She steps in barefoot, carrying her shoes and a glass of white wine she doesn’t remember picking up. She presses thirty-seven. The elevator reeks of bleach and somebody else’s perfume. In the light up there, she looks fifteen years older than she did at lunch. Four hours of behavioral economists agreeing with one another and patting one another on the back about it. Her feet are ruined. The wine is warm. She drinks the wine anyway.
The elevator stops on four. A man steps in.
He has a paperback in his left hand, thumb keeping his place. He presses thirty-one and stands as far from her as the box allows. They both look at the floor.
The doors close. The car hums upward.
He is tall, she clocks. His jacket is dark. Cardamom and a long day in a suit. Only the hum of the elevator. The orange digits climb. Eleven. Twelve.
At fifteen, the car jerks with a small twitch, and the hum dies, and the lights go out.
The darkness is total. Whether her eyes are open or closed, she cannot tell. She reaches for the wall and finds it.
Silence. Then his voice, somewhere to her left.
“Well,” he says. “That’s new.”
***
Her pupils strain at nothing. There’s supposed to be an emergency light. There isn’t.
“Are you all right?” she asks.
“Grand. I’m absolutely grand. Is there an emergency button?”
He is not fine. She can hear it.
“There should be a panel near the doors,” she says. “Left side, I think. I’ll find it.”
She trails her hand along the wall and walks toward the doors. She feels the seam where the wall meets the door frame, then the raised edge of a panel, then a column of buttons. She presses the lowest one. Nothing. She presses the one above. Nothing.
“I think the whole system is down,” she says.
“Right.” His breath has gone shallow. “Right. OK.”
“We could try the phone. There’s usually a phone behind a little door.”
“A little door?”
“In the panel. A little hinged door.”
“You sound like you’ve done this before.”
“Everyone’s been stuck in an elevator.”
“I haven’t.”
Her fingers find the hinged door and lift the handset out. Dead.
“Phone’s out too,” she says. “But someone will notice. The system will flag it, or someone will call a lift that won’t come, and then they’ll check. It’s a hotel. They have protocols.”
“Protocols.” He laughs. “You’re very calm.”
“One of us should be.”
He calms.
“Where are you?” he says. “I mean, where are you standing? I don’t want to step on you.”
“I’m by the doors. Panel side. You’re on the back wall?”
“I think so. I honestly have no idea. This is absurd.”
“It is.”
“I’m from Lisbon,” he says. He clears his throat. “In case. You know. They need to notify someone.”
“Edinburgh,” she says.
“Conference?”
“The behavioral economics thing. You?”
“Same. I was supposed to be presenting tomorrow morning. I guess that’s up in the air now.”
“Was that a pun?”
“An attempt, by the looks of it.”
She laughs, slides down the wall, and ends up on the carpet without remembering the decision. He does the same.
“What is your presentation about?” she says.
“Sunk cost fallacy in romantic relationships.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not. It’s actually quite interesting. People stay in relationships long past the point of diminishing returns because they’ve already invested so much. Time, emotion, shared Netflix queues. The usual.”
“And you’ve quantified this.”
“I’ve made very serious graphs.”
She smiles in the dark.
“Has anyone ever applied it to themselves?” she says. “Your research. Has anyone sat in the audience and thought, oh, he’s talking about me?”
“Everyone. They always think you’re describing them.”
“Are they wrong?”
“No.”
“Is that why you study it? Because you’ve done it yourself?”
“I stayed in Lisbon for someone,” he says. “Turned down a position in London. Three years. Very serious graphs of my own, if you want to think about it that way.”
“And?”
“And the data was clear long before I admitted it.”
She doesn’t say she is sorry.
Something loosens after that. The confession, small as it was, opens a door neither of them closes, and the conversation flows through it freely. He tells her about Lisbon. The light. The river. The afternoon sun on the tiles of the Alfama, which he says cameras always get wrong. She tells him you can get all four seasons in Edinburgh between the hotel and the conference hall.
She notices how freely she is telling him things. She has not told Silvia half of what she has told him in forty minutes.
