Five Wishes

Chapter 4

I push the buttons, frantically. I try all of them, gently at first, and then I'm slamming my fists against the panel.

"It's not working!" I scream, punching the panel for all I'm worth.

"Calm down, Bruce Banner. Let me look at that."

Mack clamps his hands on my shoulders and moves me to the other side of the elevator. He turns around and pushes every button.

"I already did that. Why are you doing what I did already? Is that your only strategy?" I say, my voice hitched up a couple octaves.

"Don't worry. I've got a ton of strategies up my sleeve."

"You're wearing short sleeves."

He ignores me and unclips a tool from his belt. It's one of those all-purpose things that turns into a million kinds of tools. It's like a New Age Swiss Army knife. He opens it to a fancy kind of screwdriver and uses it to unscrew the panel.

"Here we go," he says, looking at the wiry innards of the control panel.

I push him out of the way to see what he's seeing. "What? What? What do you see?"

"I don't see anything with you blocking the control panel, Marion," he says to the back of my head.

"Sorry." I step to the side and urge him to stick his tool back into the maze of wires. "What is it? Can you fix it?"

"Well..." He scratches his head. "I've never actually fixed an elevator before."

"Oh my God. I'm going to die! I'm going to die trapped in an elevator with you! And I'm not going to make it to my audition!"

Mack pushes the wires back into the control panel and screws on the cover. Calmly, he pushes the buttons, again. Nothing. Nada. We're stuck.

"Do the alarm," I say. "Push the alarm button."

"The elevator doesn't exactly have an alarm."

"What do you mean, doesn't exactly have an alarm?"

"It doesn't have an alarm."

My panic reproduces itself like an amoeba that you study in tenth grade biology class. The panic doubles and triples in size until my body is too small of a place to hold it, and it needs to burst out of me.

"I'm going to die! I'm going to die! I'm going to die in a broken, old, ugly elevator!" I scream. I grab fistfuls of Mack's shirt and pull him toward me. "I'm going to die!"

He raises an eyebrow and seems to think a minute about the odds of us dying. It's irritating as all get out that he's so calm in the face of our terrible demise. I open my mouth to scream, again, but he stops me cold.

Like a magic trick, his strong arms are suddenly wrapped around my middle, pulling me close and lifting me slightly off the ground. He's massive, even bigger in the small space.

"You're really big," I note.

"Oh, you have no idea," he says.

To prove it, his hands slip under my ass, and he lifts me. He pushes me against his ever-growing bulge, which threatens to bust through his button-fly. I worry that there won't be enough room in the elevator for the three of us: Mack, me, and his giant p***s.

He takes a step forward until my back is against the wall, and he goes in for the kill.

I mean, he kisses me.

Which is a killer.

It's the deadliest, takes your breath away, hot damn kiss that's ever existed since lips were invented.

I'm suddenly very grateful for lips. What a fabulous topper for the mouth. I've never fully appreciated lips before Mack Ryan presses his against mine in a broken elevator between the third and fourth floors.

He doesn't play around. No tentative peck. No timid nibbling. My mouth opens to him, as if he's Ali Baba and he's said the magic words. His tongue searches for mine, and once he finds it, he demands more.

He's very demanding. With one hand cupping my ass, his other hand travels to my breast. I discover I like it when a man's demanding. In fact, I want more demanding.

I demand it.

My hands curve behind Mack's neck, pulling him even closer. My fingers thread through the thick hair that pokes out from underneath his fishing cap. He's all kind of good. I knew he was fine, but I didn't know how fine. Even his neck is sexy. It's long and muscled. I want to kiss and suck and lick his neck.

If his neck is this good, I reason, the rest of him is probably off the charts. I need to inspect his everything to verify my assumption. I want to do all kinds of things to him. Different things. For the first time in my life, I'm hankering to bite a man's ass.

Oh, yeah.

For a moment, I think I hear Barry White singing. Somehow, the R&B crooner has joined us in the elevator, and his deep voice is spurring me on to get naked in a hurry. It doesn't seem odd at all to me that Barry White would appear out of nowhere to give a free concert while I kiss the man I've been crushing on for two years.

But it's not Barry White, I realize. It's Mack. And he's not singing. He's crooning. There's no other word for it. Officially, I guess it would be called moaning, but his voice is impossibly deep and smooth, and it's so filled with arousal that it beckons me to glide my hands down his back and tuck them inside his jeans.

