In 2019, I started a job as a junior editor for an online city guide in Melbourne. I was struck by the social media coordinator, Steph, who worked quietly and diligently in a corner of the office, but had a surname that was at odds with her vibe. She was Vigilante by name, but not by nature.
Our shared Italian heritage was an instant bonding agent. We had chemistry, sure, but it was purely platonic. Even when lockdown put a pin in all things in real life, work’s instant messaging app helped our friendship survive working from home. I’d write stories about the city; Steph would cleverly bring them to life on social media. The synergy was real.
As restrictions eased, we began spending more time together. But I was oblivious to how things were snowballing.
I sent her cacio e pepe tortellini when she had Covid. I invited her to a restaurant I was reviewing and we lingered long after dessert, glassy-eyed, swapping stories about our nonnos, who we’d both just lost. I felt indistinguishable pangs as she dated others in our orbit. I called her a “pal” and ignored the palpitations.
But one night as the heavens opened, so too did my emotional floodgates.
While our co-workers thinned at after-work knock-offs, a torrential rainstorm incoming, I agreed to tag along to Steph’s friend’s birthday at a riverside bar that lacked weatherproofing.
I knew no one except her, but her friends brought me so far into the fold, I hadn’t noticed when she disappeared. Plonked in the worst seat possible, rain trickling directly off an umbrella down my back and soddening my fish kebab, I thought: I’m still here – why?
One per cent more attuned to my feelings, I went looking for Steph in a crowd that was now as wet as it was wild. In the thick of it, I found her. Her usually straightened hair had reverted to its natural form in the deluge – a beautiful tangle of curly unruliness that I’d never seen before. Her burliest friend, the birthday boy, was towering over her, gently shaking her shoulders and yelling over the DJ: “Just do it!”
Do what? Me? Surely not. Unless …
That was the first time I had any inkling she might see me as anything other than a friend. I spent a whole week so fixated on what I’d overheard, it overshadowed my realisation that I might feel the same.
There was something about Steph: so endearingly sweet and softly spoken, but always armed with a razor-sharp aside; an all-out-Italian upbringing so like mine, we could’ve grown up together; and a gentleness that seeped out as she let her guard down.
A week later, our workplace had organised a boozy scavenger hunt. After scouring Melbourne’s inner north, we clocked off at a rooftop bar where, surrounded by our colleagues as their most raucous selves, I found the courage (mostly liquid) to ask Steph: “Do what?”
Heart thumping, I brushed my knee against hers under the table. We both froze. Then she pressed hers into mine. And with one glance, the dots connected themselves. It was cinematic: what you imagine when someone says – perhaps with rolled eyes – that “sparks flew”. Uncinematic: our first kiss later that night, against a dive bar’s scungy bench.
That was four years ago. And now the woman I sat in the rain for sits across from me at our kitchen table, in the house we share, where a card stuck on the fridge reads, “From one pal to another”, immortalising her inability to say how she felt and mine to even realise.
We don’t work together any more, but the foundation we laid while collaborating on silly little Instagram posts is what we’re building a life upon.
I was cautious about dating a colleague who was also a friend. There’s often no going back in either situation, so it felt doubly loaded. But can you really ruin a friendship if it was never just a friendship to begin with?
The risk versus reward has been off the charts. It’s one thing to think you know what love is – but it’s another to be so undeniably entwined in it that you wonder why there was ever a question mark.
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