Love Stuck

by Michele De Winton

  “I am eminently approachable. I have an open-door policy throughout my companies.”

  “Sure. Bet hardly anyone uses it though, right?”

  “They don’t need to. Anderson’s runs well.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Kirk thought about the conversation he’d had with his head of marketing this morning. Were his staff disgruntled? Enough to steal secrets from him and sell them to Daniella Richmond? No. No way. He dismissed the idea out of hand. “What did you do to so ingratiate yourself with Ms Brooks?”

  Sarah smiled warmly, and Kirk realized it was the first time he’d seen her face look so soft, and…pretty rather than beautiful. “Cara’s dogs are a menace. I get that she’s dedicated to them, but man, the scrapes they’ve got her into.”

  “What’s that got to do with your apparent styling wizardry?”

  Sarah gave him the finger.

  “Oh, very mature,” he said, but she simply reached for her wine glass. “They got to the dress. Boris has taught himself to open doorknobs, and they made it into the wardrobe. Muttly ate through the garment bag. Literally ate it. Then the two of them pulled the dress to pieces and worse, chewed through the fabric, so it was completely unsalvageable. Oh, and then they ate through the veil too. Dogs must have had hella stomach aches after that.”

  “Oh. Not ideal.”

  “No shit, Sherlock. Anyway, I called around, pulled together an outfit. She looks wonderful. Happily Ever After.”

  “I could have guessed you would think it was appropriate to put a bride in turquoise.”

  She rolled her eyes. “She looks fantastic. And you can tell she feels beautiful. That’s what every bride wants on their wedding day, not to wear white because everyone else says she should.”

  “It’s tradition.”

  “It’s old-fashioned.”

  “Hardly.”

  “It’s an outdated patriarchal view that dictates all women should be virgins, wives or mothers.”

  Kirk almost choked on his wine. “Excuse me. How did we get from wearing white on your wedding day to views of the patriarchy?”

  “You tell me. You’re a living example of patriarchal privilege.”

  “I worked hard to get where I am.”

  “I’m sure you did. And I’m sure you stepped on plenty of people on the way up.”

  He was about to reply when the groom stood for the final short speech. After clapping politely with the rest of the crowd as it ended, Kirk turned to finish his retort to Sarah and found her seat empty. He frowned and looked around, but she was gone, along with the jacket that had been slung over the back of her chair. A strange sensation scratched at his skin. Frustration, he decided. He hadn’t got the last word in. But now that the speeches were over, he could leave without being rude, and he slipped out toward the lifts.

  5.

  Sass took deep, steadying breaths as she waited for the elevator doors to close. Of course, she had been sat next to Kirk Anderson because life loved to have a laugh at her expense. And he’d been an absolute ass, not only about her friend, but about her part in fixing the wedding dress fiasco. Man, if she never saw that man again, it would be too soon.

  “Hold the lift.” The voice was strained from running to catch the elevator, and Sass was about to push the hold button when someone slid inside just before the doors closed.

  Kirk Anderson. Kill me now.

  “I’ll get the next one,” Kirk said, and she was about to encourage him, vigorously, out the door when the elevator started descending.

  “I can’t believe I woke up looking forward to this day,” she muttered.

  “You and me both.”

  She shrunk as far as she could away from him into the back-left corner, but he just stood, taking up all the air, right in the middle of the elevator.

  “For the record, over fifty percent of my staff are women, and I make it a policy to ensure there are at least two women on all of my executive boards.”

  Huh. That was not what she had expected him to say.

  “And Anderson’s has a blind recruitment policy. It’s something we started right at the beginning. All job applicants must remove gender, age, and race from their applications. I want the best people for the job. Period.”

  Double huh. Sass released a little of the tension from her shoulders. “You should quit now while you’re ahead.”

  He turned to her. “I don’t need to. I’m already successful. Although probably not in a way that you would consider worthy.”

  “Honestly. You should shut up now.” She stepped forward and pushed the button on the elevator wall in a futile attempt to get it to speed up.

  But as if it had misinterpreted her request, the elevator suddenly stuttered and paused mid-floor.

  “Really? You had to go and push the wrong button?”

  “That wasn’t me.” Sass pushed the ground floor button three more times, but the elevator only stuttered as if it was trying to restart the hydraulics.

  “Let me try.” Kirk pushed the button too, but this time nothing happened.

  Sass closed her eyes a moment. This was not happening. The lift was going to restart again any moment. When she opened them again, nothing had changed. “Well, at least it can’t get any worse,” she muttered, half under her breath.

  Then the lights flickered. “No. Please, no.”

  The lights gave up completely, plunging the tiny square room into complete darkness.

  “Nice one, Hunt. Seems like it’s you who needs to keep your mouth shut.”

  She didn’t even bite, she was too busy trying to not think through the implications. Being in a metal box, suspended above a screamingly long lift shaft was already making the fear-fingers creep up her spine. The last thing she needed to do right now was over think it.

  “Wait. There should be…” Sass could just make out Kirk fumbling around at the control panel.