His lips don't stop. It's the never-ending kiss. A few seconds more, and I'm sure the friction will ignite us into flames. But what a way to go... Dying in a ball of flames, brought on by the most talented pair of lips I've ever come across.

It gets me to thinking. Lips. Tongue. Lips. Tongue. The possibilities are endless with two simple body parts.

Oh, God.

His hands are everywhere. Talented fingers explore my body while he kisses me in a familiar, seductive rhythm.

I'm aroused from my head to my toes. My blood is pumping to my hoohah, like it's going for gold in the Olympics. I'm also wet. Very, very wet. I've peed in my pants kind of wet. If I wasn't ovulating before, I sure am now. I've probably got three eggs pushing each other out of the way to see which of them can make it down my fallopian tubes first.

With the thought of eggs and fallopian tubes, I sober up. At least, I sober up enough to take my hands out of his pants, break off the kiss, and push him away. I'm still pretty drunk with arousal, though. It's all I can do to not take a running leap at his midsection.

"You kissed me," I say, breathless.

"Did I?" he asks. His chest rises and falls with heavy breathing. His fisherman's hat has slipped over one eye, and he rights it on his head, taking a second to wipe his forehead with the back of his hand. His lips are red and swollen, and his eyes are predator dark.

"Why did you kiss me?" I demand.

His eyes travel up my body, pausing briefly at my chest. "You were panicking. I thought I would calm you down."

"I wasn't panicking," I lie. "And you certainly didn't calm me down!"

"You're right. You weren't calm. I like that."

"Oh, geez." I slap my cheek to wake myself out my hormonal stupor. "Shut up!" I yell.

"I didn't say anything."

"Not you. My body. It needs to shut up," I explain.

"Sorry, I can't help you with that," he says with a grin. "I only know how to make your body talk."

"Gross," I say and bite my lower lip. I notice that his jeans are still ready to explode, and his eyes are big as saucers. Flying saucer big.

He's definitely attracted to me, or maybe it's just the trapped with a woman in an enclosed space that's got him hot and bothered. But I don't want to be kissed merely to stop from freaking out. In fact, it pisses me off.

I'm about to work up the courage to tell him my lips are off limits forever, when the elevator lurches back to life. It creaks and groans, and for a glorious half a second I think we're going down to the bottom floor, where I'll be freed and will make it to my audition on time and become rich and famous or at least employed.

But nope.

It's only a hiccup. A death rattle. A momentary last gasp from an otherwise dead machine.

"No!" I yell. "Keep going! Keep going!" I hop up and down, trying to get it to start again. "Help me out here," I urge Mack. I continue to jump up and down, but he doesn't join me. The elevator sways from side to side, but it doesn't budge. I keep jumping, but we're as stuck as ever.

"You might want to stop doing that," he says.

"We have to do something! You could at least help me."

He puts his hand on my shoulder. "I really think you should stop."

I give it everything I got, jumping up as high as I can to fall as hard as possible to give the elevator a shock into starting. "I think I've almost got it going," I say, optimistically.

Mack leans over and looks me in the eyes. "Please stop. If you don't stop, we have a good chance of plummeting to our deaths."

"Deaths?"

I stop jumping. Even if he's wrong, I'm out of breath. I drop to the floor and curl into the fetal position. I close my eyes and pant, like I'm a dog.

"What are you doing down there?" he asks.

"There's more oxygen down here."

"Are you claustrophobic?"

"Only in small, enclosed spaces."

Mack sits down cross-legged next to me. He takes my hand and rubs my palm with his thumb. "We're going to be fine," he says. He's so calm and strong that I almost believe him. "There's plenty of oxygen. It's not exactly airtight, if you know what I mean."

I take a deep breath. "Okay. What if I have to pee?"

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Let's focus on getting help. Take out your cellphone and call 911."

Suddenly it's easier to breathe. My cellphone. Of course. Why didn't I think about that before? Esperanza's fire department will get us out of here.

"Where's your cellphone?" he asks.

"In my purse."

"Where's your purse?"

Where's my purse?

I look around the elevator. There's Mack. There's me. There's a tackle box. There's a fishing rod. No purse. I must have left it in my apartment when I was rushing to leave for the audition.

