I hated elevators. The way they were always so cramped, and how it took forever to just go a couple feet. Most of the time, I tried to avoid them, climbing flight after flight of stairs instead. The Ryder Memorial Library, newly built, was the only library on campus and the only library in the city which had the copy of the book I needed for my culture of food class. And, for some strange reason, the stairs—excluding the emergency, don't-enter-or-an-alarm-will-sign stairs—only went to the third floor. The only way to reach to top floor, where my book sat waiting, was the elevator.

Stepping into the elevator, I sighed loudly. I would have much rather risked the alarm ringing stairs then have to spend half a second in there. All I needed, though, was to get my project done and I would be back in bed, eating ice cream and watching The Notebook again. Pressing the DOOR CLOSE button, I took a deep breath. Everything would be fine. I would be fine. The doors were two seconds from closing when a hand thrust out, catching them. It was something I had only seen happen in the movies, never in real life.

“Mind if I...”

His voice trailed off as he noticed my standing there. Mavis Harold. I pursed my lips together as the doors finally closed, and the elevator started upwards. “Great.” I muttered, staring into the reflective buttons in front of me. I was holding onto the rail tightly, my knuckles beginning to turn white, “this is just great.” The elevator changed from G to 1 and it seemed to take forever, spread out over hours instead of seconds. In my head, I counted the time it took between floors. One. Two. “What are you doing here?” I asked him. Three. Four.

“I go to this school too.”

“No you don't.” I told him, pressing the 7 button repeatedly, hoping it would speed the elevator along. “You don't exist. I'm not allowing you to exist.”

“Mature.” He sighed. “I wasn't the one that started this. You were."

It was the longest elevator ride ever. “Sure. I kissed you. I'll admit it. But you were the one who kissed me back. Who kept kissing me. Who...” I let my voice trail off slightly. “You weren't some innocent bystander in this so stop pretending you were.” Why wasn't it going fast enough. I smoked the button with my hand. Nothing was worth this. Nothing. “Why am I even still talking to you?” I asked, partially to myself.

“Jesus Wren,” he started, “we were having a good time and everything was fine until...”

And then it stopped. The elevator. It just stopped moving, coming to a complete halt. The florescent lights which had been blaring above our heads cut out, leaving us in darkness, except for the one emergency light in the corner of the elevator. I looked towards the digital display above my head, which was now dark. Suddenly my heart began to pound. I could feel it, about to break through my chest. Hitting the buttons, I waited for it to start about again, for the doors to open and for someone to walk through. But nothing happened. I hit the button again, harder. “Open.” I pleaded, smacking it a couple more times. “Open. Open. Open.” I paused, smashing my hand into it. “Open.”

“Stop.” Mavis said behind me, “if anything you're only making it worse...” I could barely hear him though, the panic rising in my brain.

“Open. Open. Open.” I repeated, hitting the DOOR OPEN button. Nothing happened. “Oh god.” I said, flailing myself against the side of the elevator. “I'm going to die in here. I'm actually gong to die in here.” I stared over in Mavis' direction. He was just standing there, calm. Not a worry in the world. It made me angrier with him than I already had been, cursing him for his calm attitude. “And worse, I'm going to die in here with you.”

He stepped forward, closing the distance that I had been purposely keeping between us, and pulling my hand away from the buttons. Pressing the large red EMERGENCY button, he stepped back, waiting. I could feel myself panicking more and more as I stood there, trapped. Looking up I noticed the exit at the top, a tiny space of about three feet. “Look,” I said, pointing upwards. “I'm getting out of here.”

“Wren,” he sighed, “don't be stupid.”

I stared at him, hand on the hip, full on attitude. “Don't call me stupid."

“We should stay put until someone comes,” he explained. “because if this elevator starts moving again, say when the power comes back on, then you're going to end up a pancake.” He clapped his hands together for emphasis, un-tactfully, I wished that I was stuck in here with someone else, anyone else. The elevator ride would have been bad enough. This was worse. “You just need to sit down and chill. It's not like they didn't notice that the doors stopped moving, okay?”

I looked towards him. “You just expect me to stay here. With you?”

“We've been forced into tighter spaces.” He cracked a half grin and I wanted to punch him. I held myself back from punching him. This hadn't been how I wanted it, but this was how it had to be. It didn't seem possible that we could ever go back to the people we had been, even the friends we had been.

“Don't do that,” I warned, the only warning he would get. I was panicking, stuck in a confined space with a guy who was last on my list of favorite people. No one could hold me responsible for my actions.

He looked at me, “do what?”

“Bring up our mutual past. It has definitely not been long enough.”

“What is so wrong with...”

And then I noticed it behind him, tucked into the bottom of the control panel. Pushing Mavis aside, I fell down to my knees and picked up the EMERGENCY PHONE that neither of us had noticed. Opening the door that covered it, I pressed the CALL button, holding it in. Finally, after what seemed like forever, someone's voice echoed in the tight space of the elevator.

“We're stuck in the elevator,” I explained, my voice loud and panicked. “And, I'd really like to not be stuck in the elevator.”

“We were already informed of your need for assistance from the emergency button,” the person responded, almost automatically. “Is everyone okay?”

“Yeah, we're fine, we're just kind off...”

They cut me off before I could finish, already satisfied with the fact that no one was in dire need of assistance, “We will try to get to you as quickly as possible, but there is a city wide power outage and the whole campus is dark. Once the emergency situations have been dealt with, then campus police will be quick to come to your assistance. It probably won't take more than a couple hours...”