She shivers. The elevator is cooling, and her dress is sleeveless. The carpet does nothing. Her dress was designed for a warm room with other people. It was not designed for this.
“Christ, you’re freezing,” he says.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. I can hear you shaking.”
She can, in fact, hear herself shaking. The dress is sleeveless, and her skin has gone rough with goosebumps.
“Here,” he says, and she hears the jacket come off. “I’m going to put this on you. I’m going to try to find you without hitting you in the face.”
“Appreciated.”
His hand finds her shoulder and stays. Through the dress, his palm is hotter than she expected. Then the jacket settles over her, heavy and lined, still carrying the heat of his body.
His hand begins to lift. Hers is on it before she has decided to put it there.
She does not plan this. Her hand is already on his before she knows it is going to be. She holds his hand against her shoulder, gently.
His hand stiffens under hers; he pulls away. She has misread this entirely.
“Sorry,” she says, and the word comes out flat, and she is grateful, for the first time, for the dark.
“No, it’s fine. You’re fine. I just…”
He doesn’t finish. She pulls the jacket tighter around her shoulders. It smells of cardamom and the warm cotton of a shirt he has worn since morning.
“Have you ever noticed,” she says, “that hotel carpets all have the same pattern? That sort of geometric thing that’s not quite any particular shape?”
“The pattern that exists to hide stains.”
“Exactly. It’s designed to be impossible to remember. You could live in a hotel for a year and not be able to describe the carpet.”
“Like elevators.”
“Like elevators.”
The conversation recovers. They talk about hotels. The worst and the strangest, a place in Osaka where the bed was a capsule and the walls were so thin you could hear the man next door brushing his teeth. A hostel in Reykjavik with a hot tub that smelled like sulfur and a view of the Northern Lights. They list hotels, and they are saying things that should not feel intimate but do, ridiculous beds and terrible breakfasts, and the dark turns it into the kind of conversation you would have with your best friend over the phone at 2am.
“I’m still cold,” she says.
He is quiet for a beat. Two. She can hear him thinking.
“I could sit next to you,” he says. “If that would help.”
“It would.”
He moves. She hears the shuffle of his body across the carpet, the small sounds of navigation, and then he is next to her, his shoulder against hers, and the warmth is immediate and startling, and where their shoulders touch, she can feel the heat all the way down to her hip. He feels heavier than she expected on her shoulder. He sits so close that she can feel each breath of his.
Neither of them speaks. The cold is still there, but it has retreated to the places they are not touching. Everywhere they are pressed together is warm, and she is aware that she has stopped shivering and that it has nothing to do with the jacket.
His breathing changes. She hears it shift direction, from beside her to toward her, and then the warmth of his exhalation is on her neck, below her ear, and she holds still, completely still. The warmth moves. From her ear to her jaw, not a touch, just breath, and her fingers press into the carpet.
She turns her head. They are close. Close enough that their breath mingles, and there is no space between them anymore.
He says nothing. She says nothing. She moves one closer. He does not move away. She moves another. He holds. She can feel his breath on her upper lip now.
She leans forward.
The kiss lands wrong. His mouth finds her chin, the rough edge of her jaw. She adjusts. He adjusts. His hand comes to the side of her face and holds her in place, and the second try lands. She opens her mouth, and his tongue finds hers, and the taste of him fills her head slowly but surely, displacing everything else.
He kisses slowly. His hand slides up from her face into her hair. She feels his grip from head to toe.
She presses into him, her body flush against his from shoulder to hip. The jacket falls, and she lets it, and the cold air hits her shoulders, and she does not care because his mouth is warm, his hand is in her hair, and his other hand has found her waist and is pulling her closer.
They kiss until the cold stops mattering. Until the kissing is no longer polite but raw and animalistic.
He breaks away. He is breathing hard, and she can tell he did not want to.
“I don’t know your name,” he says.
“No,” she says. “You don’t.”
She pulls him back.
