11. Elara
Elara
The elevator doors close and I’m still thinking about Kyle’s stupid face.
Not because I want to be. Because my brain won’t stop replaying it — the smile when I jerked back, the wall stopping me, his hand coming up to my—
Erik’s arm tightens slightly around my shoulders.
My body relaxes.
Just like that. One second I’m wound so tight I can hear my own heartbeat in my ears, and then his arm adjusts, barely, and something in me lets go all at once like it was waiting for permission.
I go rigid.
What was that?
What was that?
I’m not moving. I’m not totally sure I’m breathing.
People don’t just — deflate. Not in elevators.
Not next to the neighbor. There’s a process to calming down, there are steps, you talk yourself through it, and I did not do any of the steps.
Something reached in and switched me off and the switch was his arm.
Okay. Let’s think about literally anything else.
The café.
The deadline.
The oolong article, which is still due, which does not care that I’ve had a day. Gerald probably needs water. I should water Gerald. That’s a thing I can hold onto, the watering of Gerald, a normal task for a normal woman who is normal —
The tension drains out of me again, slow and stupid, like it didn’t get the first memo and is only now lying back down.
Fine. Whatever.
I’m tired and it’s fine and this is just — him. Not him him. Him as in the situation. The Kyle of it all, the adrenaline crash, the small enclosed box where I can finally breathe after all of that. That’s all this is. A box. Physics. You’d relax too.
The floor numbers tick up.
I stare at them like they owe me money because I refuse to look anywhere else right now.
Erik doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t move his arm. The elevator smells like him, like the forest he always somehow smells like, pine and cold air and something underneath it I don’t have a word for and am not going to go looking for one.
I only notice because I notice things.
I’m a writer. Noticing is the job.
I could tell you what the elevator smells like on any given Tuesday.
This is professional observation and it is completely beside the point and my face is doing something warm that I would like it to stop doing.
The doors open and we make our way down the hall.
His arm drops when we reach my door.
I feel the loss of it.
Which is fine. Arms come off shoulders. That’s the natural lifecycle of an arm on a shoulder. It means nothing that the hallway suddenly feels about ten degrees colder and a foot wider, that’s just the building, buildings do that.
I dig for my keys.
“Hey.” His voice is quiet. “You gonna be okay?”
“Yeah, no problem, totally fine, thanks.” I get the key in on the first try, which after the day I’ve had feels like a standing ovation. “Really. I’m good.”
“Ella—”
“Don’t call me that.”
I move to pull away.
“Elara.”
My feet stop.
I don’t tell them to. They just stop, because you stop when someone says your actual name in a voice that means it, and I look up at him because apparently that’s happening now too.
And it’s… a lot.
He’s looking right into my eyes and it makes me want to fall in and back away at the exact same time, which is not a thing eyes are supposed to do. My heart is going again, the racing thing, the thing it keeps doing today that I am choosing to blame on caffeine and a near—Kyle—experience.
And of course — of course — this is the moment my brain decides to replay the elevator.
Do you practice that? Is it a club? I asked this man, this exact face, whether his jaw required a membership.
Out loud. Less than twenty-four hours ago.
There is a version of me that gets to stand in a hallway being looked at like this without the words is it a club surfacing uninvited, and I will never be her.
Nope. The jaw is not the issue. Focus.
“He knows where you live.” It’s not a question. It’s flat, certain, like he’s stating a fact.
Because he is. He knows it.
And I don’t know why, but I hate that so much right now.
Still, now is now and he’s waiting for an answer.
“…Yeah,” I say. “He does.”
Erik nods and I’ve never seen this look on his face before. I don’t love it on him.
“Then come stay with me.” Simple. Like it’s already decided, like he’s reading me the weather and not asking my opinion of it. “Just a few days. Until this blows over.”
“What — no. No, I can’t do that.”
“You can. I’m literally across the hall.”
“I can’t, I have deadlines—”
“You have a laptop.”
“I work better at my desk, and you have a whole life and things and—” And I can hear it. I can hear the sentence loading itself into the chamber and I cannot get my hand in front of it in time. “—I’m sure you have women.”
Silence.
My eyes go very wide.
“I just meant—” I gesture at nothing, at the hallway, at the concept of the universe. “Like. In general. As a category. A man like you presumably has — a calendar. With things in it. People-shaped things. I don’t need to be a thing in your calendar.”
He doesn’t laugh. He blinks at me, slow, like I haven’t said anything strange at all, like I’m sure you have women is a perfectly normal thing to say to a man who just peeled your ex off you.
Fantastic. Love that for me.
“Elara.” He says it certain, like the name is a full sentence. “What matters right now is that you’re safe. I can’t make sure of that from across the hall.”
“But—”
“Please. Let me do this.”
I breathe out.
The hallway is quiet. His keys are in his hand and he’s still looking at me like that, and I’m so tired, and Kyle is somewhere in this city knowing my address, which is the kind of fact that sits on your chest at three a.m. And Erik is right here, and warm, and steady, and my nervous system already voted without asking me, and so did the other one, the one with worse judgment and much louder opinions—
“One condition,” I say.
Something moves at the corner of his mouth.
Dammit.
“What’s that?”
“You stay at my place.”
“Done.”
Zero hesitation. No counteroffer, no let me think. Just done, immediate, like I handed him something he’d already decided he wanted and was waiting for me to offer.
I open my mouth.
Close it.
I don’t have a follow-up. I prepared for resistance and got a yes and now I’m just standing here holding a negotiation that ended early.
“Come on.” He’s already turning toward his door. “Come with me while I grab my things. I don’t want you alone right now.”
I follow him without thinking about it.
Because of Kyle.
Yeah. That’s it. That’s the reason.