"I'm sorry about your dad," she says, and I shrug, because we said all these things last spring at the funeral.

  "You should take your wife home," I say. "She's looking kind of jealous at the bar."

  Felicity snorts, but we both turn to where Riya is waiting, and she points at her eyes with two fingers and then swivels her wrist until they're pointing at us.

  "Maybe we should give her a reason to be jealous then." Felicity grinds against me, even while Chris Martin pours his heart out through the speakers.

  "You don't do much for me, honey." Even if I were into women, Fee is like my sister.

  She laughs in my ear. "Likewise, babycakes."

  "I love you," I say.

  "Love you too."

  Despite the reputation of New England prep schools being a bastion for young minds and progressive thinking, Mortimer was still firmly rooted in a different era. A conservative 'don't ask don't tell' era. Even when we were still muddling through the murky swamp of our sexuality, Felicity and I knew we were different from most of our classmates and clung to each other like life preservers.

  Riya comes back with two more glasses of wine for her and Felicity, and a glass of Goose on the rocks for me. At this point in the night, there's no point in keeping up the soda pretense.

  I toss it back, managing to only dribble a little bit of icy liquid down my chin.

  "I'm going to go."

  "No!" Fee clings to my arm. I glance at Riya for help and she mercifully steps in.

  "Babe, Lucas has to fly back to Portland tomorrow."

  "Yeah. Big day. Need to get my rest."

  Felicity pouts. "But what about brunch?"

  "I'll see you at brunch."

  There are hugs and air kisses, promises not to wake each other before ten o'clock tomorrow morning. Riya swears they'll be up at six, because Aalia, their daughter, hasn't slept past five in her entire life, but Felicity promises that if that happens, they'll find ways to keep busy until the hour gets to something more acceptable to those of us without hell spawn (seriously though, my goddaughter is the cutest). The arch in Felicity's eyebrow says she and Riya won't even need to leave bed to do it.

  There are no more hands to shake, no more kisses to blow. I made a quick detour to the men's room and then head towards the exit. The Mortimer reunion is the biggest event of the year, and this hotel is oversold, so Fee, Riya and I are all staying at a place down the street. It was hot out today. If it's still nice outside, I might walk and clear my head.

  Of course, Watt and a couple of his buddies are standing on the landing of the staircase. They each have a drink in their hand, and Watt's face is now distinctly the color of marinara. And even though we are grown-ups and I can throw out cool comebacks—seriously, how perfect was that salty rim joke?— the image they make is too close to my memories of finding them in the same place in the Mortimer athletic center, or lingering by the main doors of the dining hall. This evening has been, overall, painless enough that I swallow my pride and redirect to the elevator, because why risk fate by giving Watt one more chance to make me regret coming?

  It takes a minute for the doors to open, and Watt's laughter down the stairs makes the skin on the back of my neck prickle while I wait. When the doors part, I leap into the elevator like I'm being chased and stab at the button for the lobby with reflexes born from adolescent panic.

  The doors are sliding shut and relief is starting to cool my skin when an arm shoves through the opening. I swallow as the doors slide back open again.

  Be cool. Don't tremble. He might be drunk, but he can still smell fear.

  Bentley Hammersmith IV steps into the elevator. He laughs and waves at someone still at the party then, as the doors shut, turns and gives me a startled grin, like he didn't know anyone else was in this cozy five by six space.

  "Hey!" For once, his smile doesn't make me melt. I'm too tired, too done with all the people I didn't want to see again, to be seduced.

  "Have a good time?" Ben says as the elevator starts to descend.

  "Sure."

  The counter ticks down. It's only two floors to the lobby, maybe thirty steps to the front door, and then I'm free.

  "I was sorry to hear about your dad," he says as the number clicks past floor two.

  "Thanks." My thighs tense like I'm about to run the hundred-yard dash. The elevator comes to a stop, my fists clench and . . .

  Nothing happens.

  I took a philosophy course in college and the professor talked about general consensus. We operate day-to-day using a basic set of assumptions.

