“No! I found it in the fridge and had to throw it in the garbage and was headed back to my—”
“Did you touch it?”
“What?”
“Oh, thank God.” The snuffling laugh he lets out makes me want to smack him. “It’s a relief, actually. I’d thought you’d forgot to wash or something.”
“Forgotten to…” Mortification floods through me on a hot, prickly wave. “Can you smell it?”
“Like feet, only worse.”
“Oh, no.” I sniff my hands, the air. “I got used to it, I guess.”
“Right, well, it’s a change from your normal smell.”
I go rigid and all the hot blood that flooded my system a second ago just washes out. “Mywhat?”
In the few uncomfortable seconds of complete silence that follow, I notice that we are once again surrounded by pitch black. I’m not panicked about it now, though. Oh no. Now, I’m too busy panicking about whatever this smell is that I apparently exude.
When he says, “Nothing,” as if he hasn’t just literally compared me to a stinky cheese, it takes every bit of my willpower to back down and pretend like it’s nothing.
It’s safer this way.
“We need to get out of here.” I turn and mess with the folding doors for a few seconds, will them to open. “Allo!” I yell, my voice getting swallowed up by the space above and below us. “Au secours!”
“Il y a quelqu’un?” the jerk neighbor shouts, significantly louder. “Allo! Madame Christen? Laurent?”
“He’s gone.”
He bellows, “Enora!”
“Skiing with her asshole boyfriend.”
“What about the family? The Blandels? Fourth floor?”
“Left last week.”
“Et merde.”
“Oh, God. I can’t do this,” I moan under my breath. “Not again.”
“Again?”
Ignoring his question, I scrabble around on the elevator wall. Maybe there’s an escape hatch or something. A hole I can crawl through or a little cubby with a phone inside. I’ve seen those before. “There’s gotta be a way to call out. You know, a little door somewhere.”
“Oh. That’s not a bad idea.”
“That another shocker for you?”
“What?” His light scans one elevator wall. “Why?”
Now it’s my turn to snort. “Look, you’ve clearly got a thing against women. You’ve been a jerk to me from day one.”
The light swivels and slides up my body to shine right in my eyes. “I like women very much, thank you.”
“Please get that out of my face.”
It shifts to scan the opposite wall. “Youwere the rude one, actually, the day we met.”
