We Met on a Thursday, It Ended on a Monday

We met on a Thursday because Thursdays are for people who don’t really have weekends, or at least for people who like to pretend they still do, clinging to the idea that one more drink after work somehow separates the week from whatever comes next.

She suggested a drink near the office, practical and efficient, and I suggested somewhere with late seating, just in case, which we both accepted without comment, as though this were a normal way to frame the start of something rather than the first quiet concession to lives already overfilled.

She worked in law, M&A but from the other side of the table, and we established that almost immediately, the way people in the City do, not out of genuine curiosity but out of necessity, because once you know what someone does you can roughly calculate how tired they are, how distracted they’ll be and how much emotional space they’re realistically going to have left.

We bonded quickly over shared exhaustion and a mutual contempt for our inboxes, finding comfort in the fact that neither of us needed explanations or apologies for checking our phones too often, because there is something deeply seductive about being understood without having to translate your life.

We drank more than we planned to, laughed louder than the room required and swapped horror stories like war veterans comparing scars, recounting all-nighters, unreasonable clients and the particular absurdities of people who earn too much money and still feel permanently on edge. The stories were bleak, but the tone was light, because humour is the only socially acceptable way to talk about despair.

Missed calls buzzed and were ignored, briefly and rebelliously, phones turned face down in a gesture that felt symbolic even though neither of us really believed it meant anything.

At 10:30pm, neither of us had checked our phones.

By 10:45pm, both of us had.

There was nothing urgent, nothing demanding an immediate response, just the usual low-grade anxiety humming beneath everything, the reminder that this time wasn’t really ours and that whatever we were doing existed on borrowed hours.

We ordered another drink anyway.

Going back to her place felt easy and familiar, like slipping into a routine we already knew by heart despite having only met a few hours earlier, clothes discarded without ceremony, half-jokes about alarm clocks and early starts, unspoken agreements not to ask questions that might make things heavier than they needed to be.

There were no declarations and no conversations about intentions, because those are luxuries reserved for people with space, and this wasn’t about planning so much as proximity, about enjoying the fact that for a brief window neither of us had anywhere else we were supposed to be.

Friday was a write-off in the way that only Fridays can be when you decide not to care too much. We both cancelled meetings we absolutely shouldn’t have cancelled, doing it casually and without drama, ordered takeaway to her desk and pretended it was indulgence rather than avoidance, telling each other we deserved this while quietly knowing how rarely that sentiment ever lasts.

We talked around important things rather than about them, touching on families, cities we might live in one day, jobs we complained about but were secretly proud of, and people we used to be before ambition hardened into something that felt less negotiable.

By Saturday afternoon, the bubble had started to thin.By Sunday evening, reality crept back in properly.

She checked her phone more often. I caught myself glancing at mine, not because anything was happening but because something always might, and we sat on opposite ends of the sofa with laptops open, half-watching a series neither of us cared about, the kind you choose precisely because it doesn’t ask for attention.

The silence between us wasn’t awkward. It was tired, and tired in a way that conversation doesn’t really fix.

We still touched occasionally, a foot resting against a calf, a hand briefly on a knee, small gestures that said this is still nice while quietly acknowledging that nice was probably all this was ever going to be.

On Monday morning I left early. She had a call. I had a meeting. We kissed goodbye like people who already knew how this would end but didn’t want to be the first to articulate it.

At 3:17pm, she texted to say that she thought we both knew this wasn’t really going anywhere, and I stared at the message longer than I needed to because she was right and because there was a strange comfort in how cleanly it had been said.

It wasn’t that we didn’t like each other, or that the weekend hadn’t been good, or even that either of us had done anything wrong. It was that neither of us had the emotional bandwidth to build something real, and we were running on fumes, mistaking intensity for connection and proximity for intimacy.

We’d confused shared exhaustion for compatibility.

In another life, with fewer deals and more space, maybe it could have been something, but in this one it was just another almost-relationship, filed away between pitch decks and calendar invites.

I replied with what felt like the appropriate amount of maturity, said I understood and wished her well, and then went back to work, oddly relieved, another loose end tied up and another emotional risk quietly avoided.

Thursdays continued to exist.

So did Mondays.

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