He leans in. She leans in. Their foreheads meet before their mouths do, a soft, blunt knock, but neither of them stops. She tilts up, and his mouth lands on hers, and her hands come up into his hair and grip, and this kiss is more intense than any of the previous ones. She tastes him. Warm, clean. Then the wine, her wine, was transferred and passed back between them. His hand is on the back of her neck. The other is on her torso, high, under her arm. He is not polite.
She reaches to pull him closer and her hand meets air. She huffs out something that is nearly a laugh.
He laughs, briefly and a little self-conscious.
“What?”
“You’re hard to find.”
“I’m literally right here.” He is laughing. “You’re the one who took the dress off and then wandered.”
“Wander? Where to even?” She is laughing as she says it.
He takes her face in his hand. He does not rush. His thumb settles on her cheekbone. His other hand is on her waist. He kisses her again, slower than before.
Her hand finds a scar on his left side. It is raised and smooth, a thin ridge across his lower ribs. She follows the length with her thumb. She does not stop with the scar. The ridge of his hip was sharper than she expected. The inside of his arm, where the skin is shockingly soft.
She kisses the scar. She is surprised by how much she wants her mouth on it. She kisses it again. She works her mouth up his body, past the soft tuft of hair below his navel, past a rib, to the flat bone between his pecs. His hand comes to the back of her head. He strokes her hair, slowly. He reaches around her with his other hand and finds the clasp of her bra. The clasp gives, and the straps slip off her shoulders.
“You’ve done that before.”
“Of unhooking strangers’ bras in stuck elevators?”
She laughs, delighted, and the sound returns off the wall before she has finished laughing, too close, no distance between making it and hearing it.
His left hand stays on the back of her head, his fingers closing in her hair. He tugs, gently. His right hand comes up to her left breast and cups it, his thumb finding the nipple first, his mouth following the thumb. He licks the nipple, slowly. He takes it in his mouth. He closes his teeth on it, soft, then softer. She puts her hands in his hair and grips. She has always been quiet. She has spent years pushing the sounds down because, somewhere along the way, she absorbed the idea that a loud woman is one who is too much. She does not press this one down. It comes out of her low and rough, and she is surprised by it, and somewhere she is also a little pleased.
He moves to her right breast. He runs his tongue across her nipple. She lets him have one lick, and then another, and then she pulls him back by the hair, hard enough to feel firm, soft enough to be a request. He lifts his head. She is already kissing his neck. Her mouth moves down the tendon of his neck, under his jaw, to the place below his ear where his pulse is close to the skin. Her right hand drops to his stomach and slides lower.
Her hand slides down his stomach. Past his waistband. Past a coarse strip of hair. She finds his cock hard, warm under her fingers. She wraps her hand around and strokes once, her thumb passing over the head, but the skin is a tad dry, and he winces. “Sorry,” she says, smiling, and she licks her palm. She tries again. He breathes out. His stomach tightens under her wrist. This time, the stroke is clean. Her thumb circles the head, gentle, then firmer. Then a proper stroke, the full length. He moans into her hair, and his hips start to move under her. The underwear pulls against her wrist on every downstroke.
“It would be easier if your pants were off.”
They work him out of his trousers together; he lifts, she pulls, he pushes the other side down. His underwear follows. His cock comes free. She takes hold of him again. The stroke is cleaner without fabric. She kisses him while she strokes him, his mouth giving up on the kiss a little more with each stroke.
She goes down and takes his cock in her mouth, hungry. Her hand is on him, too, at the base, working in time with her mouth. She hears herself, the wet sound of her mouth, the hum in her throat when she goes deep. Saliva spills down her chin. He moans, low at first, then higher. Then, something in Portuguese she does not catch. His hand is on the back of her head, resting, his fingers opening and closing. She sets a pace she likes and stays with it.
She pulls back, and he makes a sound of loss that flatters her more than any compliment has in years. She lies back on the carpet. It is thin and gritty, and it smells of bleach. She pulls him down and wraps her legs around his waist and says, “I want you inside of me.”
She grabs his ass with both hands and presses him down into her.
“Don’t talk. Just fuck me.”
