Stuck with You (The STEMinist Novellas #2) by Ali Hazelwood

            “Does your phone work?” he asks again, patient. Kind.

            Why is he so kind? He was never supposed to be kind. After what happened between us, I decided to torture myself by asking around about him, and the word kind never came up. Not once. One of New York’s top engineers, people would often say. Known for being as good at his job as he is surly. No-nonsense, aloof, standoffish. Though he was never any of these things with me. Until he was, of course.

            “Um.” I fish my phone out of the back pocket of my black tailored pants and press the home button. “No service. But this is a Faraday cage,” I think out loud, “and the elevator shaft is steel. No RF signal is going to be able to make a loop and . . .” I notice the way Erik is staring at me and abruptly shut up. Right. He’s an engineer, too. He already knows all of this. I clear my throat. “No signal, no.”

            Erik nods. “Wi-Fi should work, but it doesn’t. So maybe this is—”

            “—a building-wide power outage?”

            “Maybe even the whole block.”

            Shit.

            Shit, shit, shit. Shit.

            Erik seems to be reading my mind, because he studies me for a moment and says reassuringly, “It might be for the best. Someone is bound to check the elevators if they know that the power’s gone.” He pauses before adding, “Although it might take a while.” Painfully honest. As usual.

            “How long?”

            He shrugs. “A few hours?”

            A few what? A few hours? In an elevator that is smaller than my already-minuscule bathroom? With Erik Nowak, the broodiest of Scandinavian mountains? Erik Nowak, the man who I . . .

            No. No way.

            “There must be something we can do,” I say, trying to sound collected. I swear I’m not panicking. No more than a lot.

            “Nothing that I can think of.”

            “But . . . what do we do now, then?” I ask, hating how whiny my voice is.

            Erik lets his messenger bag drop to the floor with a thump. He leans against the wall opposite mine, which should theoretically give me some room to breathe, even though for some physics-defying reason he still feels too close. I watch him slide his phone in the front pocket of his jeans and cross his arms on his chest. His eyes are cold, unreadable, but there is a faint gleam in them that has a shiver running down my spine.

            “Now,” he says, gaze locked with mine, “we wait.”

            It’s 10:45 on a Friday night. And for the third time in less than ten minutes, my world crashes to an end.





Chapter 2


            Three weeks ago

            There are worse things in the world.

            There are, without a single doubt, giant heaps of worse things in the world. Wet socks. PMS. The Star Wars prequels. Oatmeal raisin cookies that masquerade as chocolate chip, slow Wi-Fi, climate change and income inequality, dandruff, traffic, the finale of Game of Thrones, tarantulas, food-scented soap, people who hate soccer, daylight saving time (when it moves one hour ahead, not behind), toxic masculinity, the unjustly short life span of guinea pigs—all of these, just to name a small handful, are truly terrible, dreadful, horrific things. Because such is the way of the universe: it’s full of bad, sad, upsetting, unfair, enraging circumstances, and I should know better than to pout like a ten-year-old who’s half an inch too short for the roller coaster when Faye tells me from behind the counter of her small coffee shop:

            “Sorry, honey, we’re all out of croissants.”

            To be clear: I don’t even want a croissant. Which I know sounds weird (everybody should always want a croissant; it’s a law of physics, like the Fermi paradox or Einstein’s field equation), but the truth is, I would gladly do without this specific croissant—if this were a regular Tuesday morning.

            Unfortunately, today is pitch day. Which means that I’m meeting with potential future GreenFrame clients. I talk to them, tell them the hundreds of little things I can do to help them manage large-scale sustainable building projects, and hope they’ll decide to hire us. It’s what I’ve been doing for about eight months, ever since I finished my Ph.D.: I try to bring in new clients; I try to keep the ones we already have; I try to ease Gianna’s workload, since she just had her first baby—who, incidentally, is three babies. Apparently, triplets do happen. And they’re adorable, but they also wake one another up in the middle of the night in a never-ending spiral of sleeplessness and exhaustion. Who would have thought? But back to the clients: GreenFrame has been venturing dangerously close to not-quite-in-the-black territory, and today’s pitch meeting is critical to keep the red at bay.