Page 9 of Masks and Mishaps

“You’re what?”

“I’m just—”

“This is legitimately the least you’ve ever spoken in the span of a minute—”

Ding!

“I’m really hard,” he blurts out right as the elevator door opens on the sixth floor to a woman with her phone against her ear. Her eyebrows are in the stratosphere, and she takes in Dalton and me before she says, “No, honey, that wasn’t me. It was this very large man in the elevator.” She covers the microphone with her palm. “I’ll take the stairs,” she whispers before turning on her heels.

The doors close again.

I want to tell him more. I want to tell him I’d let him pick me up and bounce me on his dick for six hours straight if he wanted. Instead, I put my hands back on his neck. “You obviously want this too.”

“I can’t,” he murmurs. “Ican’t. But goddamn, you make it difficult. I’m human. You have to have mercy on me.”

“But you can,” I insist. “Youarehuman. Do you know what humans do? They fuck. So why the hell won’t you—”

Ding!

“—just fuck me?” I finish right as the door opens on the third floor now, revealing a middle-aged man holding what is unmistakably a full bag from a cat litter genie.

The man’s jaw lowers. “I was trying to…” He raises the bag of litter clumps. “I don’t feel comfortable putting it in my kitchen trashcan—”

“Thanks, boss, I’ll handle it,” Dalton says, nodding for the man to leave the gigantic bag on the elevator floor.

His eyebrows rise. “Really?”

“Yeah, no worries. In the trash room, right?” Dalton asks, acting as if I’m not dangling off him like garland on a Christmas tree. He winks at the man. “Have a great evening.”

“You too,” he says, and his look of confusion lingers until the doors close.

Dalton faces me again and his expression immediately shifts back from pleasant to agonized. “Ess, we can’t. Our parents—”

“Aren’t married yet.”

“We work together—”

“I’m just an intern.”

“You’re still in college—”

“I’m graduating in June.”

“And I’m a train wreck,” he finishes.

Ding!Lobby. Dalton presses the ten button again.

The words have caught me off guard, but his expression gets me. Seeing the look of resignation on his face—the flat line of his mouth, his tucked lips, his tight cheeks—I’m at a loss. Not correcting him immediately is the biggest mistake I’ve made all night.

“That’s not true,” I finally manage—and I mean it. The words are too late though. Dalton is already releasing his tentative hold on my waist and putting space between us.

“And what about my mom?” he finishes.

There it is. Alyssa Cavendish deserves the world—and to her, my father is the world, apparently.

We stare at each other in tense silence for the next few floors until,Ding!Tenth floor.

“Come with me.” I cock my head toward the elevator’s open doors. “We can talk.”

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