Part 2:
Just stay in that back corner for me. Okay, Clara said softly. The grinding started. Metal on metal, the sound of something being forced. Clara winced, but kept her eyes on the gap at the top of the doors. She saw shadows moving in the light. Heard grunts of effort. Heard what sounded like another voice asking something she couldn’t make out. We’re making progress, Ryan said.
Whoever maintained this elevator last did a terrible job. These doors should open smoothly, but the tracks are gked up with. Never mind. You don’t need the details. Just know we’re getting there. Do you do this often? Clara asked. Rescue people from elevators. More often than you’d think. Last month, I pulled a guy out who’d been stuck for 3 hours.
He’d eaten half his lunch and was working on the crossword puzzle by the time we got to him. 3 hours. Clara’s voice pitched higher. But that was a completely different situation. Different elevator, different building, different problem. We’re going to have you out way before that. I promise. Something about the certainty in his voice made Clara believe him.
She wrapped her arms around herself and waited, counting her breaths the way he’d taught her, focusing on the sounds of rescue happening just beyond the doors. “Almost there,” Ryan said. “Stand back just a little more.” The doors lurched, groaned, then slowly, agonizingly slowly began to part. Light flooded in, bright and startling after the dimness.
Clara shielded her eyes, blinking against the glare. As her vision adjusted, she saw hands gripping the elevator doors, forcing them wider. Then she saw him. Ryan Cooper was not what she expected. Clara had imagined maintenance men as older, maybe running to fat, wearing stained coveralls and sporting unckempt beards.
Ryan was maybe 35 with dark hair that curled slightly at his temples and eyes the color of weathered denim. He wore navy work pants and a gray t-shirt with the Hail Industries maintenance logo on the chest. And his hands, the hands currently holding the elevator doors open, were scarred and calloused, but somehow beautiful in their capability.
He was looking at her with concern and something else she couldn’t quite name. relief maybe or recognition as if he’d been as invested in getting her out safely as she’d been in being rescued. Ms. Hail, he said, and his voice was the same as through the intercom, but richer somehow, more real.
Let’s get you out of there. He extended a hand. Clara stared at it for a moment, at the scars across his knuckles, at the dusting of dark hair on his forearms, at the simple offered gesture of help. How long had it been since someone had offered her a hand? Really offered, not as a business formality or a photo opportunity, but as a genuine human connection.
She took his hand. His grip was warm and strong and steady, and he pulled her easily up over the gap between the elevator floor and the building floor. For just a moment, Clare was close enough to smell him. Soap and something mechanical, coffee, and clean sweat. It was so different from the cologne of the men in her boardroom.
so utterly unpretentious and real that she felt dizzy. “Or maybe that was still the panic attack.” “Easy,” Ryan said, his hand moving to her elbow to steady her. “You okay? Do you need to sit down?” “I’m fine,” Clara said automatically. Then, more honestly, “No, maybe. I don’t know.” Ryan guided her to a bench in the hallway, one of those modern, uncomfortable things that Clara had approved in a design meeting years ago.
Without ever considering that someone might actually need to sit on it, he crouched in front of her, those blue gray eyes searching her face with a level of attention that made her feel simultaneously exposed and seen. “Take your time,” he said. “There’s no rush.” Behind him, another maintenance worker, a younger guy with red hair, was securing the elevator doors and speaking into a radio.
Clara could hear fragments of conversation. Structural engineer, full inspection. Probably out of service until, “How long was I in there?” Clara asked. Ryan checked his watch. About 22 minutes. 22 minutes. It had felt like hours. Clara looked at her own watch, a PC Felipe that cost more than most people’s cars, and saw that it was only 7:37.
Her Tokyo call would be starting in her phone. She’d had her phone in her bag, hadn’t she? Clara scrabbled for her purse, which had somehow ended up on the floor during the elevator incident. She pulled out her phone and saw 17 missed calls, 34 texts, and a string of increasingly frantic emails from her assistant.
I need to Clara started to stand, but Ryan’s hand on her shoulder stopped her. “Miss Hail, you just went through a traumatic experience. Maybe take 5 minutes before you jump back into work mode.” Clara looked at him, really looked at him and saw genuine concern in his expression. Not the calculated concern of an employee worried about liability, but actual human empathy.
It was so foreign to her world that she almost didn’t recognize it. “I don’t have 5 minutes,” she said, but her voice lacked conviction. “Then take two doctor’s orders.” “You’re not a doctor.” “No, but I am the guy who just spent 22 minutes talking you through a panic attack, so I’m pulling rank.” He smiled and the smile transformed his face from handsome to something that made Clara’s chest do a strange unfamiliar flutter.
