“Hey there, gumdrop, tell me you’re alive,” I said.
His eyes flickered open then narrowed, and he scrubbed a hand over his forehead. “Oh my fucking . . . What the . . . What the actual fuck just happened?”
His voice was surprisingly deep, a smooth strum of low bass chords.
It waslethal.
“Well,” I sang, glancing around. “I think we’re stuck in an elevator. And it’s going to be fine. Look, emergency lights. Yay for emergency lights!”
He shifted to a sitting position, effectively knocking my hand from his thigh, and rubbed his eyes.
He’d been thrown clear across the elevator car yet he looked as though he just walked out of a J. Crew catalog photo shoot. He was tastefully rumpled in his preppy gingham check shirt and fancy loafers, and I half expected him to announce it was time for a yachting competition or polo tournament or something.
But that shit did it for me. I wanted to eat him with a spoon while he gave me a couple more smoldery, scowly glares.
That’s right, honey. Tell me all about your purebred golden retrievers.
Static crackled from the intercom. “Hello? Anyone in there?”
“Hi, yeah, there are two of us—”
“Is this electrical or mechanical?” he asked, his palms pressed to his eyes.
“Power went out to the whole Back Bay,” the voice from the intercom replied. “Must’ve been the heat wave. Rescue team is on its way, and we’ll have you out of there in a jiff. Just, um, sit tight.”
The good news: we weren’t dead, and with any luck a firefighter would have to throw me over his shoulder and carry me to safety. Presuming this beautiful boy wasn’t interested in the task.
The bad news: I was sweating like a beast. Not dewy, glistening girl sweat, either. I was starting to look like a defensive tackle at training camp. It wasn’t until recently that I understood why my mother always had a handkerchief in her pocket; a lady had to keep herself tidy.
As much as I discarded my mother’s—and grandmothers’ and aunts’—commentary around all things lady-like, I couldn’t disagree with them on a few points. To start, perspiration management was critical.
The other point was hair. I came from a long line of women who started sprouting dark upper lip peach fuzz right around the time they turned thirty, and I was no exception to that curse.
If anything, I was an overachieving early sprouter.
It wasn’t even two weeks after my twenty-eighth birthday that I realized the shadow above my lip was a girlstache, and I’d been stemming the tide for the past year. As soon as I could afford laser hair removal, I was ditching the crème bleach and being done with that shit.
But the rest of it? The marrying a nice boy from the neighborhood, the house no more than three blocks from my parents’ place in Jersey, the job at my family’s restaurant? I was done with that shit, too.
I’d been done for a long time.
“Oh fuck,” he murmured, and his head fell back against the wall. He pressed his hand to his breastbone and I heard him counting under his breath.
“Yeah, I know. But this building is really good, I’m sure they’re—”
“No,” he grunted. He didn’t look so hot anymore—still yummy, unwaveringly yummy—but more and more wrecked. He lifted a shaking hand in the direction of his leather messenger bag. “Can you reach in the front pocket and grab the case? Please.”
I handed him the small kit, and when his fingers struggled to grip the zipper, I opened it for him. Syringes and vials of insulin sat in neatly ordered rows, and I glanced at him. Perhaps my excessive sweating wasn’t the only bad news. “This is for a pump, right?”
“It’s fine, just give it to me,” he snapped. His eyes fell shut and his chest heaved as his breath came in short, shallow pants.
I crawled closer, climbing astride his lap while patting each of his pockets. Even with his face flushed and the muscles under his rolled up shirtsleeves twitching in distress, he was gorgeous. So perfect and so vulnerable.
“Really, don’t touch it,” he gasped. “Please don’t. I can do it.”
That was nowhere near accurate. His words were broken, at once slurred and frantic, and he couldn’t align his fingers to snag the pump from my hand. My knowledge was limited, but the screen on his Walkman-sized device indicated his blood sugar was arcing high into dangerous territory, and we didn’t have time for this debate.
“Twelve years as a band camp counselor and I know everything there is to know about operating one of these,” I said. “Insulin pumps, inhalers, and EpiPens. I know them all. Can’t start a fire in the woods, at least not on purpose, but I can work these.”
