskine out of my bag and open it in my lap and let my hand go.

I’ve always drawn people. Before I could design anything, I drew the women at my mother’s church, the guys at my brothers’ games, strangers on the bus. It’s not a hobby. It’s closer to a nervous habit—my hand needs to be doing something, and if it’s not making a logo it’ll make a face. The front of the book is work: roughs, type explorations, grids. The back of the book is people. Sam. Theo and Biscuit. Marguerite, precise and tired. The twins as one two-headed creature, which they’d love.

I’m not thinking about anything. I’m listening to the click of a keyboard across the pod. I look down.

It’s a forearm.

Sleeve rolled twice, the fold sharp enough to cut. The tendon that stands up on the back of the hand when it holds a pen. The thin silver ring on the right hand—I’ve got that too, I’ve got the exact width of it. The pen itself, held the way she holds it, too far down, almost at the nib, like she’s suspicious of the whole tool.

I know this forearm. I’ve drawn it before. I’ve drawn it—I flip back, don’t count, flip forward, close the book—I’ve drawn it enough that the pages know where it goes.

It’s fine. It’s a study. Artists do studies. Da Vinci drew a thousand hands and nobody thought he wanted to be pinned against a—

I close the sketchbook hard enough that Theo looks over.

“You good?”

“Great. Paper cut.”

Across the pod, Jordan Kai tucks her hair behind her ear and mouths a sentence to herself, and I look at the wall.

By five the light’s gone sideways and gold and the floor is emptying—the crypto guy(s), Marguerite with her cough drops, the twins who leave in perfect unison, Preston with a look at my desk that says tomorrow. Theo’s packing up Biscuit’s water bowl. The Edison bulbs are doing their best.

Jordan stands. Cardigan on, headphones around her neck, laptop into a bag that looks like it cost more than my rent, which, today, is not a high bar. She waters the plant. She waters it on Mondays, at end of day, with a small glass from the kitchen, and I should not know that.

She passes the pillar. She looks at the sign. Her upper lip does the thing.

“It’s not Papyrus,” she says, to no one, and keeps walking.

“Sure,” I say, to my monitor.

She stops. Turns. The gold light hits her from the side, catches on her jaw, and for one second she looks like something I’d pay to draw, and then she opens her mouth and ruins it.

“You’ll want to stop taking speaker calls at that desk.”

“Will I.”

“It’s a shared space.”

“It’s a shared space where I’ve been for a year and a half and you’ve been for eight months.”

“I’ve been here two years.”

“You’ve been here two years in the nook.” I point at her dedicated office, the little glass-doored cube in the corner with the blinds she keeps at half-mast. “You only started sitting out here in the pod in June. So I’ve been at this desk longer than you. Squatter’s rights.”

“Adverse possession.”

“What?”

“The legal term. It’s adverse possession, not squatter’s rights.”

“You’re correcting my idiom.”

“I’m correcting your law.”

I lean back. My chair squeaks. I let it. “Why did you start sitting out here, actually? You have an office. It has a door. It’s the whole concept.”

It’s a fair question. It’s an obvious question. It’s not a hard question. But Jordan Kai looks at me for a beat too long, like I’ve asked her something in a language she used to speak, and then her face closes like a laptop.

“The light’s better,” she says.

And walks out.

The good light is at my desk. Everyone knows that. Preston knows that.

I watch her go and I don’t know what to do with the fact that she just lied to me, badly, about something that doesn’t matter.

I should leave. I stay.

Partly because the bakery logo isn’t done, and partly because the bakery logo is almost done and I’m at the stage where I can’t stop, and partly—this is the honest part—because there’s a wall on the other side of the pod where Sam pins the members’ board, and something new goes up there most nights, and I’m the mayor. I like to know.

At 6:40 the pod is mine. The building creaks. Somewhere on the floor the heat kicks on and the vents breathe out a smell like dust and pennies. I get the bread looking so soft you’d bruise it.

At 6:52 my laptop chimes. The Switchyard members’ board pushes new posts to the app, and I have the app because I’m the mayor and Sam threatened me.

New listing: TANDEM — Brand Lead (Contract).

I know Tandem. Everyone in the building knows Tandem. Devika Rao and Imani Brooks, married, both wearing the same brand of sneaker in different colors, who took the big glass suite on the east side eight months ago and have been steadily hiring since. Their app is—I pull it up because I’m nosy—a “shared-life platform.” Calendars, bills, chores, the stuff that makes couples fight. Tandem: Life, together. Their current logo is two circles that don’t quite touch. It looks like a bra.

I read the post.

Seeking a brand lead for a full identity and voice rebrand ahead of our seed raise. Twelve-month retainer. Investor Day is April 24. We want someone who’ll argue with us. Pitches Thursday, 2 PM, the Fishbowl. Members only.

Twelve-month retainer.

I read it again.

Twelve-month retainer.

That’s rent for a year. That’s the invoice I’m chasing not mattering. That’s Moretti Studio being a real thing with a real name on a real case study, not a hot desk and a rolling cart and a sticky note on the bottom of my monitor doing math.

That’s mine. I know it’s mine the way I knew the bread needed more warmth. It’s the kind of job I’ve been circling for eighteen months, and it’s on my floor, in my building, for two women who eat lunch at the same communal table I do, and I’ve already been thinking about how to fix that bra logo for a month.

I’m already sketching. I’m already sketching in my head: two shapes, overlapping, making a third shape in the middle that’s neither—

I look up.

Across the pod, in the dark, Desk 14 is lit by one laptop screen, and Jordan Kai is sitting in front of it.

I didn’t hear her come back. I didn’t hear the door, or the elevator, or her shoes. She’s just there, cardigan off, sleeves rolled, hair tucked behind one ear. Her face is blue-lit and absolutely still, and her eyes are moving left to right across the exact same post on the exact same board.

She reads it twice. I watch her do it.

Then she looks up. Right at me. And for a second there’s nothing on her face at all—no snob, no ice, no noted—just a person who wants something, looking at the other person who wants it.

“Members only,” she says.

“I read.”

“Thursday.”

“I read that too.”

She closes her laptop. The pod goes dark except for my three monitors and a bakery logo that looks, if I say so, like something worth paying for.

“Wear something quiet,” she says, and gets up, and is gone.

I sit there in the good light with my heart going like I’ve been running, and I open the sketchbook to the front—the work half, the half that’s allowed—and I start.