  When you flip a switch, a light turns on.

  Green means go.

  When an elevator stops, the next thing that happens is the doors open.

  When assumptions aren't met, it takes a while to know what to do.

  There's silence. We both stare. The 'L' button for the lobby is still illuminated on the panel. I push it. No change. I push the 'open door' button. I've heard that the open and close buttons don't actually do anything; they’re there to give you a sense of control in a powerless world. Today there is definitely no control.

  "Let me try." Ben brushes past me and stabs at the panel. I should be irritated. I know how to push a button, but all I can think is that he smells good.

  The doors don't open.

  We stare some more. If there were a sound system this would be a good time for the bland muzak to bust out something on a mid-nineties synthesizer.

  On a whim, I push the button for the third floor—the one we came from—because in the end, I can manage passing Watt if it means this evening will finally be over.

  The elevator doesn't go anywhere.

  "Well that's a problem," Ben says at the same time I say "Oh shit."

  I press my ear to the door.

  "What are you doing?" Ben sounds amused.

  "Trying to hear if we got to the lobby." What I can actually hear is the thumping base from the party upstairs. Sounds like the DJ has moved on to Sexy and I Know It. Fee knows all the steps to the dance from the music video.

  Ben pushes the red button on the elevator panel.

  "What are you doing?" I squeak. My whole life, I've been terrified of pushing that red button accidentally, and now he's just gone and done it like he's turning on a light.

  "Calling for help."

  "Why?"

  He stares at me like I've sprouted an extra eye. "Because we're stuck."

  I laugh nervously. "We're not stuck. We're just—"

  "Hello?" A voice crackles from the speaker in the panel.

  "Hi, yes, we're stuck in the elevator."

  There's a pause. Then the staticky voice says, "Hello?"

  Ben crouches down, the fabric of his navy suit pants pulling tight over his thighs. "We're stuck in the elevator."

  My heart squeezes a little at his words.

  "Which elevator?"

  He turns and raises his eyebrows at me. I shrug. Like I'm supposed to know?

  "Hello?" the voice says again.

  "I don't know which elevator. There are two. We're in one of them."

  "Hello?"

  He sighs. He pushes the red button.

  "What are you doing?" I say again.

  "Hanging up on her."

  "Hello?"

  Apparently the voice in the box will not be hung up on.

  "You talk to her." He points an annoyed finger at the panel.

  "Me?" Why am I going to have any better success than Ben Hammersmith, the man who immediately draws everyone's attention and admiration?

  He pulls his phone out of his pocket and dials, turning his back to me. He puts a hand on his hip, and the action flares out his jacket. I love it when a guy does that. Ben's suit has obviously been made for him. Double vents in the back mean it's nipped in at the waist in a way that shows off his body even in all those layers. He looks like a stock photo model about to take a very important business call.

  "Hello?" The voice is persisting.

  "Hello?" Ben says into the phone. "Hi yes, my name is Ben Hammersmith. I was at the Mortimer reunion. I'm stuck in the elevator."

  "Hello?" The panel voice crackles and, with no other options, I get down on my knees.

  "Hello. We're stuck in the elevator."

  "Which elevator sir?" It's a relief that we're getting a response again.

  "Yes, we've already done that," Ben says to whoever he's speaking to on the phone.

  "I don't know," I say. "There are two elevators."

  "Which hotel are you at, sir?"

  I blink. Doesn't she know? "We're at the Guardian Hotel."

  "No, we're talking to them now," Ben glances over his shoulder at me and I try to give him a confident smile. I like the way he said 'we'. My sixteen-year-old self would have loved to be any kind of 'we' with Ben Hammersmith.

  "What city are you in sir?" The panel voice says. Ben's eyes go wide. So do mine.

  "Don't you know?" I ask.

  There's a pause. Static.

  "Hello? Sir? What city are you in?"

  I want to bang my head against the panel, but Ben is watching me.

  "It's some kind of central dispatch operator," he says slowly into his phone. "They don't really seem to know what's going on."

