I nodded. The truth of it sat heavy and real between us.
“He asked me to smuggle him some Skittles, and I was on my way to commit the felony when a hot nurse in scrubs distracted me.”
Her eyes met mine.
The elevator seemed smaller all at once. Her gaze held, steady and assessing, then softened into something I couldn’t ignore. The storm outside rattled the building, wind forcing rain against concrete, a reminder of everything in motion beyond these walls.
She looked away first. “Your friend isn’t supposed to be eating Skittles right now. And second of all, I’m not—”
The lights cut out and Nicole gasped, grabbing hold of my arm.
The elevator lurched, dropping a fraction before grinding to a stop that threw me off balance. I caught myself against the wall, heart jumping into my throat. Darkness swallowed the space, thick enough that I couldn’t see my own hands.
“What the hell?” My words echoed back to me in the gloom.
A few seconds passed, but the car stayed still. Then a small emergency light flickered on near the ceiling, casting a dull, amber glow over the metal walls and the floor between us.
Nicole exhaled and pressed her palm to the control panel as if she were feeling for a pulse. “Okay. This is fine. Everything’s fine. We’ll just press the emergency button and they’ll come get us.”
I stepped forward and started jabbing all the buttons. Door open. Emergency call. None of them lit up under my fingers the way they were supposed to. Nothing happened.
“Unless you’re made of backup battery and jolts of power are shooting out of your fingertips,” she said, “nothing’s going to happen.”
I tried one more time out of sheer stubbornness, then let my hand drop. “Isn’t this place supposed to have emergency power or something? A generator? It’s a hospital.”
She gave me a look that carried the weight of a double shift and a storm that wasn’t letting up. “Yes. Emergency power for the patients and the machines needed to keep them alive. Not for a couple of idiots who thought it was a good idea to take an elevator during one of the biggest storms of the season.”
I slid down until I was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, knees bent. The metal was cool through my clothes. The amber light buzzed faintly overhead, annoying with the way it kept flickering every few seconds. As though it were laughing at me and my distress.
“I don’t appreciate you calling me names,” I said. “My life is literally hanging in the balance.”
She snorted despite herself, then checked her watch, thumb hovering over the face as if staring hard enough might bend time back into cooperation.
I looked at her standing there in scrubs that had seen better hours, hair escaping its tie, eyes tired but alert. The vending machine, the Skittles, the easy relief I’d been carrying from Shawn’s room all felt far away now.
Not just because we were stuck in an elevator with no power during a storm that had shut half the city down, but because I was trapped in a metal box with the one person I hadn’t stopped thinking about since the night I walked off a stage and realized I wanted her more than the rules telling me not to.
“If the button didn’t light up, that means nobody knows we’re in here,” I said. “That means we’re stuck in this death trap until someone realizes we’re stuck in this death trap.”
“Please— Don’t blow all your optimism all at once.”
Nicole slid down the wall beside me, the movement careful, like she was conserving energy she didn’t have to spare. The floor creaked softly as she settled, knees bent, shoulders brushing mine. That small point of contact created enough electricity to get every elevator in the tri-state area moving again.
“This could take hours,” she said, head back, eyes closed. “Elevators are low priority. Patients first, and there are hundreds of them.”
“Hours,” I repeated.
“Hours.”
The word stretched, and time did a strange thing after that. It stopped behaving like time and started behaving like taffy, pulling long and thin and sticky. The emergency light kept buzzing a hole through my brain. Somewhere far below us, a generator coughed and steadied. Rain hammered the building in waves, like the storm was pacing outside, impatient.
We sat. Then we paced in short, four-cornered lines. Then we sat again.
At some point, she leaned her head back against the wall and let out a breath that sounded like surrender.
“Okay,” she said. “We need to not lose our minds.”
“I’m already ahead of you. My mind left the building about half an hour ago.”