  An emergency light came on, and Sass let out the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. The pale blue glow put angles on everything, and when Kirk turned toward her, his jaw looked like he could cut them out of there with it. He turned back to the control panel and pushed the emergency call button. Silence.

  “Damn. Power must be out or something. I guess that comes with buying such an old building.”

  Sass ground her teeth together. An old building. An old building, with crappy old wiring and an elevator shaft that probably needed maintenance. No, don’t go there.

  “Joe has a great team. Sure, we’ll be out of here in no time,” he said.

  The silence became deafening.

  “Ms Hunt?”

  “I’m concentrating.” She ground the words out between her teeth.

  “Focusing your physic powers on the lift maintenance team to tell them where we are?” She could tell it was a joke, but couldn’t find it in her to laugh. The blue light made the whites of Kirk’s eyes and his teeth glow a little, and it was unnerving.

  Another pause dragged out uncomfortably.

  “Well, maybe we should have had our meeting in an elevator the first time. I much prefer this quieter version of you.”

  “I don’t like small spaces.”

  “Ah.” Sass fancied she heard the penny drop. “You’re claustrophobic.”

  “No. I just don’t like small spaces.”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Just your emotions getting in the way of your rational brain. You can talk yourself down.”

  “Seriously? I tell you I don’t like small spaces and you tell me to get over it?”

  “That’s not what I said—” But then the elevator gave a giant shudder, and Sass let out a shriek as she staggered against the wall.

  Kirk was over beside her in an instant, and despite herself, she clutched onto his arm. And in between the panic and the fear, she felt something warm coming from him.

  “It’s stopped.”

  She realized she was clinging to him, but she didn’t want to let go. “I can’t believe I’m sa
ying this, but will you talk to me? Or distract me or something.”

  Kirk took in a deep breath. “You think that’s a good idea? We only seem to antagonize each other.”

  “Even being angry is better than this,” she managed.

  “Right.” He paused, clearly searching for something. “Tell me about your tattoos. Why did you get them?”

  “That’s what you do to distract me?”

  “You’re cutting off my blood supply with your vice-like grip, excuse me for picking the topic that first came to mind.”

  “Sorry. Yes. My tattoos.” She took a deep breath. She could do this, talk, keep talking, that would help. “My mom has bipolar. For years I thought I’d inherited the condition. I was depressed. Really depressed. All the time. And then one day I decided I couldn’t live with the uncertainty anymore. I didn’t want to know if I was going to be flying high one minute, then hiding under my bed the next.”

  “Like your mother.”

  “Like my mother.” Suddenly she felt the air leaving her lungs again. She was just like her mother. She was panicking. She was going to fall into the black…

  “But don’t they have drugs that can help?” His voice cut through her panic and grounded her.

  “They do. And they’re much better now. But back then, without any health insurance, the only stuff mom could get flattened her out like a zombie. She hated it. I hated it. So, I tried to end it.”

  “You tried to kill yourself?” It was a little gratifying that he thought of her as someone who would never take that ultimate step, Sass realized. If even an ass-hat like Kirk Anderson thought she could keep it together, then she could. She would. Sass took a deep, staggering breath. “Do you think it’s worth trying the emergency button again?”

  “Sure.” He started to unwind her hands from his arm, but she didn’t want to let go.

  “No, just see if you can reach,” she said.

  He did. Nothing happened.

  “Keep talking. We’re going to be okay. Don’t focus on where we are.” His voice lowered and she felt warmed by it.

  “I can’t believe out of all the people in the world, I’m telling you this, but yes. I tried to kill myself. Only I didn’t try that hard. I took a couple pills, got my stomach pumped. Realized how close I’d come to missing out.” She paused. “On life.”

  “And so you got a tattoo.”

  She bit her lip. “I know what you’re doing.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Getting me to distract myself so you don’t need to do anything that would require human emotion.”

  “Is it working?”

  Yes. Yes, it was working, but she didn’t want to admit it. Didn’t want to owe this man anything.

  “Forget about out there. Just focus on getting through this,” he said. “Focus on breathing.”

  “Two.” Sass rubbed her fingers over the slightly raised surface of her left wrist. “I’ve got two tattoos. Got them a week apart. The black hole was then, and the butterfly is now. There’s a movement. People tattoo semi-colons to remind themselves how close they came to the end. To remember that this isn’t the end, that they decided to continue instead. The butterfly has one of those in it. A semi-colon, as its body.”

  He was silent a moment. “I’m sorry.” A pause. “About your mom. Life as a kid must have been difficult.”

  She shrugged, even though she wasn’t sure he would register the movement in the semi-darkness. Her regular phone call to her mom each week was the one time she allowed herself to think about her past. To indulge herself in going through the what ifs. The rest of the time Sass focused on staying positive. On moving forward. On making people into walking artwork.

  “That’s why I do what I do. To try and make people feel confident, feel like their best selves. I know you don’t believe it, or think it’s worth anything, but it is. I’ve been on the other side of depression and I know what joy looking good can bring to people. Putting on a pretend cloak, one made of positivity, it can make you feel better despite yourself. You put on real clothes that make you feel good about yourself, and you start to believe you’re okay.

