Yours Truly (Part of Your World, #2)(72)

What do you mean it’s stuck?” I said.

Jacob was rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s stuck. I can’t get it open.”

I stared at him. Then I went back to the door and started tugging desperately on the handle. It was like trying to open a bank vault.

“No…” I breathed. “No, no, no, no, no…”

“Are you claustrophobic?” he asked, looking worried.

No. I was not. “Yes,” I lied.

“But we eat lunch in a supply closet—”

“That door isn’t locked!”

I pulled out my phone and called Alexis, pacing in front of the fireplace while Jacob threw open the windows and the bathroom door to help me with my fictional fear of enclosed spaces.

She answered on the second ring. “Hey—”

“Ali? We’re locked in Jacob’s room.”

“What?”

“There was some freaky breeze, the door slammed shut, and now it won’t open.”

I heard the sound of her coming in the front door while she relayed this to Daniel. “We just got home, we’ll be up there in a second.”

Forty-five minutes later, we were still trapped.

Jacob had been trying to troubleshoot from our side, but the issue wasn’t the lock. The door had swollen itself into the doorway. Like a broken finger swelling around a wedding ring.

“I’m just going to cut it,” Daniel said resignedly through the speaker on my phone.

“No, don’t cut it,” Jacob said quickly.

I gawked at him. “What do you mean don’t cut it?”

He nodded at it. “That’s an antique door. It’s probably original to the house. It’s irreplaceable.”

“We are trapped here!”

He peered at me calmly. “Look, my cabin does stuff like this. The foundation settles and the house shifts. Humidity makes the doors stick. It just rained yesterday, that’s probably what’s going on.”

Jacob raised his voice. “Daniel, do you have a dehumidifier?”

“In the basement, yeah.”

“Okay. Set that up in the hallway. Let’s run it overnight. See if we can’t dry out the wood a little. If we can’t get it open in the morning, we can reevaluate.”

“Good idea,” Daniel said from the other side.

I looked at Jacob bleakly. “All night? We have to stay here all night?”

“We were going to bed anyway,” Jacob said. “We have a bathroom, water, we just ate. We don’t need anything—”

“I do! I need…my retainer!” I said desperately. “I can’t live without it!”

He gave me the amused look of a parent entertaining the wild story of a three-year-old.

I couldn’t stay the night in this room with Jacob. I couldn’t share a bed with him. I looked over at it in a half panic. I’d never actually seen a bed that small—wasn’t this a bed-and-breakfast once? Didn’t they specialize in beds meant for couples? Was this a child’s room???

“I could always get a ladder up there,” Daniel called through the speakerphone. “But you’d have to climb out onto the roof—”

“Yes. Absolutely.” I nodded enthusiastically. “Let’s do it.”

“You are not climbing out onto a roof,” Jacob said.

“Why?”

“Because you could fall. And look at the windows. They only open four inches wide. You’d have to birth-canal yourself out of it, you’ll get stuck.”

“I agree, Bri,” Alexis said through the phone. “It’s too dangerous. I think the plan is good, just stay where you are.”

I looked at Jacob in despair.

“Excuse me,” I said, and I took my phone to the bathroom and shut the door.

“Alexis, take me off speaker and go to your room,” I whispered.

There was a pause and the sound of a door closing. “Okay, you’re off speaker.”

“I cannot sleep in here tonight.”

“Why?”

“Because I will have sex with him.”

She snorted.

“It’s not funny,” I hiss-whispered. “Your house has locked me in a thirst trap and I’m so sex starved and into him I’m not going to be able to say no. My legs will probably shoot straight out like one of those fainting goats the second he so much as breathes on me. This is a crisis!”

I could tell she’d moved the phone away from her mouth so I wouldn’t hear her laugh—which I totally did.

“Ali, the man literally propositioned me last night.”

“He asked you on a date,” she said, still snickering. “He didn’t ask you for sex.”

“Yes, he did. We already go on dates. Every day. He wasn’t asking me to get emotionally involved with him, because he’s not emotionally available and he’s seen my dating profile and he knows I’m not either, so what he was actually asking was if I’d be interested in maybe having sex with him.”

“That is a very dizzying argument…”

“So now I’m locked in a room with a man that I’m half in love with and extremely attracted to, who wants to have sex with me, and I’m sorry, but I have about as much willpower as a piece of broccoli.”