A mechanical stutter, loss of momentum, and then nothing. The car hung between floors, the amber digits flickering between 10 and 11 before holding steady.
The hum cut out.
Silence. The building exhaled.
Heath glanced at the panel and back at me. "We stuck?"
"Probably."
The car didn't move. Five seconds. Ten.
We were between floors, in a city that didn't belong to either of us. It was a steel box with no audience and no script.
Heath leaned back against the wall. Patient. Then he looked at me.
Every layer of careful self-management fell away. What remained was just Heath, fully and unbearably himself.
And I understood, in the space between one breath and the next, that I'd been holding mine since I was sixteen. Every clean shift and every perfectly maintained boundary had been an elaborate, exhausting act of not breathing.
Heath Donnelly stood two feet away with his tie undone and his fear visible, extended like a hand, and my lungs refused to cooperate any longer.
I reached out and touched the side of his neck. His skin was warm.
Heath's eyes opened wide. Then focused, sharpening the way they did when a loose puck appeared in traffic.
I kissed him.
Not smooth or practiced. I didn't have enough experience for that.
The angle was wrong at first; my mouth caught the corner of his before I corrected it . In that moment, I understood this was the least controlled thing I'd done since I was sixteen years old and drunk on cheap beer in a hotel room that smelled like pizza.
Except now I wasn't sixteen, and I wasn't drunk. The boy I'd kissed in juniors had tasted like spearmint gum. What I tasted now was Heath, coffee, salt, and the faintly metallic edge of a mouthguard chewed half to death.
He froze for a half-beat. Maybe less.
Then he gripped my jacket with both hands. He grabbed the lapels and pulled me into him.
His mouth opened under mine. The kiss went from desperate to devastating in the space of a breath. All the restraint I'd packed away since juniors met all the hunger Heath carried. The collision wasn't pretty.
Our teeth clacked briefly. His nose pressed hard against my cheek. I crowded him against the wall.
He released my jacket and moved his hands to my waist. He knew what he wanted, and he'd simply been waiting for permission to reach for it.
I braced one hand against the wall beside his head. The other held his jaw, thumb moving across his cheekbone.
He made a sound. Low, from the back of his throat.
I pulled back an inch. His breath hit my mouth. Fast. Ragged.
Heath's eyes opened. Brown and gold in the bad lighting, the color nearly swallowed by the dark at their center. This close, I could count the freckles across his nose.
The elevator shuddered. The motor caught again
The mechanical hum returned. The car lurched upward, and the motion knocked us slightly off-balance.
We stared at each other.
I couldn't catch my breath. Neither could he.
