Bastian shifts beside me, adjusting the blanket that’s slipped off my shoulder. His fingers brush my collarbone and I shiver, not from cold this time.
“You good?” he asks.
I snort. “If ‘good’ means I just let my boss finger me in the back of his Range Rover while watching the sunrise over Lake Michigan, then yeah. I’m spectacular.”
A laugh rumbles out of him. “You’ve got a way with words.”
“Yeah, well, it gets me into more tight spaces than it gets me out of.” I blush and, because I can’t help myself, add, “No pun intended.”
Bastian laughs again, a little louder this time. It’s a sound I’m quickly wishing I could treat the way my early 2000s self would’ve done and burn onto a CD, because I want to skip back to the beginning of the track and play it over and over again.
“That does remind me of something, though,” I continue. “You never told me why you’re bad with enclosed spaces.”
His brow wrinkles. “Huh?”
“Back in the elevator, you told me you weren’t good with enclosed spaces. Why not?”
“Oh.” He scratches his jaw. “That’s kind of a bummer of a story.”
“Bummers are what I do best,” I tell him. I spread my hands toward the sunrise. “Everything else is going too well right now to belong in my life. So I’d rather invite some grief in on my terms instead of waiting for the world to invent the grief for me.”
He shakes his head in dismay. “Pessimism does not suit you, you know.”
“Oh, I’m as jaded as they come, buddy. Trust me. Pessimism is my art, and I am its Picasso.” I butt my forehead against his shoulder. “Now, stop ducking the question. It’s your turn to be a little vulnerable for once.”
He laughs, but it peters out quickly. There’s a sadness in his eyes I’m starting to recognize. It tends to crop up whenever anyone pushes him about his past. First, it was Dante at the oyster bar; now, here I am, making him dig up all his metaphorical dead bodies.
Bastian’s jaw works from side to side for a moment. His eyes drift toward the lake, though I don’t think he’s really seeing it.
“When I was a kid,” he starts slowly, “maybe seven or eight, I was at this restaurant where my brother worked. Well, where he sort of did some side work for this guy, Dmitri, who owned it. Anyway.” He clears his throat. “We were horsing around, playing tag or some shit, running through the kitchen like idiots.”
I stay quiet, sensing that if I interrupt, he’ll clam up entirely.
“I ran into the walk-in freezer to hide from him. Thought I was being clever.” His mouth twists up. “But the door… It had this heavy-duty latch. It’s supposed to have a safety release of some kind on the inside, but this one was broken.”
My stomach flips as I see where this is going. “Oh, Bastian.”
“The door swung shut behind me. Locked automatically.” All the light has gone out of his voice now. “I was in there for… I don’t know. Felt like hours, but it couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes, maybe thirty. I screamed until my throat was raw. Pounded on the door until my hands were numb and bloody.”
He holds up his hands, and for the first time, I notice faint scars across his knuckles that I’d always assumed were from kitchen work.
“It was dark. So fucking dark. And cold—the kind of cold that gets into your bones and won’t leave. I remember thinking I was going to die in there. That they’d find me frozen solid, like a popsicle.” He lets out a bitter laugh. “Dramatic for an eight-year-old, I know.”
“That’s not dramatic,” I whisper. “That’straumatic.”
“Yeah, well.” He shrugs like he’s unbothered. “My brother finally found me. I was blue, shaking so hard I couldn’t stand. He wrapped me in his coat and carried me out.” He turns to look at me. “Bottom line is, since then, I hate dark, tight spaces. End of story.”
I reach out and lace my fingers through his. His hand is warm and solid. “I’m sorry that happened to you,” I tell him softly. “That must’ve been terrifying.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Trauma doesn’t really care about timelines, though, does it?”
“No,” he admits. “I guess not.”
We sit in silence for another moment, watching the sun climb higher. The sky has eased into a softer, paler, robin’s egg shade of blue that makes me think maybe winter won’t last forever.
In the back of my head, though, is that same doomsday clock that’s been running for a week now.
