I’m Harry Styles, early thirties, tamed just enough to look respectable on a board slide. My father and I own 'Styles & Wren', the City’s most brutal and successful law firm. I don’t swing an axe; I sign papers, smooth egos, and win. The villa in Hampstead is quiet and expensive, and for five years Nara and I have moved through it like well-dressed ghosts. Then you buy the place next door. Nara brings you round with a cake and a laugh and that light cardigan she thinks is charming. You listen, kind, careful with your questions, and when you smile I feel heat behind my ribs like a cigarette sparked in a back stairwell. You start jogging the Heath at dawn. I bring the bins out early just to say “Morning.” It’s ridiculous.

Nara adores you. She pulls you for coffee, yoga, charity things that smell of roses and obligation. I like that you humor her. I hate that I like it. At dinners, you sit opposite and I invent reasons to pour your wine, steadying the bottle because my hand wants to shake. When your knee brushes mine beneath the table, conversation turns to static. I go home with my wife and stare at the ceiling.

It happens when I finally stop pretending I don’t want it. I text you: “Drop by the office. Lunch hour.” The lift doors shut, and you’re inside my world of glass and walnut and London spread under us like a map I own. My office smells of leather and good ink. Paige, my assistant, clocks you with those sharp eyes. “Client?” she asks. “Private,” I say, and she lifts a brow like a warning. The door clicks, and it’s just us and the city. I tell myself not to kiss you. I kiss you anyway. It’s clumsy first, then certain, and I back into the desk I once used to negotiate a billion-pound merger. You slide into my space without words—never much for them, just quick breath, soft sounds—and the want roars through me. I keep it careful, controlled, careful enough that if Paige knocks I can compose, but it’s a thin thread. When you finally lean your forehead to mine I feel stupidly victorious and horribly young.

After, I straighten my tie. You smooth your hair and touch the corner of my mouth with your thumb. I laugh. “I’m a disaster.” You check the door, that polite flash of mischief, and the laugh dies in my throat. Paige brings in documents like a magistrate. Her gaze lands on you, then on the calendar where a neat block says “Strategy.” She knows. Of course she knows. “Shall I… protect your afternoons more discreetly?” she asks. “Yes,” I say, and she leaves a silence that feels like judgment.

The affair grows like ivy—fast, quiet, impossible to ignore. You visit the office and we burn an hour that should belong to share prices and depositions. I begin to resent the days you spend with Nara, which is vile of me because she’s good and steady and has done nothing wrong. She invites you in so often the sound of your laugh carries over the hedge, and I think, sick with it, that she is unknowingly delivering you to my door. Guilt isn’t what I expect. It doesn’t arrive like police sirens; it thrums like a bassline under everything. I bring Nara peonies. Then you pass me on the pavement with a paper bag from the bakery and a shy look, and the fraud is the only version of me that feels honest. Today I’m short-tempered in the boardroom. My phone lights with a calendar note: “Coffee with Nara ☕.” I hate how it makes me want to drag you out of her kitchen by the wrist. By noon I’ve given up pretending to be better. I tell Paige, “Hold my calls,” and you’re in my office before the lift dings.

“I can’t think when you’re near,” I say, hands braced on the desk because I want you on it again like a man who’s forgotten his own name. You step between my knees. Your fingers skim my shirt buttons like you’re counting to calm me down. “You drive me mad,” I whisper, and I mean it as a compliment and an accusation. “Tell me to stop and I will,” I say. “Tell me to leave her and I will.”