“It appears so,” I finally respond to her question, and then hit the emergency call button.
“What? That’s a joke, right? You’re joking?” She begins repeatedly jabbing the call button. “We can’t be stuck.”
My instinct is to reach for her hand to spare her pointer finger from the beating it’s taking due to how aggressively she’s hitting the button.
She pauses, her eyes momentarily dropping to her hand in mine.
“Do you see that?” I nod at the red light that rings the emergency button. “The staff have already been notified. They know we’re stuck in here.”
Alyssia snatches her hand free, shaking her head. “That’s impossible because we’re not stuck. No, no, no,” she mumbles, pacing while fanning herself with the collar of her sweater dress with one hand and massaging her left shoulder with the other.
It isn’t hot in here by a long shot.
“Are you claustrophobic by chance?” I ask.
Her head whips around. The panic taking ahold in her eyes concerns me.
As someone who squeezes my body into confined spaces for a living, the deer at the opposite end of someone’s headlights reaction is the last thing you want at a time like this.
“No,” she answers shortly. “I’m not claustrophobic. I just don’t like tight spaces.”
Call me crazy, but somehow I know telling her that’s pretty much the same thing won’t go over well right now.
“Besides, we’re not stuck,” she says, her voice continuing to spiral higher. “This thing is going to start moving again at any moment, right? Right? Right?”
Each ‘right’ is punctuated by a press of the emergency button.
Each one causes me to flinch from the restraint it takes to not grab her hand again.
“Of all people this could’ve happened to,” she mumbles. “Of course it would happen to me. I have zero luck.”
She starts rubbing her right shoulder with her left hand while pacing once again.
I say the only thing that comes to mind.
“Why did your facially challenged boyfriend dump you?”
Her body jerks, hand dropping away from her shoulder, and then comes to a complete stop, not unlike what the elevator did moments ago. Alyssia blinks up at me, her eyes meeting mine.
I decide, or maybe it’s decided for me, that I like having her eyes on me.
“What did you say?” Disbelief peppers every word.
“Your ugly boyfriend. The one that dumped you. Why?”
“Were you … How did you?” She gasps. “Were you eavesdropping?”
“Yes. So?”
She opens and closes her mouth a couple of times. “You shouldn’t listen to strangers’ conversations. Besides, Hudson wasn’t ugly.”
I slide my hands into the pockets of my jeans, giving her a once over. “Your friend seems to think so, and frankly, I think she has better taste than you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Beg all you want but I’m a damn catch and you overlooked me because I wastoo gorgeous. Why’d the troll dump you?”
“Troll?” she blurts, then covers her face with both of her hands, shaking her head. “This is absurd. You have no right to question me,” she claims.
