Newsletter Archive
What happens when you get trapped in an elevator with the guy you can’t stand – and then the lights go out?
Alone in the Elevator: Excerpt
Prologue
Beth
Basic information is there, but you need to connect the dots
Underdeveloped
??
It was the ?? that drove me over the edge. Could a professor write anything more infuriating on a student paper? I thought my analysis of the Monroe Doctrine’s impact on American foreign policy was perfectly clear. If he thought differently, he could at least explain why.
?? is lazy. Dismissive. Infantilizing.
The only thing I could possibly learn from ?? is that Jack Fletcher is a dick. But I knew that already.
He’s not even a professor. He’s a teaching assistant, a grader, for the eminent but checked-out Dr. Webb. Dr. Webb can’t be bothered to read fifty student papers. Nate Dorsey, the other grader for American History to 1865, isn’t reading my work either; he and I dated over the summer, when we were instructors at Benton State’s Junior Historians Academy. Jack had been responsible for supervising us both. And while he was effortlessly inspiring with the middle school kids we were all teaching—he exuded the kind of warmhearted authority that makes some people go weak at the knees—he was a shit mentor. Arrogant. Dismissive. Infantilizing. The kind of man who would later write ?? on a perfectly clear analysis of the Monroe Doctrine.
So what if he’s blindingly handsome, I think as I pound up the worn stairs of the university building where his TA office is located. It’s December; the sun hasn’t made his brown hair blaze red for months. I haven’t seen his shoulder muscles stretch a T-shirt since August. We may have worked together all summer, but now if I walk past him after one of Dr. Webb’s lectures, he can scarcely be bothered to look at me with his smoldering brown eyes. Let alone address me with his almost-too-pretty mouth.
Which is fine. It’s great. We’re sort-of professor and sort-of student. I wrote a good paper; I did my job. I’m here now to make sure he does his. And I swear that I push my way into his office—a hodgepodge of desks strewn with the crusty coffee cups and battered library books of his fellow graduate students, who are all fortunately absent—with no intention other than to politely ask him to clarify that infuriating ??
“Beth,” he says as soon as he sees me, lifting his smoldering brown eyes to mine and smirking slightly with his pretty mouth. He had been bent over his computer when I came in, but now he leans back and folds his arms across his chest, shoulder muscles stretching a chocolate-brown Henley.
Goddammit.
“What the fuck does this mean?” I demand, less politely than I’d hoped—I hadn’t planned on that Henley—as I yank my paper out of my bag and fling it like a Frisbee over his laptop.
“It means you got an A minus,” he replies calmly, lifting an eyebrow at me.
“Which I contest, but I didn’t mean that, I meant this.” I take several steps closer so I can flip to the page with the offensive question marks.
He slips the paper out of my hand, smiles more—should I clock him with a crusty coffee cup?— and begins to read. From the beginning.
“You don’t even remember it?” I fume, insulted.
He glances at me again, smirk fading, and replies shortly, “I read a lot of student papers.”
“And I’m just another student,” I find myself saying. No matter how much he ignores me now, I must be more memorable than the randos in Dr. Webb’s class. He never squabbled with them over whether our middle schoolers were drinking too much, too little, or just enough water in Missouri’s blistering summer heat. He never fought with them on trivia nights at one of our local bars (“I’m not debating whether the mule is Missouri’s state animal,” he’d told me condescendingly, arms folded much the way they are now. “I’m saying you’re wrong about what a mule is.” “No, you’re wrong,” I’d parried. “Its parents have to be a male donkey and a female horse. The male is the ass, Jack. The male.”). I’ve never caught him checking out them the way I imagine, in my weaker moments, that I sometimes catch him checking out me.
Jack frowns at my last remark, focuses harder on my paper, and tenses his muscles distractingly. Every once in a while, I think I see the corners of his mouth twitch, but it could just be a trick of the light.
“I think these comments are sound,” he tells me finally, handing me back my paper with no trace of a smirk.
“But what—”
“You have good ideas, you argue passionately, but your thinking needs to mature. That’s all.” He stands up—I had forgotten how tall he is—and walks around his desk to lead me out of the cramped office.
“That’s all? That’s all? You can’t just tell me, vaguely, that I’m inadequate—”
“I didn’t say you were inadequate—”
“—you have to tell me what, specifically, I need to improve!”
He looks me in the eye for a fraction of a second, big chest rising and falling, then drags his gaze down to the paper as he pushes it toward me. Our fingers touch as I take it from him. I let out the tiniest involuntary gasp; he yanks his hand back like he’s been burned.
He’s never so much as brushed my shoulder on his way to the copier. Never put a hand on my arm to get my attention. Never given me a high five or a handshake or steadied me in a crowd of jostling kids. If he had, maybe that accidental contact wouldn’t have fanned a flame. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed how small this office is, or how close we’re standing.
My sort-of professor and I are just inches apart in front of the sort-of closed door, pinned between his desk and his colleague’s. If I took a step back, I would feel its edge bite into my thighs.
I don’t take a step back. Instead I look up at Jack questioningly, maybe challengingly, taking in the tendons of his neck, his slightly open mouth, the way he can’t seem to decide if he wants to let his eyes rest on my face or my body.
“You’ll figure it out on your own,” he murmurs after too long a pause as he settles for staring at my own open mouth. “And Dr. Webb is ultimately responsible for everyone’s final grades.”
“Which will be based on the information you give him,” I contradict him on an exhale, no longer paying excellent attention to our actual conversation. “I know Dr. Webb isn’t reading our work, and Nate can’t grade mine, so that leaves—”
I don’t know who moves first. I don’t know if I hop onto the desk behind me, or if he grabs me around the waist and lifts me. I can never remember, later, which of us flung open my heavy winter coat. All I know is that Jack Fletcher is suddenly panting over me, stepping between the legs I’m spreading wide for him, and leaning into the hands I’m wrapping around his biceps.
My heart is pounding so hard that I feel short of breath; his muscles feel so delicious that I can’t see straight. Nate, who I broke up with months ago, had been a boy; Jack is a man. As I dig my fingers into his unyielding flesh, probably whimpering a little, I finally have to admit how desperately I’ve been wanting him to treat me like a woman, instead of the naive, barely post-adolescent kid I wish I wasn’t.
But instead of kissing me, instead of fucking my brains out on a pile of battered library books, he closes his eyes and growls, “Go, Beth.”
“What? Why?” I force out, unconsciously pulling him closer.
He waits a minute to fight. He braces himself against the desk, big arms on either side of me, and lets me slide my hands up to his delicious shoulders. He bends forward enough that I can feel his hot breath on my throat.
“You’re not my professor,” I murmur as I greedily run my fingers through his russet hair. “Not technically.”
“Close enough,” he grits out. He drags himself away from me, backs up as far as he can and puts his hands on his hips, still breathing hard, still keeping his eyes closed.
“And you’re, what? 27? 28?” I press, starting to panic a little that this moment is slipping out of my grasp. “I’m 21, that’s not such a big—” “Get OUT,” he bellows so suddenly and forcefully that I flinch. I’m too flustered to even hurl a fuck you his way as I stuff my paper into my bag, zip up my coat, and scurry out of his office, burning with shame like the naive, barely post-adolescent kid I definitely am.