Page 15 of Come Home to Me

“Uhh…” Sarah looks to me, her chest rising and falling rapidly.

“Looks like I should have gotten off with Jason.” I give her my best everything’s going to be okay face, despite my own elevated heartrate.

“I am so glad you didn’t.” She tentatively releases her death grip on the wall. “At least the lights stayed on. Silver lining and all that. What do we do now?” Sarah blows a careful breath past pursed lips.

The honest answer is that I have no idea what to do, but I pretend like I’m the resident expert on stuck elevators. I try the ‘Door Open’ button. When that doesn’t work, I try the ‘Door Closed’ button. Nada. I push one of the buttons for the floor I think we’re closest to, and then, when nothing happens after that, I finally push the ‘Call’ button.

Sarah giggles. “So, basically, you have no idea either.”

“Not really. But that seems to cover all the bases. If nothing happens in the next couple minutes, I’ll call building security on my phone.”

A voice scratches through shitty speakers. “Yes?”

I explain the situation to the disembodied voice, who then promises to have help on the way as soon as possible and apologizes for the inconvenience. “Oh,” the person continues. “And, when I say as soon as possible, I mean you should go ahead and make yourselves as comfortable as you can. These things can take hours. Have a nice day!”

Sarah turns to me with wide eyes, color rising high in her cheeks. Fear tightens her features, but she lets out another long breath and forces a smile. “I’m just chalking up experiences and adventures left and right, aren’t I? First time west. First time in a car accident. First time in Denver. First time stuck in an elevator.”

I appreciate the effort she’s making to stay calm. Her flared nostrils and wild gaze betray how anxious she is, but I don’t let on that I see it. “Wow. I’m almost jealous.” I step closer to her, hoping my presence will soothe her. “Maybe I should try taking off on a random trip without knowing where I’m going someday.”

“If you want to totally renovate your life in less than a month, I say go for it. New job. New city. New clothes. Hell, I might even get a new car out of it.” Sarah laughs and I’d do anything to hear that sound again. Some of her visible anxiety slips away.

We talk about whatever comes to our minds for the better part of an hour. I regale her with stories of growing up on the ranch, getting in trouble with my brothers, and helping Leo out of some pretty tough situations.

“I tried so hard to like growing up on the farm,” Sarah says when I’m done. “You know what? Scratch that. I really didn’t try all that hard. David and Colton, my older brothers, were so good at it and I really hated getting dirty. It drove my dad crazy. I think he would have been happier if he’d had all boys, like you guys.”

The conversation moves on. I learn her favorite show to binge watch on Netflix and she learns I really don’t watch much TV. I discover exactly what in the world it means to be born on the cusp of a sign—her birthday falls during the transition of Aquarius into Pisces, so she has traits of both signs—and she realizes just how much I wasn’t kidding when I told her I couldn’t care less about that kind of stuff.

“Alright,” I say during a lull in conversation. “Tell me one thing that happened to you when you were young that no one else knows about.”

Sarah draws her brows together and a wild look shoots through her eyes. She opens her mouth, then closes it, then opens it again, as if she wants to say something but doesn’t know where to start. It’s not like her to be speechless, so I break the silence, afraid I stepped into a landmine of emotional scars.

“For example, when I was fresh out of high school, my brother Leo put a firecracker in the mailbox. I saw him do it, and the kid was already in trouble for skipping school, so instead of telling Mom, I thought I’d just get the thing out of the mailbox and toss it in the ditch and no one would be the wiser. Only, the timing was way off and it ended up looking like I was the one who put the thing in there. I got in so much trouble, and my mom kept saying how unlike me it was, but I never told a soul the truth until now.”

“That’s your deepest, darkest secret?” Sarah widens her eyes and shakes her head. “Man. You really are a rebel soul, aren’t you?”

It’s not my deepest, darkest secret. Not by a long shot. But I don’t know her well enough to get into the real stuff. Someday, if she sticks around, we’ll talk about it. But for now we’ll stick with the high level info. “Consider yourself officially in the inner circle of Frank Wilde.”

Sarah smiles, and then drops her gaze as she thinks. I watch her face as she decides what to say. Will she tell me whatever it is that had her so upset just moments ago? Or will she choose to censor herself too?

“So,” she says as she fiddles with the hem of her skirt. “Remember in middle school when people would pass notes around? At my school, they had these really intricate ways to fold the paper and the note would be something silly like, do you like me? Check yes or no. And there’d be actual boxes for people to check.”

So she opted for the high level stuff, too.

I laugh to cover my disappointment. “I think that’s just a mainstay of growing up. It was the same way in my school.”

Sarah rolls her eyes. “Yeah, well, I never got one of those notes. My friends did, but I didn’t and I spent the better part of eighth grade trying to figure out what was wrong with me.”

I’d bet my family’s ranch that Sarah’s friends weren’t as pretty as she was. There isn’t a thirteen-year-old boy alive who would have had the balls to pass a girl like her a note and risk getting shot down.

“I can assure you,” I say. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

Sarah lets out a short little laugh. “Now you’re just being foolish. There’s plenty wrong with me. Just ask anyone who knows me.”

At some point, we get tired of standing and sit, side by side, leaning against the wall. Her body presses against mine, her scent, so sweet and spicy, envelops me. Wonderfully terrible thoughts invade my mind.

...my body pressed against hers, my hands sliding under her skirt…

“So, do you really think I’ll have the job by the beginning of next week?”

---