12. Chapter 12
twelve
Max was right. This was the worst. Second only to the hobbling.
After trying a few different positions, including riding him piggyback—don’t even get me started on the heyday Max had with that one, given our ‘donkey business’ debate—we’d settled on the least uncomfortable option. Him, carrying me bridal style, and me, wearing the cursed donkey costume.
It might’ve been romantic—all of mine and Max’s history aside—if I didn’t have a tail. And smacking his chin with my donkey nose every time I tried to turn my head was a total mood killer, so there’s that.
“It smells like baked beans in here.” An oblivious observer might say I was complaining, but they’d be wrong. I was simply informing him of important truths about our situation.
“On the plus side, no one will be able to identify you,” he offered, grinning.
He showed few signs of tiring, despite the fact we’d already gone almost a full block like this.
He was a vision, honestly, even from my awkward angle.
Muscles for days, no longer hidden by the hoodie tied around his waist. Broad shoulders, hunky chest, arms of steel as he held me against him.
Possibly the only plus side of wearing the suit, aside from not having to carry its awkward bulk, was the chance it allowed me to watch him without being creepy.
Or, creepi er , anyway. The suit did all the work for me in that regard.
“Yeah, you’ll be the one getting a reputation around the complex, Max.”
As if I didn’t already feel guilty enough.
There was the guilt from the incident that had weighed on me for a year, sure, but I’d accrued new guilt.
I’d interrupted his Wednesday evening with the whole snake scare, ruined his plans tonight with this donkey fiasco, and now he was carrying me all the way back home. I wasn’t exactly a lightweight.
“Sorry for this,” I said, so softly I wasn’t sure he’d hear it through the donkey head.
“Sorry for what, exactly?” He flashed another smile, a few beads of sweat gathering along his hairline. “Helping a friend out, letting me tag along, or making my weekend a lot more exciting?”
I gulped. That wasn’t at all how I saw the turn of events. “All of them? But mostly roping you into this. And tripping down the stairs in the first place.”
His smile fell and his brows lowered as he fixed me with a stern look. “You don’t have to apologize for choices I made, Dekker. And you don’t have to apologize for things that are beyond your control.”
I shrugged lamely. “Yeah, but if I’d listened to you and let you carry the suit down the stairs instead, we probably wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s my fault.”
“Maybe, and maybe not. Who’s to say I wouldn’t have tripped instead? No offense, but I’m a lot bigger than you. I don’t think you would’ve been able to carry me home if the roles were reversed.”
Huh. Well, even if that had happened, he was so strong and in such great shape, he probably could’ve hopped home on one leg, easy breezy lemon squeezy. It wouldn’t have been as dire as he made it sound.
A car slowed as it passed, the passenger window rolled down as a guy leaned out of it and wolf-whistled at us. I tensed as adrenaline flooded my system. Max’s hold on me tightened.
The passenger shouted something about Max being an… uh, butt guy before adding another vulgar insult and driving off. It was crude and obscene, but I couldn’t deny the cleverness of the heckler’s play on words.
Max didn’t even look in their direction, yet I had no doubt he was ready to act at a moment’s notice if things escalated.
It was in the way he didn’t look directly at them, if anything.
The subtle angling of his body to keep them in his periphery, his measured breathing and steady pace.
No average civilian would react so nonchalantly.
It was both intimidating and hotter than a pizza oven.
When a few seconds passed in tense silence, I patted his chest, my voice soft and my heart still racing. “You can put me down. I can make it the rest of the way.”
I most certainly could not —at least not any time this decade—but he didn’t need to know that.
He arched an eyebrow. “Because of what that knucklehead said?”
Again, all I could offer was a shrug. It was simpler than confessing my sins to him, than begging for his forgiveness before I did anything else.
“Their opinions don’t matter to me, okay?” he continued, the faintest ghost of a smile on his lips. “I learned a long time ago not to sweat the small stuff.”
I wrinkled my brow. “How did you do that?”
