No. Nope. Not today. Not any day. Not EVER.

The elevator button gets it. Gets all of it. Every press is Andrew's face, is Lisa's face, is the specific image you cannot stop replaying of your boyfriend's contact name lighting up your best friend's phone at 11 PM on a Wednesday like that's just a thing that happens, like that's fine, like you weren't right there—

Lobby.

Lobby.

LOBBY.

"Okay Andrew you are so done," you whisper to the button. "You are so unbelievably done. You are rotting."

Five years of friendship. Five years. You held this girl's hand through her parents' divorce. You proofread her situationship texts at 3 AM. You defended her when people said she was a lot. She was a lot, you knew she was a lot, you loved her because she was a lot—

And she looked at your boyfriend and went yeah, okay, why not.

No thoughts. No hesitation. No basic human decency. Just—why not.

Your forehead meets the elevator wall.

Thunk.

Thank God. Thank God for waterproof mascara. Genuinely one of the top five human innovations. You look unwell, you are aware, but at least you look like a dry unwell person. Your eyeliner is not running. Your dignity is not—well. Your dignity is adjacent. It's in the same building as you. Same elevator, even.

There's someone else in the elevator.

You clocked it. Registered it. Filed it under not my problem right now. Dark suit, all black, the collar open a few buttons because apparently some people just get to look like that, and there's a tattoo crawling up his neck that your eyes caught for half a second before you went back to your emotional breakdown—

Thunk.

Your head against the steel again. Satisfying in a pathetic way.

And then—you hear it.

Not a laugh. Something worse than a laugh. An exhale. Controlled. Amused. The kind of sound that says I am watching you be insane and I find it mildly entertaining.

You turn so fast.

"Sorry, is this FUNNY to you?"

He doesn't move. That's the thing, he doesn't even shift. Just looks at you from across the elevator like you're a nature documentary and he's got a comfortable couch and nowhere to be.

And then you actually look at him and—

Oh.

Oh no.

Okay so he's. He's tall. He's really tall, the kind of tall that changes the geometry of a room, and the suit fits like it was made specifically to make everyone else feel underdressed, and the copper hair is pushed back like he ran one hand through it once and it just stayed like that, because of course it did, and his eyes—

Green.

Not like, greenish. Not hazel-adjacent. Green like someone turned the saturation up, green like a bad decision you'd make with zero regret.

The hand resting in his pocket has a tattoo too. Dark lines across his knuckles.

Focus.

"Miss." His voice is unreasonably low. "You're going to hurt yourself."

"I'm expressing myself—"

"Stop hitting the elevator." The corner of his mouth moves. Just barely. "It'll—"

"If you say it'll stop working I will actually—"

"I was going to say stop responding," he says, "but sure, finish that sentence, I'm curious where it was going."

The smirk. Full. Unbothered. The smirk of a man who has never once in his life been caught off guard.

The lights flicker.

Your stomach drops before the elevator does.

One second of white. One second of absolute nothing. And then the sound—below your feet, in the walls, everywhere—like the building just exhaled and forgot to inhale, and the drop is small, it's barely anything, but your entire nervous system does not get that memo and your hand—

Grabs him.

His forearm. Solid. Warm. The tattoo under your fingers is more detailed than you expected and you can't look at it because you're looking at his face and he's looking at your hand and the emergency light clicks on, amber and low, and the elevator...

Stops.

"Oh my god," you breathe.

"Hm." He looks down at your hand. Back up at you.

You let go so fast.

"We're stuck."

"Yes."

"The elevator is not moving."

"Correct."

"You jinxed it! " You point at him.