Page 11 of In the Net
HARPER
“No way,” I sigh.
“Shit, are we stuck?” Sebastian closes his book around his index finger and steps toward the control panel. He shrugs. “Guess I’ll press the emergency call button. I’ve kinda always wanted to.”
He presses the red button, and a couple seconds later a staticky voice buzzes through the speaker next to the control panel. “Hello, Brumehill College maintenance department.”
“Yeah, hey. We seem to be stuck on this elevator. The one in Peek’s Hall. It just stopped between the fourth and fifth floors. Hasn’t been moving for like, I dunno, thirty seconds?”
“We’ll get someone out to take a look right away,” the voice replies. “Is anyone in the elevator experiencing a medical emergency?”
Sebastian turns to me. “You’re not about to lapse into a fit of hysteria, are you?”
I straighten my lips. “No.”
“Not about to faint?”
“No.”
“That bowel condition of yours isn’t about to return?”
“Sebastian,” I grit his name through clenched teeth.
With a grin, he turns back to the speaker. “Nope. No medical emergencies.”
“Alright,” the voice from the maintenance department replies, “I’m going to dispatch someone to figure out what’s going on. If you need to contact us, just press the emergency call button, and I’ll be here.”
“Thanks, will do,” Sebastian answers, stepping away from the panel and resting against the back wall of the cabin.
Several beats of uncomfortable silence pass.
“So, ever been stuck in an elevator before?” Sebastian asks.
“First time,” I answer on a sigh.
“Same here. Think this experience will bond us and we’ll be best friends from now on?”
I cut him a pointed glare.
His brows bounce sardonically. “Yeah. Probably not.”
I lean against the wall of the cabin and tilt my head back, feeling drops of perspiration gather at the nape of my neck. “It’s so stuffy in here.”
“You said it.”
I’m still looking up at the ceiling, but my peripheral vision senses movement from Sebastian, so I flit my gaze to him—to find him unbuttoning his oversized blue button-up shirt.
He slings it off his arms to reveal an obscenely tight undershirt, plastered to his torso. I can’t stop my eyes from crawling down his body. Sweat is already causing the thin white fabric to cling to him, spots of dampness here and there revealing outlines of the sharp edges of his abs and chest.
The sight only supercharges the collection of sweat gathering on me. Now I can feel droplets slinking down my back and stomach. There’s no air conditioning and minimal ventilation in this cabin, and outside the temperature is reaching its high in the mid-eighties.
Sebastian tugs at the collar of his shirt to get some air. The glimpse of his sturdy collarbones, glistening under a sheen of perspiration, while his Adam’s apple bulges on a swallow, makes a warmth much sharper and more intense than the stagnant heat of this elevator coil low in my center.
I quickly pull my gaze away and try to focus on reading my book. But as utterly engrossed in it as I was just minutes ago, none of the words make any sense to my scattered brain when I try to finish the sentence I was in the middle of when the elevator stalled.
“By the way, if you’re getting hot, too, you can take off any piece of clothing you want,” Sebastian says, pulling my attention even further away from my book. “I’m a gentleman. I won’t look.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