It seemed like one of those phrases people threw around as a substitute for wisdom without any advice on how to implement it. Knowing I shouldn’t care about unimportant things didn’t stop me from caring—it only made me feel guilty for it.
He pursed his lips in thought, giving me the most insane urge to run my gloved donkey fingers over them. “You know, I’m going to have to think about that before I can give a good answer. I think a lot of it was innate for me, but some of it I learned from babysitting my younger siblings.”
I perked up at the mention of his family, like a puppy begging for scraps. And yet, the next words out of my mouth were, “What if you can’t not care?”
“About the small stuff?”
“About everything.” I frowned, resisting a yawn as his steady pace and warm body lulled me into a trance. “Sometimes I feel so much all the time that I think I’ll explode.” I laughed softly to myself. “That doesn’t make any sense, does it?”
He hummed thoughtfully. “Just because others don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t real.” His breathing was a touch heavier now. “It sounds really overwhelming, though.”
“It is,” I whispered.
Even when it became too much and numbness took over, I could feel that numbness on a cellular level. That shouldn’t even be possible, right?
In an attempt to lighten the mood, despite the fact my pulse still raced, and my hands shook just from the threat of confrontation with the heckler, I infused cheerfulness into my voice. “It’s not all bad, though. I can get really passionate about things.”
He chuckled, and a bead of sweat dripped down his temple. He adjusted his hold on me as we finally reached the parking lot next to our apartment building. Maybe he was more exhausted from carrying me than he’d let on.
Sure enough, when he spoke, his voice was a little strained. “What kinds of things?”
“Food.” I didn’t even have to think about it.
“I think the world would be a much tastier, happier place if everyone was passionate about good food. You know some people don’t even care what their food tastes like?
Eating is just something they do to stay alive.
An item on a checklist.” I started shaking my head until the donkey ear smacked Max’s jaw. “Oops, sorry. But it blows my mind.”
“I can imagine,” he grunted. Veins popped in his neck in a way that was both attractive and alarming, lit by the parking lot streetlights. “Is that why you became a baker?”
Any levity I’d managed to stir up snuffed out, like he’d blown out the candle that kept my soul alight. My brother’s face came to mind, rapidly scrolling through different expressions. Frustrated. Sad. Happy. Encouraging. And the last one, pale and peaceful in a casket.
It was like Max had mentioned my old bakery again, but worse. A punch to the stomach completely out of the blue. He’d made me comfortable enough to open up, and then he’d pounced.
It could be completely unintentional. Kris and Annie would argue it was. Or it could be the ingenious machinations of a well-trained federal agent. Either way, I didn’t feel up to conversation anymore.
“It’s part of it,” I managed to say, though my voice was conspicuously strangled. We were nearly to the doors to our building. “Put me down, Max. We’re here now, anyway. I’m killing you.”
“I’m fine,” he insisted through heavy breaths. “I can at least get you to your door.”
I scoffed. He’d already carried me a block and a half—me, a fully grown adult who had never said no to dessert in her life—and he was going to push himself to make it through the lobby, up a flight of stairs, and down our hallway to my apartment?
Even if I wasn’t suffocating in my guilt, my humanity prevented me from letting him hurt himself for my sake.
“I don’t think so, buddy.” I wiggled, loosening his hold on me. “We’re taking the elevator, and I’m walking the rest of the way.”
“Walking” was a generous term for the pitiful limping I had to do to get anywhere, but still.
He sighed but relented and set me down right outside the doors to the complex. I straightened the slightly too-large donkey head with as much dignity as I could muster. Which was approximately negative seven.
He held the door open for me while I hopped through, one hand keeping the donkey face from shifting and the other swinging for all it was worth. I needed as much momentum as I could get if I didn’t want to keel over three steps inside the lobby.
“Thank you,” I panted, turning the gigantic donkey head left and right looking for the elevator.
