I pull out my phone and see a notification. “There’s a power outage,” I groan. “Looks like a truck hit a transformer or something.”
A voice crackles over the intercom. “Is someone in the elevator?”
“Lana, you have to get us out,” Kyler says, his voice a few octaves higher than before and cracking.
Great. He’s definitely in panic mode.
“I’m working on it, Kyler. Are you alone in there?”
“No, I’m with my date,” he says, his breath coming in heavy huffs like he’s a wolf about to blow down the three little pigs’ houses. “We’re going to run out of air.”
“No, you’re not. You’re just freaking out. I’m getting you out as soon as I can. Ky’s date, please help him stay calm until we get the doors open.”
The man I’d been considering letting take me to bed starts pacing the small space. I try to give him the benefit of the doubt. We all have things we’re terrified of. Maybe his is enclosed spaces.
“Why don’t we just talk?”
I sit on the floor, but he doesn’t join me. Instead, he continues in a circle. “About what?”
“Anything.”
“I’m claustrophobic.”
No kidding. “You don’t say.”
Letting out a long breath, he crouches down and hugs his knees. “We’re going to die in here.”
“No, we’re not. We’re between the main floor and the basement. Even if we dropped, it wouldn’t be a long fall. Relax… we’re fine.”
His eyes dart around like a cornered animal, and now I’m getting nervous. I’m not typically anxious in confined spaces, but with him, it’s impossible not to feed off of his energy.
“I was such a nerd in high school that my mom had to pay my second cousin to go with me to prom,” Kyler blurts out.
I blink at him. “What are you doing?”
“I need to confess things before I die.”
“First, I’m not a priest. And second, we’re not going to die. We’re just—”
“I paid her fifty bucks for a blowjob.”
And just like that, any option for sex, even months down the road, evaporate. “That’s… maybe too much confessing.”
“She took it and did it, then said if I gave her another fifty, she’d fuck me. We had sex in the back of the limo my parents paid for, and we never made it inside.”
I have nothing.
No response. No desire to attempt to console him anymore. Nothing about what he just said is anywhere near the realm of okay.
“We thought she was pregnant with my baby because I spent another five hundred dollars after that to get laid, but it turned out to be my other cousin’s baby.”
Now I have questions. “Your other cousin as in her brother? Or your other cousin as in he is a cousin to both of you?”
“Cousin to both of us.”
“She slept with multiple cousins? Like,hercousins?”
“She’s adopted, so there’s no blood relation,” he snaps. “Don’t make it incestuous.”