  "Hello?"

  I roll my eyes. "Never mind. The door opened. False alarm."

  "Glad we could be of service!" The voice says, then there's the buzzing sound of a dial tone, then silence.

  Ben frowns. "What are you doing?"

  I wave my phone at him. "Two can play this game. Who did you call?"

  "The front desk."

  I snort. "I'll race you."

  "Race me how?"

  But I'm already dialling. The phone rings, and for a second I think she won't pick up, but then mercifully, a new feminine voice says "Luke?"

  "Fee?"

  "Hey! Forget something?" She's barely audible over Bon Jovi in the background.

  "I'm stuck in the elevator."

  "What?"

  "I'm—"

  The inside of the elevator disappears into black as the overhead light goes out.

  "What was that?" I say, at the same time Felicity says, "Oh my god!" and Ben says "Well fuck."

  It's surprising to know that my list of day-to-day assumptions includes the idea that when the power goes out in an elevator, some kind of emergency lighting comes on immediately.

  This proves to be false. The elevator is so black I can't even make out Ben standing in front of me, even though he can’t be more than a couple feet away.

  "Luke?" Felicity says.

  "Fee, I need you to—"

  "The power just went out."

  "Yeah, I think—"

  "I need to find Riya. I'll call you back!"

  The phone goes dead.

  The elevator is silent, illuminated briefly by my homescreen before that light goes out too.

  "Well?" Ben asks. In the dark, his voice sounds even closer than I expected. I text Felicity quickly, ignoring the way my knuckles ache around the phone.

  Stuck in elevator. Send help.

  "Felicity is working on it," I say. Once she finds Riya, she'll check her phone again and see the message. Moments after that, she'll snap into action. When Felicity launches a plan, it's like the Battle of Hogwarts and Felicity is playing the parts of Hermione, Professor McGonagall, and Molly Weasley all at once.

  Ben sighs. There's a blinding flash of light that makes me grunt and put my hand in front of my eyes.

  "Sorry."

  When I peek between my fingers, Ben is illuminated like he's telling ghost stories at summer camp and I realize the flash was the light on his phone. Why didn't I think of that?

  He sets it down on the floor, and while it's not quite the emergency lighting I had imagined, in the confined space around us, it's pretty effective. The walls of the elevator are mirrored, so the beam of the little flashlight bounces in all directions, highlighting Ben's cheekbones and the bags under my eyes.

  There's another pause.

  What do you say to a virtual stranger who was simultaneously the featured party in many of your earliest homosexual imaginings, and who doesn't even remember your name?

  "I enjoyed your speech," he says.

  That would have worked. Good thing Ben is better at this small talk thing that I am.

  "Thanks."

  "Did your father pass recently?"

  "The spring."

  "That sucks. It sounds like you were close."

  My hand goes to my jacket, over the pocket where my first speech is still neatly tucked away. What conversation would we be having if I'd read it instead of Fee's contingency speech?

  "So where do you live now?" I ask.

  "Chicago. I work in commercial real estate development."

  That's . . . almost what I expected. It's a job my dad would have approved of at the very least.

  "How about you?" he says.

  Shit. I should have seen that one coming. Ben's face is bland, like he's already had this conversation a hundred times tonight and he probably has. I watch very carefully, waiting for the moment I lose his interest as I say, "I'm a high school music teacher in Portland, Oregon."

  "Private school?"

  "Nope. It's just your average public high school." Someday soon they're going to finally do away with the arts budget completely and tell me I get to teach phys ed or bust. "I shepherd average kids from average families through the basics of reading music and playing as a group."

  "Is it a marching band?"

  I gotta give Ben Hammersmith credit; he's trying to salvage this. It's just him and me in this tiny space and he is doing his darndest to make me interesting.

  "No. The marching band budget got cut three years ago. So it's a concert band and I teach the jazz ensemble." They mostly let me keep teaching because the instruments were already paid for, so the only investment was my salary. The marching band was too expensive, what with the travel, the uniforms, the competitions. No number of bake sales and booster fundraisers was going to save it.