Max nodded in acknowledgement, breathing just as heavily as me, despite expending a million times more effort. His skin glistened with sweat. He laced his fingers behind his head and deepened his breathing, his powerful rib cage expanding and compressing, and his biceps on full display.
If my donkey jaw could move, it would’ve dropped to the floor.
It wasn’t until he angled his head and squinted like he was trying to see through the donkey’s cartoonish screen-eyes that I realized he’d said something.
Possibly many somethings. And I’d stood there, staring blankly at him in a creepy donkey costume like I was setting the scene for a horror movie.
Like Saw , but Hee-Haw , and my weapon of choice would be awkward silence.
Chilling, I know.
I snorted involuntarily at my sleep-deprived creative genius. “ Hee-Haw. Classic.”
Max’s brow furrowed, though a smile spread across his face. “What?”
Oh, biscuits and cream , I’d said that part out loud. I really had to stop doing that.
“I was thinking about donkey serial killers,” I blurted, like a normal person. To distract from my rapid descent into insanity, I jabbed a thumb over my shoulder. “The elevator? Where is it?”
He stared at me for a beat, clearly not ready to move on from the “donkey serial killers” comment. Which was fair.
I was about to hop away like a good little donkey-bunny when he gestured behind me. “That’s it right there.”
I slowly spun my furry self around until I could get a gander at the scratched wooden door in the wall next to an overflowing bulletin board.
Upon closer inspection, the door didn’t have a doorknob, and a barely detectable seam split it in half.
Scuffs and suspicious stains marred it, and the floor indicator that should’ve been above it was a creepy metal arrow stuck between numbers one and two.
The call button looked like a small hole in the wall, almost like what I imagined shooting a cement slab would produce.
“This?” I squeaked. “I thought this was a supply closet where they hid the bodies of people who were late on rent.”
“Honestly, that might be preferable,” he chuckled.
He pressed his knuckle into the bullet hole-like button.
A horrible grinding noise filled the lobby, accompanied by the screech of metal on metal.
Whirring might have happened in the background, but the sounds of death approaching were too overbearing to tell.
The metal arrow above the door twitched until it finally dipped more toward the number one.
The wooden door slid open, bringing higher-pitched grinding and screeching.
Max held his arm in the way to keep the door open, keeping an eye on the cursed contraption in case it decided it wanted a bite out of him. Which it might. “Still want to take the elevator? One flight of stairs isn’t bad.”
As someone who had climbed said stairs, I begged to differ.
Besides, so what if it looked like a death trap waiting to snap its jaw around us?
The building legally had to be up to code, right?
And that included the elevator. No matter what it looked like.
Or sounded like. Or whether it sent the icy chill of the grave across my spine. I could handle one elevator ride.
I nodded resolutely, my donkey snout bobbing. “I’m taking it. You’ve carried me enough already.”
Whether he came with me was up to him and his sense of self-preservation. I’d collect my flip-flops and plastic bag currently stored in his hoodie pocket tomorrow or something.
I hopped past him into the elevator of death, cringing as it shook from my weight. Warm, stale air wafted in through my mask. “The complex doesn’t have a basement for me to plummet to my death in, right?”
He shook his head and laughed. “Not as far as I know. Only one way to find out, though.”
And with that, he joined me.
The inside of the elevator was even worse, shockingly enough.
The buttons were rubbed free of paint, and the glowing screen that showed the floor number was cracked nearly beyond legibility.
With a shrug, Max pressed the button in the middle, which would hopefully take us to the second floor out of the three possible options.
We exchanged uneasy glances as the door screeched shut, his resigned and mine hidden by a mask. With a nightmarish groan, the elevator shuddered upward.
“One floor,” I mumbled to myself as I leaned heavily against the dilapidated wall. “We just have to make it one floor.”
No sooner had the words left my mouth than a new shuddering rocked the floor. The fluorescent lights flickered overhead. The grinding of metal on metal intensified until it rang in my ears and the donkey’s.
And then everything went still.