Necessary Restorations (The Walsh Series) (A) (3 page)

So much for getting us out in a jiff.

The air was thick enough to chew, and I was way too close to experiencing one of my worst nightmares: smelling like a two-day-old Italian sub sandwich while in the company of other humans. As far as worst nightmares went, this wasn’t on par with death by killer bees or finding a severed finger in a tub of hummus, but it was a real concern.

The underwear model wasn’t faring much better in this heat. However, it was working out beautifully for me since he had ditched the gingham shirt, leaving him in just a gray tank and khakis. That, a ring on his thumb, a spendy-looking watch, two medical alert bracelets, a copper cuff, freckles, and the dark outline of tattoos on his shoulders.

Those freckles were just too fucking sweet. I wanted to touch everything and ask a dozen questions.

When the Neil Young song ended, I turned down the volume and said, “I’m Tiel, by the way.”

He kept his eyes closed but the corners of his mouth tipped up. “Teal? Like the color?”

I got the ‘isn’t that a color?’ routine a lot. Trust me, I gave my parents plenty of shit for that choice, and spent several adolescent years calling myself Renee. My mother could still produce homemade birthday cards I signed with my adopted name. I found it odd she bothered to keep them. In her book, I ranked just above the people who routinely let their dog poop in her front yard.

It wasn’t until I was out of the house and fully myself that I stopped wanting to be a Hannah or Rachel or Emma. Or Renee.

My older sister, on the other hand, couldn’t get enough of her name. She loved explaining that Agapi was the Greek word for divine love—at least that was her preferred translation. She liked it so much she tattooed her name on her own ass.

It was easy for her to embrace every ounce of her Greekness; she was my mother’s clone. She had the wavy mocha hair, the perfect olive skin, the dark eyes, and the tall, slender figure.

In every way imaginable, I was Agapi’s opposite. I was such an odd blend of both gene pools that I resembled neither of my parents. At first glance, I looked like the kid they adopted. Aside from inheriting my father’s thick black hair and a slightly lighter shade of my mother’s skin, my features were distinctly mine. Sometimes I wondered whether I’d feel differently about my family, my religions, my cultures if I’d ever felt like I belonged in any of them. To this day, I wasn’t sure where I belonged, but at least now I knew who I was.

“No, not the color. T-I-E-L.”

My name came with no cute translation.

“That’s rather distinctive,” he said, his eyes still closed and his smile spreading.

I shrugged and studied his short beard scruff. It was cute, and it softened the line of his jaw in a way that made fuzziness seem wholly sophisticated.

“Yeah,” I said. “But I like that I can Google myself and not find anyone else out there with my exact, full name.”

If I had to guess, this boy could grow one hell of a lumberjack beard in no time at all. It wouldn’t go with the preppy look, but I got the impression he could pull off anything. Underwear models were gifted like that.

And wouldn’t that be a sight? Skivvies, scruff, and smile.

“Okay, I’ll bite. What’s your full name?”

“Tiel Kalogeropoulos-Desai. But I dropped the Kalogeropoulos bit a long time ago. No one has time for all those vowels.”

“That’s amazing,” he laughed. His breathing was a bit more regular, the pulse in his throat jumping a little less. Glancing at his device, I saw his glucose readings leveling off into safer ranges. “It’s like the entire United Nations was crammed into one person.”

“You know, muffin, instead of busting my balls, you could tell me
your
name. It seems like we’re hanging together for a bit.”

“Or dying together,” he said, and then he laughed. “Sorry. I’m Sam. Samuel Aidan Walsh, if that’s what we’re doing.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sam, despite these,” I glanced around the elevator, “circumstances.”

He opened his eyes, all slate blue and serious, and he nodded toward the insulin pump and iPhone in my hands. “Thanks for sorting me out.” I smiled, and he gave me a lopsided grin. “I’m sorry you had to see all that, Tiel.”

And somehow, that was all it took. I was full-tilt smitten with this beautiful boy, from the inside out. I felt like a cartoon character with my heart swelling to ten times its normal size and thumping right out of my chest for all to see.

But before I allowed myself to think about that, the elevator shook, and metal-on-metal shrieked around us.

Everything went dark, and then we were falling.

DEEP BREATH IN, deep breath out. Deep breath in, deep breath out.

Breathing means we’re alive. Deep breath in, deep breath out. Just keep breathing.

“Hey there, folks,” a voice boomed from the intercom. “Captain MacNamara here, Boston Fire Department. Is everyone still with me?”

At first, I didn’t understand the words over Tiel’s screams.

We were huddled together in the corner where we’d landed, Tiel’s arms around my waist, our legs tangled, my hand holding her head to my chest. It was an involuntary reaction to the jolt, my personal space compulsions temporarily suspended, and neither of us were ready to let go yet.

“Shh. It’s okay,” I murmured against her hair, then spoke toward the intercom. “This situation appears to be getting worse, Captain.”

“I know you’ve had one hell of a fall, and we’re workin’ on getting you out, but I’m going to need you to be patient with me.”

“How much
more
patient?” I asked.

This building, despite all its Brutalistic splendor, was off my short-term investment list.

“We’ve got a lady trapped in the other car, and she’s in labor. As long as everyone’s all right in there, we’re going to work on getting to her first.”

Tiel looked up at me in the hazy darkness, giving me and my device a purposeful glance, but I shook my head. I had enough insulin to last me two days, and enough glucose tablets for the month. I was more concerned about sitting on the goddamn floor in a malfunctioning elevator. If anything, going into a diabetic coma would be preferable to picking up the flesh-eating bacteria that was certain to be crawling all over this death trap.

