“About thirty minutes?” he replies with a slight shrug, and his complete lack of concern irks me.
Why didn’t you call us sooner?is on the tip of my tongue, but there’s no time to argue. Someone’s been trapped for over forty minutes now, and I don’t want to keep them waiting any longer.
With my crew behind me, I head inside and go straight to the elevator banks. Three of the four display screens above the doors show active movement, but the one on the far left seems to be stuck on forty-seven.
“Do you know where it’s stuck?” I ask. I don’t want to presume, but also, this guy isn’t filling me with much hope.
“Um, below the forty-seventh floor, I think,” Lawrence sniffs, a hint of boredom in his tone. “It’s part of the residency floors.”
My head snaps toward him with a frown. How can he not be sure? One of his residents is trapped, and he can’t have the decency to get all the facts together to help us do our job more efficiently? What an ass.
I try to keep the frustration out of my voice when I ask, “And where is your maintenance team?”
“He’s out of town.”
Is this guy serious? A building of this scale shouldn’t be reliant on a single person to manage their maintenance. I have to take a deep inhale through my nose, and one of the guys behind me mumbles, “For fuck’s sake.”
I ignore the incompetent man and march over to the fire service elevator. Once the doors are open, I use a key to activate it and let part of my crew step in with the equipment and send them up first.
By the time I step out onto the forty-seventh floor, Charlie and Spencer are making quick work of opening the elevator doors. The power must have gone off shortly after the car left the floor as there’s around a two-foot gap between the hallway floor and the top of the car doors.
I squat down to take a look inside to see whether the person inside will require medical attention before we extract them, but nothing could prepare me for the sight of the man sitting on the floor.
Elliot.
Bent knees pulled tightly to his chest, the fingers on one hand tapping a nervous rhythm against his shin, as the other picks at the skin around his nails. The whole time, his eyes are fixed on a spot on the mirrored wall in front of him. Not blinking.
Without a second thought, I throw protocol out the window and shrug off my turnout coat.
“Avi, get the oxygen ready and prepare to do an EKG,” I say, low enough so he can’t hear me.
She gives a firm nod, and I turn back to the elevator. Dropping to my knees, I carefully slide through the gap into the car. I keep a firm grip of the floor until my feet are only inches away from the floor of the car and land softly so as not to jostleit. His wide eyes haven’t shifted from the spot on the wall, and I take that as my cue to slowly kneel in front of him. I take in his flushed skin, shiny with sweat. His jaw is clenched tight, and the quick, shallow breaths he takes through his nose are ragged.
A heaviness settles in my chest at the sight of him. He always has this exuberant energy, even when he’s trying to hide his nerves. He’s become a permanent resident in my brain for the last fifteen months, since that day we met at the Thunder fun day. He’s brought this new wave of light into my life, even though we’ve only crossed paths less than a handful of times. I’ve bumped into him while I’ve been jogging and he’s been walking his dog in the park near the firehouse, then again at this year’s Thunder family day, and when he stopped by the other month to buy one of our station T-shirts.
But the terror in his pale green eyes is something I never want to see again.
“Hey, Elliot? It’s me, Hunter. You’re alright, okay? I won’t let anything happen to you,” I tell him, because even if we do barely know each other, I know for certain I’ll do everything in my power to protect him.
Chapter Two
Elliot
This can’t be happening.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I will for this to be some kind of twisted dream. Maybe I ate something weird and fell asleep on the couch, because that’s the only acceptable reason as to why Hunter is witnessing me on the tail end of a breakdown in the elevator.
Hunter.
Shit, I can’t believe he’s really here.
Sucking in a sharp breath, I try to flex my fingers, but everything feels numb. I don’t know how long I’ve been stuck in here for. It could have been five minutes or five hours. My concept of time is nonexistent since I went into panic mode the second the lights went out and the elevator came to a sudden stop. The only source of light I had was from my phone, but it wasn’t enough to stop the walls from closing in or to stop my vision from becoming tunneled and blurry, and a wave of numbness from traveling through my veins.
I don’t think I can feel my feet.
“Elliot?” Hunter asks. His voice is gentle and calm, and his brown eyes are focused on me when I open my own again. His hand is poised midair, like he was about to touch me but thought better of it. Any other time, I’d love for him to touch me, but I don’t think I could handle it right now. “I’m gonna get you out, okay? I just need to know you’re with me before I send my team in.”
I swallow roughly. My tongue feels so swollen in my mouth, almost as if it’ll trap my words if I try to speak.
