Page 5 of In the Net (Sin Bin Stories #5)

HARPER

“ N o way,” I sigh.

“Shit, are we stuck?” Sebastian closes his book around his index finger and steps toward the control panel. He shrugs. “Guess I’ll press the emergency call button. I’ve kinda always wanted to.”

He presses the red button, and a couple seconds later a staticky voice buzzes through the speaker next to the control panel. “Hello, Brumehill College maintenance department.”

“Yeah, hey. We seem to be stuck on this elevator. The one in Peek’s Hall. It just stopped between the fourth and fifth floors. Hasn’t been moving for like, I dunno, thirty seconds?”

“We’ll get someone out to take a look right away,” the voice replies. “Is anyone in the elevator experiencing a medical emergency?”

Sebastian turns to me. “You’re not about to lapse into a fit of hysteria, are you?”

I straighten my lips. “No.”

“Not about to faint?”

“No.”

“That bowel condition of yours isn’t about to return?”

“Sebastian,” I grit his name through clenched teeth.

With a grin, he turns back to the speaker. “Nope. No medical emergencies.”

“Alright,” the voice from the maintenance department replies, “I’m going to dispatch someone to figure out what’s going on. If you need to contact us, just press the emergency call button, and I’ll be here.”

“Thanks, will do,” Sebastian answers, stepping away from the panel and resting against the back wall of the cabin.

Several beats of uncomfortable silence pass.

“So, ever been stuck in an elevator before?” Sebastian asks.

“First time,” I answer on a sigh.

“Same here. Think this experience will bond us and we’ll be best friends from now on?”

I cut him a pointed glare.

His brows bounce sardonically. “Yeah. Probably not.”

I lean against the wall of the cabin and tilt my head back, feeling drops of perspiration gather at the nape of my neck. “It’s so stuffy in here.”

“You said it.”

I’m still looking up at the ceiling, but my peripheral vision senses movement from Sebastian, so I flit my gaze to him—to find him unbuttoning his oversized blue button-up shirt.

He slings it off his arms to reveal an obscenely tight undershirt, plastered to his torso. I can’t stop my eyes from crawling down his body. Sweat is already causing the thin white fabric to cling to him, spots of dampness here and there revealing outlines of the sharp edges of his abs and chest.

The sight only supercharges the collection of sweat gathering on me. Now I can feel droplets slinking down my back and stomach. There’s no air conditioning and minimal ventilation in this cabin, and outside the temperature is reaching its high in the mid-eighties.

Sebastian tugs at the collar of his shirt to get some air. The glimpse of his sturdy collarbones, glistening under a sheen of perspiration, while his Adam’s apple bulges on a swallow, makes a warmth much sharper and more intense than the stagnant heat of this elevator coil low in my center.

I quickly pull my gaze away and try to focus on reading my book. But as utterly engrossed in it as I was just minutes ago, none of the words make any sense to my scattered brain when I try to finish the sentence I was in the middle of when the elevator stalled.

“By the way, if you’re getting hot, too, you can take off any piece of clothing you want,” Sebastian says, pulling my attention even further away from my book. “I’m a gentleman. I won’t look.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

He shrugs. The movement of his shoulders pulls the hem of his shirt above his beltline just enough to reveal the sharp ridges of the V-shaped muscle cut low on his abdomen. “Not really.”

“Hello?” the speaker by the control panel sounds again.

This time I’m the one surging toward it, urged by my eagerness to get out of this hot, enclosed space with a partially undressed Sebastian.

“Yes? Are we going to be moving soon?” I ask, aforementioned eagerness seeping into my voice.

“We hope so,” it answers. Even through the static, it’s not difficult to detect the lack of optimism in that statement. “We’ve got maintenance staff looking at the gears at the top of the shaft. Something’s stuck. We might have to call in an outside repair service, but we’ll keep you updated.”

My stomach drops in disappointment, but I do my best to disguise it when I answer, “Great, thank you.”

I let out a long sigh when I back up to the wall, this time letting myself sink to a seating position on the floor.

Sebastian does the same. “What page are you on now?” he asks.

I open my book to check. “One-seventy-eight.”