He pushes in. Hard. She had told him now, and he has taken her at her word, and she feels all of him at once, sudden and enormous. She grabs his shoulders. Her nails break the skin. He is inside her, and he is not moving. She can feel the full shape of him, and she is going to lose her mind if he does not start moving. She digs her nails into his ass.
“Don’t be gentle.”
His strokes are long and full, and she wraps her legs tighter around him. The elevator creaks with each thrust. She is making sounds she has never made, and she is glad, ferociously glad. Her face grimaces, slackens, twists, and she does not know and does not care.
She reaches between them and puts her fingers on her clit. She has never done this while a man is inside her. She has always saved it for afterward, alone, a small private correction, because the alternative was to ask for something or do something that may have made a man feel insufficient.
His body is in the way. Her wrist is pressed against his stomach. She adjusts and finds the right pressure and speed. The two sensations, him inside her and her fingers on her clit, combine into something she has never let herself have at the same time.
He feels what she is doing. He slows his rhythm to accommodate her hand. She did not expect that. No pause, no question, no wounded ego. He simply makes room.
“Don’t stop,” she says. “Don’t change anything. Exactly like that.”
She has never said this to anyone.
He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t change anything, and she comes, and she is loud and graceless; she does not muffle it, she does not bury it in his shoulder, she just lets it fill the elevator.
He pulls back without pulling out. Both of them are breathing hard. She starts to laugh loudly in the small space, and she can hear it coming back at her, and she laughs harder. He laughs too.
“Christ.”
“I know.”
“Are you all right?”
“More than all right.”
She breathes in. The air feels heavy. Her pulse starts to come down.
“Your turn.”
She pushes him back. He pulls out. She gets up on her elbow and gets him onto his back. Something on the carpet catches her knee, a button, her own maybe, torn off earlier. She takes his cock in her hand. She licks her palm again. She takes him in her mouth. She is attentive now, not hungry. Her tongue works slowly on the underside. Her other hand holds the base, in sync with her mouth. He is breathing hard above her. He puts his hand on the back of her head. His fingers open and close in her hair without rhythm. It does not take long. When he comes, he goes silent. Absolutely silent. His body is rigid. His free hand closes on her shoulder hard enough that she will find the mark in the morning. She swallows and pulls off. He collapses on the carpet.
They lie still. The dark holds them.
The carpet is destroying her back. His elbow is in a bad place. She is probably lying in the stolen wine she forgot about. None of it matters.
She puts her hand on the back of his neck, where the hairline begins. His skin is damp. She traces small circles there and listens to his breathing slow.
Neither speaks. There is no need.
***
The fluorescent light slams on, and she throws her arm over her eyes. Through the gap between her forearm and her cheek, she can see the ceiling. Then his shirt wrinkled against the far wall. His book is face down.
The elevator hums and starts to move.
She lowers her arm.
He is sitting against the opposite wall, shirt on but unbuttoned, belt undone, his hair in three different directions. There is a red crescent on his shoulder that she put there. His eyes are brown. She did not know his eyes were brown. She knew the temperature of his mouth and the sound of his breathing when he came, and the exact spot on his left side where the scar is.
She looks at him properly, in the light, and assembles the face the dark could not give her. The shape of his nose is slightly crooked. His left eyebrow sits lower than his right. A freckle below his right ear, she could not have found with her fingers. When he is not speaking, his mouth stays slightly open. She is building a portrait in the time it takes an elevator to climb from fifteen to thirty-one.
He looks at her. She does not bother fixing herself.
They laugh. It comes from both of them at once, helpless and full.
They dress without speaking. The zip of her dress is the only sound.
Thirty-one. His floor. The doors open.
He steps out. He turns back.
“Good luck with the sunk cost talk,” she says.
He smiles. It is a good smile.
“I’ll be in the audience for yours,” he says. “Fourth row. I drift left.”
“I won’t look.”
“You will.”
For a second, neither of them moves or says anything. He is standing in the hallway. She is standing in the elevator. Then the doors close.
She rides the last six floors with his jacket over her arm and a carpet burn on her lower back that she will feel for days.