CHAPTER 7- ALMOST

ELENA POV

His fingers were warm against my jaw. Neither of us moved. The whole world had narrowed to that small gap between us and the sound of my own pulse hammering in my throat. Then, the elevator lurched so hard that the metal groaned below us.

The car dropped an inch before catching itself and starting to climb again. Mike’s hand pulled back like he had touched something hot. I scrambled up off the floor, putting as much distance as the small box allowed. My heart was still slamming for different reasons now, or maybe the same one, wearing panic as a disguise.

“It’s moving,” I said, uselessly, since we could both feel it.

“Yeah, it’s moving,” he agreed.

His voice was rougher than before. He was already straightening above the gap, already folding whatever had slipped loose back into its place.

The doors opened on forty-two with a small, innocent chime, like nothing had happened. Like the last twenty minutes hadn’t rearranged something in my chest that I fully intended to pretend was still where I had left it. Mike was waiting on the other side. Jacket back on, and sleeves rolled down.

Every trace of the man who had reached through a maintenance gap for my face smoothed away and packed back into place. Only his eyes gave something up, and only for a second, before he blinked it into something professional.

“Materials are in the conference room, I’ll have Priya bring coffee.” he said.

“Fine.”

“Elena.”

I stopped. I didn’t turn all the way, just enough to look at him over my shoulder, bracing for whatever came next. An apology, or maybe an acknowledgment. Something.

“The flaw you caught last week, I want your reading on three more deals before the end of the quarter.” he said instead, flat and businesslike, like the elevator hadn’t happened at all.

Something in my chest sank. I hated how much it sank. Hated that some small, foolish part of me had wanted him to say something else.

“Fine,” I said again and walked into the conference room without waiting for him.

The rest of the afternoon went exactly the way it should have. Cold, efficient, and professional. He sat across the long table, and every time our eyes met over a spreadsheet, one of us looked away first. Neither of us mentioned the gap in the ceiling. Or his hand on my face. Or the fact that I had genuinely, stupidly, thought he was going to kiss me.

By the time I left, the sun had already dropped behind the skyline. The cab ride home felt longer than it should have. I rested my forehead against the cool window glass and replayed it despite every instruction I gave myself not to.

I didn’t sleep that night. I lay there watching the ceiling fan turn slow circles, and every time I closed my eyes I was back on that elevator floor, looking up through the gap at a man I was fairly sure I hated, watching his face soften just enough right before his hand found my jaw.

It was the elevator, and I told myself that four times. Like repetition might make it true. Adrenaline or proximity. It doesn’t mean anything. It didn’t sound convincing, even inside my own head. I thought about the way he said my name. Softer than I had ever heard him say anything. Stripped of all that boardroom command. It's like it cost him something just to say it.

I thought about the crease between his brows in the dim emergency light. The exact shade of his eyes up close. The fact that losing an argument to me a week ago apparently still lived somewhere in his head, unintentionally. The same way this was apparently going to live in mine.

I turned onto my side. Punched my pillow into a different shape. Told myself that tomorrow I would walk back into that building exactly as unaffected as he clearly intended to be.

Across the city, in a penthouse far bigger and far emptier than my apartment, Mike stood at the window with a glass of scotch he hadn’t touched, staring down at a city that had never once kept him up at night. Then he thought about a jaw beneath his fingers, and a name in his mouth that had sounded, for one unguarded second, like something worth losing an argument for.