Page 135 of Happiness for Beginners

He met my eyes, and nodded.

“You said you didn’t.” He’d said Duncan had offered him a ride.

He nodded. “That’s right.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. “I just had this crazy feeling like you could save me.”

I realized I’d been holding in my breath and finally let it out. “I can’t even save myself.”

“But you did. You have.”

I shook my head.

“Longing for you gave me something to hope for. Even when it was hopeless.”

“It didn’t have to be hopeless,” I said.

“Would you have wanted me to trick you into bed?”

“Why didn’t you just tell me?”

He shook his head like he didn’t know, himself. “Sometime in the next few years, my eyes will go dark. All the light will go out of the world. That’s a fact, and nothing can change it. If I were a better person, I’d leave you alone. But I can’t—I’m sorry, I justcan’t.That’s really why I’m here. To say that to you. To be brave at last and say that.”

It was all wrong that we were on opposite sides of an elevator at that moment. When a guy tells you something like that, you should be in arms’ reach, at the very least. To hell with the elevator, I thought.

But just then, as if in response, the elevator dropped again. A foot? Two feet? The floor literally dropped from under us, and then we dropped, too, and then we hit the floor, both landing facedown on the carpet.

As soon as he could, Jake commando-crawled over to me. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. “Are we going to die now?”

“No,” Jake said. “We’re just going to stay trapped for a while between floors fourteen and twelve.”

“What happened to thirteen?”

“There is no thirteen.”

“The floor above twelve isn’t thirteen?”

“It is,” he said, “but they don’t call it that.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t you know this? Everybody knows this! Because of bad luck.”

“So the fourteenth floor is the thirteenth floor.”

“No,” he said. “The thirteenth floor just doesn’t exist. And that’s a good thing, because we need all the luck we can get right now.”

We stayed like that for a minute, listening for a calming voice over the speaker, or for the sound of firemen prying the door open. Some—any—noise from the outside world. Which turned out, instead, to be my cell phone ringing.

As I inched my hand across the floor toward my purse to grab it, I said, “Maybe it’s the hotel. You know, with elevator information.”

“And they’d have your cell number because?”

Good point. It wasn’t the hotel. It was Mike.

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