Chapter 20
Chloe looked around the small, stone-encased chamber that they were locked in.
It suddenly felt more like a crypt than a cellar.
The kiss still hummed on her lips, but any thought of it was fast giving way to the horror of being trapped underground with no light source, no toilet, and no one who might think to check on them for hours.
“The shelf must have fallen in front of the door,” John said, stating the obvious.
“So how do we get out?” Chloe cried, pressing her weight against the door, then shoving it in frustration.
John pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket. “No reception. You?” Chloe checked her phone. Not a flicker.
“What are we going to do? Who knows we’re down here?” she asked, her voice high and strained.
“Don’t worry,” John said. “Elaine knows I’m down here, so does the head butler. They’ll come looking for the wine in a minute.”
“Or they’ll just settle for the cheap stuff,” Chloe muttered, shivering slightly.
“That is a possibility,” he admitted, taking his jacket off and giving it to her. “Here.”
“Thanks.” She slipped it on—it was warm and smelled of his cologne. She hugged it around her, inhaling the smell.
“Rob will come looking for you,” he said, clearing his throat as he sank down onto one of the upturned crates. She looked down at her watch, which now blinked yellow. Would Rob sense what she was feeling and know to come? She didn’t even know whether the device was in range from down here.
“What do we do until then?” she asked, and now her mind leaped straight back to the kiss and she felt a flutter in her stomach.
Rob kissed like a well-rehearsed dancer who never missed a beat.
But that kiss with John, brief as it was, had been something else entirely.
It wasn’t a dance, it was a match struck, dropped on dry kindling.
Wild and unscripted…dangerously intoxicating.
That was the kind of kiss people burned the world down for.
Even now, she could still feel it—not just on her lips, but in her fingertips, at the back of her knees, a smoldering glow, desperate to be reignited.
John crouched down and set the torch upright on the floor, so it cast a cone of amber light upward.
Then, without looking at her, he stepped toward her and slipped his hand into the jacket draped around her shoulders.
Her breath caught in anticipation of what he might do, but then he dipped into the inner pocket and his hand drew back holding a bottle opener.
“We could open something?” he said, glancing at the shelves.
She exhaled. “Sure.”
John turned two crates on their sides as makeshift seats, then selected a dusty bottle of port and cracked it open with a quiet flourish. He offered her the first sip.
“I don’t know if I like port,” she said, eyeing it warily.
“Is that what Indiana Jones would say?” he asked, his voice lighter suddenly. “I thought you were always up for trying new things.”
“Oh I am,” she said, taking the bottle from him, trying not to worry about what she would do if she needed the loo. You never saw that in The Last Crusade, the damsel saying, “Will you excuse me while I do a wee behind this rock?”
She pressed the cool glass lip to her mouth and the sweet, dark liquid filled her senses.
He was right, it was delicious. She licked her lips and passed the bottle back to him.
He drank from the same spot; she watched his mouth, touching the place hers had just been.
Her pulse quickened and the walls of the cellar pressed closer.
She drew John’s jacket tighter around her shoulders, her knee brushed his, but neither of them moved. “They’ll notice we’re gone soon, right?” she asked.
“Sure, twenty minutes, max,” John said, his voice firm, reassuring.
Now that they’d embraced their immediate predicament, Chloe felt a fresh wave of embarrassment over the kiss, the seismic reaction she’d had. There was no getting away from it.
“I’m sorry, about kissing you just now,” she said quietly, and even in the half-light, she could see his cheeks burn.
“I’m sorry if I confused things,” he said, then added after a beat, “You’re with Rob. I don’t want you to do anything you’d regret.”
Was that why he’d stopped, because of Rob? She felt a thrum of hope, an ember stirring. How could she explain that Rob wasn’t real, that he wouldn’t mind? You couldn’t cheat on a machine, could you? She didn’t want to lie, but the truth was impossible.
She reached for the port, then asked with a smile, “Why didn’t you kiss me like that back then?”
John laughed, dragging a hand through his hair.
“You never looked at me then like you’re looking at me now.
” And there it was again, embers glowing hot in his eyes.
He glanced away, but she didn’t. Studying him, it struck her how unique his face was, not perfect like Rob’s but lived in, perfectly imperfect—the small scar on his forehead, his slightly crooked front tooth, the patch on his chin where stubble didn’t grow, the smile lines around his eyes, and the serious slope of his nose.