“Do you have an engineer looking at the mechanics?” I asked. “A power outage should stop an elevator, not cause it to free fall. Twice. This is a larger system failure, not just an electrical issue.”

“I can assure you, sir, we’ve got our best guys on it.” He cleared his throat. “Get comfortable. This is gonna take some time.”

The intercom’s connection clicked off, and Tiel shifted to face me, her lips pursed, eyes wide. “Okay then,” she murmured. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah,” I murmured. “I’m fine. You?”

She rolled her shoulders, wincing. “I’ve used a few of my nine lives today, but I’ll survive. You seem to know a lot about elevators.”

“My brother.” I waved toward the doors. “He’s a structural engineer. We work together. He babbles a lot.”

“What do you do?”

“Architect,” I said. “You?”

“Mmm, well, a bit of everything. I’m in grad school at Berklee, and teach a few undergrad classes. Give music lessons.”

I returned my device to my pocket, and the movement edged me away from Tiel. Gaining some space was necessary and appropriate and healthy, but without thinking, I shifted back immediately. I wanted to crawl into the opposite corner, wrap my arms around myself and breathe—alone—for several minutes, and I couldn’t explain why I didn’t. She’d already seen me fall apart. She knew about the thin tubing that snaked from my abdomen to the device in my pocket, and had a sense of how it worked. I could think of fewer than ten people on this planet with that much information about me.

“And don’t forget about band camp,” I said.

Grinning, she handed me an earbud and shuffled her playlist. We sat in the stifling heat, our backs to the wall and shoulders pressed together, enjoying the most random compilation of songs ever conceived. She hummed along with most, and sang with the others.

And it wasn’t awkward.

It should have been awkward.

We were strangers in an admittedly perilous situation, but I was getting the sense Tiel was immune to the awkward.

Perhaps she was immune to me, and that was rather intriguing. No one was immune to me. Even my elderly office assistant, Theresa, would cheerily dissect the mess that was my calendar when I asked with a hot, lingering smile.

Nine songs slipped by, and my attention shifted from controlling my breathing to the pins and needles in my leg. When the emergency lights flashed on again, I rotated my foot tentatively, and groaned at the sensation coursing through my muscles.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Squeezing my upper thigh, I hissed at the discomfort. “My leg’s asleep.”

Tiel shifted, baring a long swatch of inner thigh before righting her skirt and kneeling beside me. Black panties. Maybe navy.

Panties were my concern only when I was in the process of tearing them off, and I was too busy keeping my crazy in check to acknowledge Tiel’s panties. But I did find that expanse of skin fascinating.

She wrapped her hands around my leg and kneaded, gradually restoring the circulation. It was kind, and it seemed Tiel was unabashedly generous, but her hands were vigorously rubbing less than four inches from my cock. I didn’t think she intended
that
type of blood flow.

“Hey,” she said. “Look at that.”

Oh, Jesus. Please don’t call out the tent in my pants.

I opened my eyes, and glanced to my lap. She pointed to my left hand and her right, and the birthmarks just below our thumbs. They were fingerprint-sized and nearly the same coffee shade.

“Huh,” I murmured.

“You’re my freckle twin,” she said. The pad of her thumb swept over my hand, touching the dark spot. “I’ve never met anyone with my exact same birthmark.”

“And I’ve never been stuck in an elevator before. Seems like we’re murdering statistics this afternoon.”

In that position, I could see straight down her shirt and admire the full breasts gazing back at me.

Pink.
A pink, lacy bra that made me wonder whether her nipples would be the same shade.

I could spot silicone from across a busy street, but these were as organic as they came. They were lovely, all golden and ripe, and bursting out of that lace. There was some sort of ripened fruit metaphor waiting to be made but I was too preoccupied to think that far ahead.

“Ahem.” I glanced up to meet her bent eyebrow. “See something you like?”

The smile came to me easily, reflexively. “You have sensational tits.”

I was familiar with only two reactions to that comment: insult and interest. Either I was being slapped across the face or dragged to a private corner, and years of experience taught me the odds always ran close to fifty-fifty.

Tiel’s response was neither.

She sat back, howling with laughter until tears streamed down her cheeks and she hugged her sides. She bunched her skirt above her knees, exposing her legs and ankle bracelet. I stared at her golden skin, but I couldn’t explain what I found so interesting.

“Normal people don’t say shit like that,” she said. “It’s rude, Sam.
Rude.
And pervy. You’re a perv. But thank you. It’s nice to know they can still bring the boys to the yard.”

She didn’t take to any of my usual charms, but she didn’t meet me with outrage or disinterest either. The challenge to find and test her boundaries spurred me forward.

“Please. You’re a little pervy, too. You just gave my upper thigh a deep tissue massage like it was nothing, and beneath all that bullshit, you like me staring at your tits. You’d probably like sucking my cock, too.”

“Do you hear yourself right now?” she asked. “Very rude. Very pervy.”

I shrugged, working hard to disguise my growing fascination with her. “You like it.”

Tiel rolled her eyes and busied herself with untangling the earbuds. “I’m not responding to that.”

“Because you know I’m right.”

I studied her, taking in her pouty lips, rounded curves, and toenails polished orange. I smiled and met her eyes. Who was this girl and why did I want to learn everything about her?