“Staring contest?” I wasn’t ready to go back to doing nothing just yet. If the wait didn’t kill me, that constant buzz and flicker of the emergency light would. Nicole shot me a scathing side-eye, but it didn’t deter me. “No risk of injury, with the added bonus of getting to gaze into my beautiful blue eyes.”
I fluttered my eyelids and Nicole broke, chuckling softly as she turned to face me.
Only then did I realize this was the worst idea I’d ever had. Doomed from the start. The low light painted her eyes a darker shade, all depth and shadow. I lasted maybe ten seconds before I forgot the rules. Forgot what winning meant. Forgot why we shouldn’t be doing this at all. I felt myself leaning in, toward her.
Her breath hitched, and she blinked first, then backed up with a breathless laugh. “Bad plan.”
“Not my finest.”
Silence again. Thicker now. Charged. Thanks to me and my bright idea.
She stared at the number panel, then sighed heavily. “Any other childhood hits you want to inflict on me?”
“I-spy.”
“I’m sure every man alive is just sick to his stomach that he’ll never be you.”
“What? It’s a classic.”
“We are in a metal box, Landon.” She gestured wildly to our sparse surroundings. “We have one light and a panel of buttons. What am I going to spy? The game will be over in thirty seconds.”
“I spy,” I said with a grin, “a very grumpy nurse.”
“And I spy a superstar rookie who can’t brainstorm his way out of boredom.”
She shook her head, then looked at me fully. The space between us felt small again, heat building with nowhere to go. My knee brushed hers. Neither of us moved it away.
“Yeah, well, if you were single we could’ve been making out instead.”
Her breath stalled, and she dropped her gaze to my mouth before catching herself. When she looked back up, her eyes were darker, something electric threading through them.
“That’s not funny,” she said quietly.
“Tell me about it.”
The storm roared outside, thunder cracking close enough to feel in my bones. The elevator creaked ominously, trapped between floors, between choices. She swallowed, fingers curling against the fabric of her scrubs.
We didn’t move. We no longer touched. The air between us was pulled tight with everything we weren’t doing.
And nowhere, absolutely nowhere, to hide from it.
We said nothing more.
The space between us shrank in inches, then fractions of inches, without either of us agreeing to it out loud. Heat collected where our knees nearly met again. Her shoulder angled toward mine. I shifted, then stopped shifting, aware of how little room there was to pretend this wasn’t making me feel a certain way.
The emergency light threw a thin glow over her cheekbone, across the corner of her mouth. I could feel my pulse in my wrists, in my neck, like my body had decided something before my brain caught up.
She drew a breath that didn’t quite finish. I felt it land in my own lungs anyway.
“Landon,” she said, my name low, unfinished.
I answered by moving closer. Enough that her breath brushed my mouth when she exhaled again. Her hand came up, fingers hovering near my chest, stopping just short of contact.
Everything narrowed. The storm outside. The elevator. The hospital. It all receded until there was only the small space between our faces and the fact that neither of us had pulled away.
Her eyes flicked to my mouth again.
I could’ve closed the distance. I knew it. She knew it. The certainty of it settled heavy and unmistakable.