It was a face that told a story. Were these feelings for him new, or had they been here all along, just waiting to be unearthed?
“Let’s talk about something else,” he said, voice catching, then added with a note of yearning, “Please.” She shivered again.
“Come here, you’re still cold.” So she moved her crate next to his and he put his arm around her.
He smelled so inviting, and his embrace felt so solid and comforting that she leaned into it.
“So, what do you think of the proctor’s new beard?” John asked, his voice slightly strained.
“It suits him. Not everyone can pull off a beard,” Chloe said, leaping onto this life raft of trivial conversation. “Okay, top ten beards, famous or otherwise, go.”
“Excellent question, but are we allowed to play top ten without Kiko and Sean?”
“I think they’d give us a dispensation to play, under the circumstances.”
“In that case, Santa Claus, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“Gandalf, Abraham Lincoln—this is in no particular order.”
“Castro?” she offered.
“I’ll give you young Castro. Bluebeard? I don’t know what he looks like, but he must have had a first-rate beard.”
Chloe laughed, relieved to have found something to distract them from the heat that still lingered between them. Once they’d exhausted beards, they moved on to top ten movies with food in the title, then top ten things you’d rather be doing than being trapped in a cellar.
She realized Rob would never be able to play a game like this, not with the whole internet at his fingertips.
The fun of this game was in the debate, in suddenly remembering something everyone else had forgotten, arguing over facts half remembered.
Phones were not allowed, because googling the answer would ruin the fun.
“A Clockwork Orange!” Chloe yelled triumphantly.
John burst out laughing, the kind of helpless, full-bodied laugh that fed her own until she couldn’t breathe. “We finished fruit ten minutes ago.”
She felt warm, her head spinning—the port had crept up on her.
“Oh did we? I think I’m drunk,” Chloe said, slipping off the crate onto the floor in a graceful collapse.
“Me too,” he admitted, sliding down beside her.
“How long have we been down here?” she asked, and he reached to check his phone.
“Forty minutes,” he said.
“They must have finished dinner by now. I’m offended no one’s noticed we’re not there.”
“Indeed,” he said.
“Indeed,” she mimicked in her best scholarly drawl, then hiccupped.
He laughed, a happy drunk laugh, which made her suddenly feel nineteen again.
John clicked open, then closed, the bottle opener in his hand.
She smiled, remembering his habit of fiddling with things when he’d had too much to drink.
There was a charming vulnerability about him after three glasses of wine.
Rob would never be tipsy. He might be able to act like he was, but he would only be playing a part.
It dawned on her that he was always playing a part.
He was a figment of her imagination, made real. The thought made her shiver.
“I need to move,” she said, getting to her feet and attempting some half-hearted star jumps. He sighed, amused, then stood up to join her.
“Shall we dance? It’s more dignified than star jumps.”
“Do you have music?”
He pulled out his phone and began scrolling, his thumb firm, deliberate.
Then, quietly, the room was filled with the warm, melancholic voice of Norah Jones singing “And Then There Was You.” The sound was low, slightly tinny through the phone speaker, but it wrapped around them in the silence.
“It’s all I’ve got downloaded,” he said with an apologetic tilt of his head.
Then he reached for her hand, fingers curling around hers, and he gave a small tug, inviting rather than insisting.
She let herself be led. Her other hand found his shoulder without her thinking, and he settled a hand at her waist. And then they turned slowly in time with the music.
The room around them contracting, blurring at the edges until it was just them, in no particular space or time.
Chloe could feel the steady beat of his heart beneath his shirt, the warmth of his hands. The song lyrics brushing against something she hadn’t known was aching. She let herself rest her cheek lightly against his shoulder, and the moment felt painfully romantic.
“I take it you didn’t have the crazy chicken song, then?” she asked, smiling into his shoulder.
“That’s not in my repertoire,” he said, as he pulled her a little closer.
They moved in small circles, the port dulling the voice telling her she was playing with fire.
She didn’t care, because right now, being trapped underground in a damp wine cellar, dancing to this song, felt like the only place she wanted to be.
She lifted her head, and he was already looking at her. Their eyes met and held.