He arches a brow. “Shit. You’re past me now. I’m still on one-seventy-one.”

I flash him a tight smile. “You snooze, you lose.”

I try to focus on my book again, but when I spread the pages open in front of me, Sebastian says, “Wait.”

“What?” I ask.

“Give me a couple minutes to catch up to you. Then we can at least pass the time by talking about the book up to where we’ve read.”

A conversation with Sebastian hasn’t been my idea of a good time in many years. But it’s hot, stuffy, I’m bored, anxious, and I’m still wound way too tight from Sebastian’s scantily clad upper body. Concentrating on my book would be a long shot anyway.

“Sure, why not?” I accept.

After a couple minutes of Sebastian flipping through pages, he inserts his bookmark and lays the book on the floor by his side.

“Okay, I have a theory about what the opening line means.”

My interest is piqued. The beginning of the book—a long, cryptic sentence that seems to have nothing to do with the paragraph that launches into the story immediately after it—is already infamous among readers, though I’ve been doing my best to avoid anywhere I might encounter spoilers.

“What?” I ask.

We spend the next several minutes talking about what we think of that opening line, then move on to talking about the characters, our favorite passages, how we think the book compares to Chilton’s previous work, and why we think he chose to release it the way he did.

It feels like no time at all has passed when suddenly, the elevator cabin jerks upward and starts ascending again.

Sebastian’s face lights up with surprise. “We’re moving?”

I push back up to my feet. “Seems that way.”

Sebastian stands. When he puts his blue shirt back on, leaving it unbuttoned this time to still reveal the tight white undershirt underneath, the sight is somehow even more provocative.

I realize I’m staring way too obviously at him, and I turn my head quickly, feeling my cheeks go uncomfortably warm.

Stupid late-summer heat making me ogle Sebastian, the last thing in the world I want to do.

As much as I don’t want to ogle him … there’s a strange twinge of disappointment when we finally arrive at the seventh floor and the doors open for us.

In spite of myself, I actually enjoyed our conversation about the book. As an English major, I’ve run into plenty of people who enjoy TK Chilton’s work, but Sebastian is the only person I’ve met who’s as big a fan as I am.

Stepping from the hot, stagnant air of the cabin into the air-conditioned hallway of the seventh floor is like walking into heaven. I sigh in relief as cool air glides over my sweaty body.

All in all, being trapped in an elevator with Sebastian wasn’t as torturous as I would have expected. It’s been a while since I’ve had such an interesting conversation about a book with someone.

For everything I can say about Sebastian, I have to admit that he tends to know his stuff when it comes to literature.

Even if in his own writing his metaphors are awkward and overwrought, and even if his main characters are obvious self-inserts.

I turn to him, ready to tell him that I actually kind of enjoyed our conversation, and to wish him a decent—I won’t go as far as saying good—rest of his day, but before I’m able to open my mouth, two girls rush up to him.

“Oh my gosh, Sebastian!” one of them gushes, “ you were the one stuck in the elevator!?”

Sebastian’s face lights up. I can just about hear his ego humming as these two girls fawn over him like he just went through a near-death experience. And as if I weren’t standing next to him and didn’t have the exact same experience.

“Are you okay?” the second girl asks with a stricken face, stepping toward him and gently touching his shoulder like she needs to make sure he’s still in one piece. “Did you hurt yourself in there?”

“Me? Hurt myself? Nah,” Sebastian says, a big grin on his face. “But come on, girls, let’s get out of here and I’ll tell you all about it. I’m so late for my class, I’m just gonna skip, anyway.”

He wraps his arms around both girls’ shoulders and leads them to the stairway. As he walks away—without a single word or glance of acknowledgement toward me—I can hear him embellishing the story shamelessly as the girls gasp and giggle at his tall tale.

My brow is still scrunched. My eyes narrow in his direction when the stairway door clatters shut behind them.

Seriously? Not a single word to me after all that? The second a couple girls come along to stroke his ego, and who knows what else, he just wraps his arms around them and strolls off like I don’t even exist?

Whatever. I guess it’s worth being reminded that even if Sebastian does have some interesting things to say about my favorite author, he’s still a jerk.