Stuck with You (The STEMinist Novellas, #2)(2)
Erik nods. “Wi-Fi should work, but it doesn’t. So maybe this is—”
“—a building-wide power outage?”
“Maybe even the whole block.”
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit. Shit.
Erik seems to be reading my mind, because he studies me for a moment and says reassuringly, “It might be for the best. Someone is bound to check the elevators if they know that the power’s gone.” He pauses before adding, “Although it might take a while.” Painfully honest. As usual.
“How long?”
He shrugs. “A few hours?”
A few what? A few hours? In an elevator that is smaller than my already-minuscule bathroom? With Erik Nowak, the broodiest of Scandinavian mountains? Erik Nowak, the man who I . . .
No. No way.
“There must be something we can do,” I say, trying to sound collected. I swear I’m not panicking. No more than a lot.
“Nothing that I can think of.”
“But . . . what do we do now, then?” I ask, hating how whiny my voice is.
Erik lets his messenger bag drop to the floor with a thump. He leans against the wall opposite mine, which should theoretically give me some room to breathe, even though for some physics-defying reason he still feels too close. I watch him slide his phone in the front pocket of his jeans and cross his arms on his chest. His eyes are cold, unreadable, but there is a faint gleam in them that has a shiver running down my spine.
“Now,” he says, gaze locked with mine, “we wait.”
It’s 10:45 on a Friday night. And for the third time in less than ten minutes, my world crashes to an end.
Chapter 2
Three weeks ago
There are worse things in the world.
There are, without a single doubt, giant heaps of worse things in the world. Wet socks. PMS. The Star Wars prequels. Oatmeal raisin cookies that masquerade as chocolate chip, slow Wi-Fi, climate change and income inequality, dandruff, traffic, the finale of Game of Thrones, tarantulas, food-scented soap, people who hate soccer, daylight saving time (when it moves one hour ahead, not behind), toxic masculinity, the unjustly short life span of guinea pigs—all of these, just to name a small handful, are truly terrible, dreadful, horrific things. Because such is the way of the universe: it’s full of bad, sad, upsetting, unfair, enraging circumstances, and I should know better than to pout like a ten-year-old who’s half an inch too short for the roller coaster when Faye tells me from behind the counter of her small coffee shop:
“Sorry, honey, we’re all out of croissants.”
To be clear: I don’t even want a croissant. Which I know sounds weird (everybody should always want a croissant; it’s a law of physics, like the Fermi paradox or Einstein’s field equation), but the truth is, I would gladly do without this specific croissant—if this were a regular Tuesday morning.
Unfortunately, today is pitch day. Which means that I’m meeting with potential future GreenFrame clients. I talk to them, tell them the hundreds of little things I can do to help them manage large-scale sustainable building projects, and hope they’ll decide to hire us. It’s what I’ve been doing for about eight months, ever since I finished my Ph.D.: I try to bring in new clients; I try to keep the ones we already have; I try to ease Gianna’s workload, since she just had her first baby—who, incidentally, is three babies. Apparently, triplets do happen. And they’re adorable, but they also wake one another up in the middle of the night in a never-ending spiral of sleeplessness and exhaustion. Who would have thought? But back to the clients: GreenFrame has been venturing dangerously close to not-quite-in-the-black territory, and today’s pitch meeting is critical to keep the red at bay.
Enter the croissants. And that other little problem I happen to have: I am a little superstitious. Just a tad. Just a little stitious. I have developed a complex system of rituals and apotropaic gestures that need to be performed to ensure that my pitch meetings will go as planned. I have more years of science education than anyone ever needed, and should probably know better than to believe that the color of my socks is in any way predictive of my professional success. But do I?
Nope.
Back in college, it was exactly three braids in my hair for every single soccer game (plus two coats of L’Oréal mascara if we were playing away) and I had to listen to “Dancing Queen” and “My Immortal” before each and every final—strictly in that order. Thank God I managed to graduate on time, because the emotional whiplash was starting to grind at me.
Not that this issue of mine is something I like to admit widely. Mostly just to Mara and Hannah, my supposed best friends. We met during the first year of our Ph.D.’s and have been lumbering together through the tribulations of STEM academia ever since. For the most part, having them in my life has been my one true joy, but there have been less-than-outstanding aspects of it. For instance, the fact that during the four years we lived together they oscillated between staging anti-superstition interventions and pranking me by inviting stray black cats into our apartment on every Friday the 13th. (We even ended up adopting one for a few months, JimBob, till we noticed that the kitty in the Missing flyers all over the neighborhood suspiciously resembled him; JimBob was, in fact, Mrs. Fluffpuff, and we returned her quietly, in the middle of the night. She’s been dearly missed ever since.) Anyway, yes: I have horrible, amazing, superstition-unsupportive BFFs. But we don’t live together anymore. We don’t even live in the same city: Mara is in D.C. at the EPA, and Hannah has been working for NASA and commuting between Texas and Norway. I can throw salt over my shoulder and frantically look around for wood to knock on to my heart’s content.