"You're full of s**t," I say. "There's not a lot of oxygen in here."

Mack grips my hand tight. "Don't worry. Not a problem."

"You're using that word wrong. I don't think you know what 'problem' means."

He grins. "I know what 'problem' means."

"You're looking at me like you think I'm a problem."

"That's not how I'm looking at you."

"You're not?"

"Nope."

We lock eyes, and I realize he's not looking at me like that. He's looking at me in a whole different way. Like a bulimic eyeing a bag of M&Ms.

His thumb travels from my palm to the inside of my wrist. My skin erupts in goosebumps, and I gasp. We sit like that for a while, both of us watching his thumb on my wrist with rapt attention.

"I didn't kiss you to calm you down," he says. "I've wanted to do that for a long time."

"Really? For how long?" I turn my other hand palm up so he can caress that wrist, too. He does.

"Two years."

We've only known each other for two years. That's when I moved in, which wasn't that long after he moved to town and opened the diner.

"That's a long time to want to do something without doing it," I say.

"Tell me about it."

"I'm glad you finally did it."

Mack tugs my arm, and I sit up. He pulls me onto his lap. He smells like s*x and expensive cologne. "You smell better than you think," I note.

"It's probably a good idea if you work on your compliments. You start well, but then you slide off target."

"Do I? Maybe you should show me how it's done."

Mack takes off his hat and tosses it into the corner. His lips brush my neck. "You're the sexiest woman I've ever met," he whispers. He continues with long, languid strokes of his lips on my neck, and then he sucks ever so gently on my earlobe.

"Oh," I moan. "Yes, that's a good compliment."

"You drive me mad each time I see you. Mad to kiss you, possess you, to be inside you."

"That's another good one."

My head tips back, as his lips make their way to the front of my neck. He trails light kisses down, down, down...

"Sure, you're a pain in the ass, and you're flighty, and you can't figure out what you want to be in this world," he continues. "But I don't mind all that."

I pull back and fall off his lap. "You slid off target," I say. "You were doing great before that. You should probably take back everything you said, starting with me being a pain in the ass."

Mack pushes up from the floor and helps me up, too. "Nope. Sorry. Can't do that. It would be false advertising."

I put my hands on my hips. "Are you playing with me?"

"Yes, and I'm not done yet."

"I hate being played with."

"Well, I love playing with you. I'm planning on playing a whole lot more, once we get out of here."

"Are we getting out of here?"

Mack scans the elevator, looking at the buttons, the door, and the ceiling. "It would have been easier if you had your cellphone with you," he says.

A bell goes off in my brain, signaling a stroke of genius. "Your cellphone," I announce, slapping his shoulder. "You can call for help on your cellphone!"

"I don't have a cellphone."

"What do you mean you don't have a cellphone? Everyone has a cellphone. Stop playing with me."

"I don't have internet, either," he says, studying the elevator doors. "Come and help me."

He sticks his fingers into the crack between the doors and pulls. I do the same, pulling in the other direction. "How can you not have a cellphone?" I ask, pulling at the door with all my strength. "And no internet?"

He ignores me, focusing on opening the doors. When we manage to get the doors halfway open, I wedge my body between them, ready to be the first one out of the elevator. But there's no exit. The doors open to reveal a concrete wall.

"No!" I yell, pounding my fists against the wall.

"Get back here." Mack pulls at my hips, but I'm wedged between the doors. The pressure is terrible, and now I'm not only trapped in an elevator, but I'm going to be crushed to death between its doors.

"Why don't you have a cellphone!" I scream.

"Take a deep breath." He sounds like a drill sergeant, loud, deep, and bossy.

I take a breath just as Mack yanks me quick and hard. I fly back, free of the doors and slam into him. He takes my weight easily and keeps me upright. I look down at my body and count all my limbs to make sure I haven't lost anything important.

"Sonofabitch!" I yell.

"What? Are you hurt?" He turns me around and pats me down, looking for injuries. I stick two fingers in front of his face.

"Yes. I've broken two fingernails. Two!"

"I thought you were hurt."

"I am hurt. I paid fifteen dollars for this manicure."

Mack stares at me without blinking. His jaw clenches, and his face gets red. It looks like he's going to explode. And he does.