  “Okay. I get that.”

  That was all he said. If the lights had been on she would have checked his face, but all she could see were his outline and his eyes in the muted light. Eyes that still held the world’s oceans in them, and were focused entirely on her.

  The lift started up for a moment and then stopped with an almighty screech.

  “Oh my god, oh my god, we’re going to die.”

  “No. We’re not. Here.” He put his arm around her, and she burrowed into his chest.

  “Deep breaths. In, out. In, out.”

  Sass forced herself to calm her breathing. Listening to his heartbeat sounding out its incessant rhythm as her head stayed tucked against his chest, she started to come back to herself.

  “My mom wasn’t depressed, but she sure as hell didn’t make life easy,” he said.

  He was sharing. The laughter at the irony that Kirk Anderson was sharing with her was close to the surface, but Sass knew if she let it out it might descend into a manic spiral of giggles that would turn to tears. Instead, she closed her eyes, trying to focus on his voice. He must have taken her silence as a cue to carry on.

  “No one in my family has ever been to college. No one in my family was ever supposed to. I was supposed to go and work at the car factory in our town like everyone else did. And it didn’t even occur to me that I wouldn’t until one of my teachers at school sat me down and gave me a glimpse of another world. I love numbers, always have. I used to add up my mom’s shopping list as we went around the supermarket and tell her if something was more expensive than the week before. She liked that plenty, I guess, but any more than that, and she just glazed over and told me to hush my mouth trying to be too smart for my own good. When that teacher showed me what pure math could look like though, how it made me feel…” He paused, lost in the memory and Sass found her heart had steadied, but she didn’t pull out of his firm grip. “It made sense to me like nothing else ever had, and I didn’t want to lose it.”

  Just like how she felt about clothes, fabric, about finding the truth in people and showing them how to display it on the outside.

  “I got a scholarship and left home, but I don’t think my parents ever forgave me.”

  “Wait, what?” she said. “Forgave you? For being wildly successful?”

  “I bought them a house. And a trip to New York. But they didn’t come. And they refused the deed to the house.”

  “Shit, that’s cold.”

  She felt him shrug. “It’s who they are.”

  The troubles with her mom had been hard, were hard, but at least she knew her mom was proud of her. She told her with every phone call.

  They were both quiet a moment. Lost in their own thoughts, when Sass realized she didn’t want him to let her go. She felt safe in his arms. Safe and warm and for the first time in a long time, not worried about what was going to happen next. She took a deep breath. God, he smelled good. No man with such a cold heart had any reason to smell that good. Like the outdoors, he smelt like walking in the forest with a hint of something sweet, a glass of mulled wine afterward.

  She stole a look up at his face and discovered him looking down at her.

  “I’ve never told that to anyone before,” he said.

  The smile was unconscious, but she caught herself doing it. What the hell was happening?

  He turned to face her, but rather than pulling away from his arms, she stayed inside them, her back to the wall of the elevator, her head tipped up to his. This close she could see those eyes properly, and they had lost their cold hard edge. Now they were just blue. Pure, bright, open blue. And they held a crackle of lust in them that shot right into her.

  “You okay now?”

  She gave a small nod, not taking her eyes from his. “Thanks for talking me down.”

  “Is it just me or is it getting hot in h
ere?” He shucked his jacket and threw it into the corner but put his arms back around her.

  Oh no, it wasn’t just him. Really? Really really? But the way his white shirt molded to his broad shoulders looked much better than it should have. Way better than she should have cared about.

  He’s an arrogant ass remember? Yes, but one who had talked her down off her claustrophobic ledge and bared his soul in the process. “Tell me more about your childhood,” she said quickly to make herself stop having such treacherous thoughts.

  “I like to play the piano.”

  Sass just about got whiplash from jerking her head up to check if he was being serious. “This I have to hear.”

  “It made sense when I realized how much I liked math, but for a while, I thought I was a little crazy. I had an aunt, Aunt Deidre, who had an old upright and I taught myself to play it. She was the only one who bothered to try and understand me. But she died when I was twelve. She left me the piano in her will, but my folks sold it.”

  If he’d said he liked to collect pressed flowers Sass wouldn’t have been more surprised. Her blood surged, celebrating the fact that the man with his arms around her wasn’t such a cold-hearted jerk, but her brain tried to stop it. One cute hobby did not make Kirk Anderson a well-rounded person. Not by a long way. But he’s being so kind. Sure. Who wouldn’t? Stuck in an elevator with a person who admits they tried to kill themselves, anyone would try and turn on the charm. Even Kirk Anderson. But it feels so real. It did. It felt real and having his arms around her felt so good. “Do you play now?” she asked to stop herself thinking about the way Kirk’s chest felt against her breasts. About how his smell had wound its way into her senses and made her want to rub her face against his strong jaw. About how she wished his hands would slide down her body and pull her closer.

  “I do. I have a Baby Grand in my apartment. When I realized how mathematical music is, it became a way to wind down. To find the deeper layers underneath the numbers.”

  “You didn’t say anything about that in your information to me.” She felt him shrug.