“HOURS!” I nearly screamed.

“If your situation changes, or you need immediate assistance please contact us again. We are doing everything we can to get the power back on.” And then click. The women on the other line was gone. I wondered for a second if it had even been a real women. Maybe it had just been a recording. Maybe no one knew where we were, no one knew we were stuck. They would find our bodies three weeks from now when they finally realized the elevator had stopped working.

I could feel my hand reaching out to press the button, to get the women back, to explain to her there was no way I could spent hours stuck in an elevator with Mavis. There was no way. Before I had the chance to press the button he was pulling me away. “Don't,” he told me, as though I was four-years-old, about to touch the hot stove. “She already told you they are doing everything they can. What more do you want?"

“I want to get out of here.”

“You will.” He said, level headed, finishing with, “in a couple hours.”

“That's not good enough!” My heart was racing again, my head spinning madly, and before I knew it everything was going dark again, except this time it wasn't the power going out. I could feel the ground coming up to meet me, and then—as though I was an elevator suspended—I stopped. As my eyes started to focus again, the smoking clearing and the world coming into view again, I saw him there, looking down in my face.

“Are you okay?” Mavis asked, softly.

For a minute I almost forgot about everything, letting myself get lost in the feeling of being in his arms again. Then, just as quickly, I realized what I was doing. This wasn't happening. I wasn't letting this happen, not again, “Get off me,” I told him, pushing him back. My legs were still wobbly, but I managed to keep standing. “Don't touch me.”

“God Wren,” he sighed, sitting down on the floor cross-legged. “Can you not be nice for, I don't know, three seconds? I mean, a simple 'thank you' wouldn't hurt, would it?”

I sighed, “fine. Thank you. Don't touch me.”

“You know,” he said as I took a seat on the floor, across the elevator from him. My head was spinning way too much to stand. “you can be a real bitch sometimes.”

“That hurts.” I told him sarcastically.

But he wasn't finished, he wasn't even started yet, “I don't even know what your problem is, honestly. You were the one that started this. Everything was just fine before you had to go and tell your boyfriend everything. I mean, did you not think he would want to kick my ass. And worse, you told Carly about us. My girlfriend. What did you think was going to happen? That the four of us would just live happily ever after?”

“I just wanted to be honest. Besides,” I told him, “I thought you had told her about us. That was our deal, remember.”

He sighed. He remembered, I knew he remembered. “I was waiting for the right moment."

The two of us sat across from each other, our battle-lines drawn. This was the last thing I needed right now. I needed to be finishing my assignment. I needed to be eating way too much cookie dough ice cream. I needed to not be here, not be with him.

“What do you want me to say,” he spoke finally after what seem like a lifetime of silence. “That I screwed up. I made a mistake. We both made mistakes. What does admitting do to change that—we still hurt the people we love and we still end up alone.” I hated him right now, not only for admitting everything out loud, but for making me feel sorry for him. Make me feel sorry for being a bitch, and for telling Harris everything and for talking to his girlfriend. But most of it, it was because he was right and I knew it. I wanted so badly to throw all the pain, all the anger, that I had thrust towards me, back on him again. But sitting there in that cramped space, alone, I knew that he was right.

“Stop it,” I told him, my voice lighter, “that isn't fair. Don't make me like you again.”

“You always liked me,” he smiled, that cocky grin that I had fallen for in the first place. “I'm irresistible.”

And that was it. That was everything the two of us should have said out in the open, free to see. The air was beginning to clear, and the tension—which had been stiff between us for weeks now—was beginning to soften slightly. I'd never actually hated him, just the thought of being that girl—the girl that cheats on her boyfriend, who helps a guy cheat on his girlfriend. Both of us were the bad guys, and neither of us were the bad guys. He was right. Admitting what we had done wrong wasn't going to change what had happened. It had happened for a reason, and both of us had needed it to happen. Maybe it had started with a drunken kiss in my kitchen—our lips both tasting of whiskey—but it had ended up so much more than that.

“You know,” I said, standing up and walking over to him, taking a seat beside him. The elevator was dark. The whole situation was kind of romantic, if you thought about it. “It's still possible we could die in here.”

He knew what I was thinking. I could see it in his eyes. That was just like us—one minute we were fighting, declaring war, and the next I couldn't remember what had happened.“You're right.” There, in the darkness of that elevator, away from the world, he kissed me again, bringing everything since the night of our first drunken kiss back again. Every night, every kiss, every moment we had kept hidden from the world. We were free now, no one in the background to worry about, no people that would pop up and ruin everything, or get hurt.

I'd always been the kind of girl who had to make a lot of mistakes before she made a right choice. I wasn't sure what kissing Mavis in the darkness of that elevator would be. Maybe it was a mistake, or maybe it was a right choice or maybe it wouldn't mean anything. It wasn't just the elevator that had paused, but the entire world. A hour before I hated him for everything that had happened, and everything that hadn't—promises he just couldn't keep. And now, I took in everything about him, as thought nothing had happened at all. There was no past, there was no future—there was just then, in the darkness of that elevator, and his body against mine as he kissed me.

“You're always getting me into trouble.” I told him as they two of us lied half naked on our clothing, still in the darkness of the elevator.

He grinned. “I know.”

We stayed there, wrapped up in each other and our clothing, until the elevator—and the world—started to move again.