Chapter 6 - The Elevators Dinged With Nobody Moving
He didn't touch either of us when he moved us. He just put his hand out, flat in the air between us, and tipped his head toward the elevators.
"Let's step over here," he said. His voice had dropped. The public voice was gone. "Please."
I picked up my phone off the marble counter. The screen was dark. My papers were still damp on the edges, the ink starting to feather. I held them against my chest, over the stains, without thinking about it, and then I made myself drop my arm. Let it show.
The blonde woman — the red blazer woman — laughed once, short. "You can't touch me," she said again, quieter this time, but she moved. She wanted witnesses to see her cooperate.
We walked the twenty feet to the elevators in a line that wasn't a line. I could feel every pair of eyes from the reception desk follow us. My shoes stuck a little on the marble where the coffee had trailed. The broken white cups were still there behind us. Nobody had cleaned anything.
By the elevators, the air was cooler. The pendant lights didn't reach quite as far, and the daylight from the glass entrance cut sideways across his face. He stood with his back to the lobby, trying to make a small room out of three people.
He looked at my blouse.
I knew that look. I'd seen it in the kitchen that morning before I'd left, when he'd glanced at my bag and my phone and said drive safe. Now the white blouse had brown all down the front, dark at the buttons. Coffee had dried stiff.
"Do you have a sweater in your bag?" he whispered. "A jacket? Can you cover that up?"
I stared at him. "No."
"There’s a restroom —"
"I said no." My voice shook. I hated that it shook. "I'm not taking it off. I'm not covering it. She did this."
He glanced toward the woman in red. She was standing just outside what he thought was whisper range, arms crossed, her black top visible where her blazer had pulled open. She was watching the elevator numbers go down.
"Honey," he said, so low I almost didn't hear it over the lobby hum. "Don't do the ownership thing here. Not in front of them. We'll talk about it. Just don't make a scene about it."
It landed harder than if he'd yelled. My fingers tightened on my stained papers and they crinkled. I could smell the coffee on myself, sour now.
"You picked the wrong woman," I'd told her. I could still hear myself saying it. "My husband owns this place." I hadn't planned to say it like that. It had just come out when she grabbed my arm.
Before I could answer him, the woman in red turned her head.
"I heard that," she said. She didn't raise her voice. That was worse. Clear, even. "Go ahead. Deny it."
He froze. His mouth opened the way it had in the middle of the lobby, like he was about to separate us again, but there was nothing to separate now. Just the three of us and the brushed steel doors.
"You going to tell me he's not your husband?" she asked me, then looked back at him. "Or are you going to tell all of them I'm lying?"
The elevator dinged. The doors slid open. Empty, lit bright inside, smelling faintly of cleaner.
None of us moved.
May you like
He looked at the open doors, then at me, then at her. The chime faded. The doors stayed open, waiting. Behind us, I could hear someone at reception whisper something and then go quiet. My phone buzzed once in my hand — a missed call I'd already missed — and I didn't look down.
"Well?" she said.