  "And Dixon said you played in the band at Mortimer?"

  I eye him, but the question seems totally honest. "You really don't remember me, do you?"

  "Sure I do!" He rubs a hand over the back of his neck. "I just . . . don't remember the specifics. Like what instrument you played in the band."

  I remember everything about him. Not in a creepy way, but he lived his life so far out in the open in our years at Mortimer, it would be impossible not to know him. Ben was class president from our sophomore to senior years. He was the captain of the fencing team, which is a lot more badass than you think, and also played the lead in Romeo & Juliet, Grease, and Spring Awakening (I was in the pit band for that show. His performance was breathtaking). He dated Virginia Heckerling from the end of freshman year until right before homecoming in our senior year, and then he was single until graduation.

  I check to see if there is a wedding band on his hand now, but if anyone was going to post wedding photos in the quarterly alumni news, it would be Ben Hammersmith, so I'm not surprised when I don't see one.

  I am surprised however when the ringless hand snaps in my face.

  "Hey," he says. "You okay?"

  I've been staring. Glaring, probably. Now I blink and pull myself back to reality. Ben is standing very close, the cellphone light and the mirrors doing amazing things to highlight his cheekbones. The silver in his scruff sparkles.

  "You're not one of those people who freaks out in tight spaces, are you?" he says.

  "Me? Of course not." I scoff, puffing out my chest, embarrassed that he caught me regressing to my adolescent fanboy in front of him. "Are you?"

  He grins. Turned on me, with no outside distractions, that grin is a weapon and there's nothing I can do to resist it.

  "I'm fine," he says.

  Silence.

  Silence. You don't even know how silent it is, to be stuck in an elevator with no power in the entire building. There is no hum of motors and mechanical gears. No fans. Even the distant thump of the reunion DJ has disappeared, replaced with nothing.

  "This is not like how you see it in the movies," I say finally.

  He laughs. "I was just thinking that. There should at least be a decent soundtrack to build the tension."

  "Or a SWAT team scaling the wires to rescue us."

  "Or a bomb that we have to dismantle."

  "Yes!" I'm smiling, grinning ear to ear, quite possibly the only time I've done so with anyone but Felicity since I got off the plane from Portland yesterday. "I should warn you that I have a degree in Jazz Studies and the beginnings of tendonitis in my right hand. I can't be trusted to cut the red or green wires."

  He laughs again. It's a big sound, echoing in the small space, reflected off the walls like the blueish light from his phone. "Well I'm red-green color blind. So I guess we're screwed."

  I join his laughter. "We're definitely fucked. Call your loved ones if you need to. Say goodbye. I promise not to eavesdrop."

  "Same to you."

  My smile fades.

  "What?" he says.

  I shake my head. "Nothing. It has just been an epically shitty year, that's all." I'm sure he doesn't want the list. Mom was at Dad's funeral. She left Gerry, her latest 'dream guy' at the hotel. She patted my cheek and told me to come visit soon . . . but not too soon, because she and Gerry were flying back to their winter home in the Azores as soon as Dad was buried, and then once they got back to the States, she was doing a month-long silent retreat near Sedona. And then afterwards, there might be time for a visit, but only if I didn't mind coming at the same time as my sister and her four kids—which I did. I affectionately call Felicity's daughter the hell spawn, but my nieces and nephews really are some of the most rotten people in the world. They'll fit right in at Mortimer when they're old enough.

  "I'm sorry," Ben says.

  "For what?"

  "For your epically shitty year."

  "Why?" I loosen my tie. "You didn't have anything to do with it."

  Annnnnd now I've made things awkward again. Ben picks up his phone and flips through screens. Sometimes he tilts it and the light shines in my eyes, but that has more to do with the mirrors than anything. He should save the battery, because we don't know how long we'll be in here, especially since my phone is already in the red after too much time trying to look busy so people didn't talk to me during the cocktail hour.

 

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