A stream of red, down my lip, onto my white shirt. I touched my face, and my fingers came back red and wet, and the sight of my own blood made my stomach roll.
She moved fast. Tissues from her bag. She pressed one to my nose, gentle but firm, and her other hand went to the back of my neck to hold me steady. Her fingers were warm against my skin. Bare skin. No gloves between us. No barriers.
I should have pulled away. Every protocol I’d built for myself, every wall, every rule, said pull away. Don’t let strangers touch you. Don’t let anyone this close.
But I sat on the floor of a broken elevator and let Anna Wilson hold my face, touch my neck with her bare hands, and I didn’t even flinch.
My heart was doing something new. Not the panicked hammering from before. Something lighter. Uneven. A rhythm I didn’t recognize and couldn’t pinpoint.
The bleeding stopped. She pulled back and looked at her hands. Her fingers were smeared with my blood. She was staring at me with an expression I couldn’t read, half concern, half something shaken, like she’d just seen something she wasn’t prepared for and was still deciding what to do with it.
The elevator doors opened.
CHAPTER 7
Anna
He stood like nothing happened.
That was the part I couldn’t stop staring at. The way he got to his feet and became someone else in the space of seconds. He straightened his jacket, tugging the lapels into place. Pushed his glasses up with a hand that was still trembling, though he held it steady enough that you’d miss the shake if you weren’t looking. But I was looking.
He ran his fingers through his hair, damp with sweat, pushing it back from his forehead the way he probably did every morning in a mirror. Then he glanced down at his shirt, saw the blood, and his jaw worked once before going still.
Just like that. Shattered to composed. Like watching someone rebuild a wall in real time, brick by brick, while you stood there holding the dust.
He was tall. I’d known that since the farmers market, since the first time I’d crashed into him and had to look up to find his face. But in the elevator, on the floor, in the dark, he’d been small. Smaller than me, somehow, even though that wasn’t physically possible. He’d curled in on himself and shaken. Now he was tall again, filling the space the way he always did, andthe gap between those two versions of him left something in my chest unsettled.
We had walked out of the elevator by then. The maintenance crew was talking. Asking questions. Something about a power surge, a faulty relay, they’d have it fixed within the hour. I couldn’t process any of it because my hands were still shaking and it happened again even as I watched.
"Mr. Hunter. Your nose." My eyes followed another trickle of blood.
He touched his upper lip. His fingers came back red. He stared at them, whole body going rigid, and started to shake again.
"Here." I pulled the last tissue from my bag and held it out.
He didn’t take it. He was looking at the blood on his fingers like it had taken him somewhere else entirely. His breathing was changing. Not the full collapse from the elevator, but close enough that I could feel it building.
I didn’t think about it again. I stepped forward, pressed the tissue to his nose.
He flinched. His whole body jerked under my hand and for a second I thought he was going to push me away. But he didn't. He went still instead. Every muscle rigid, his jaw clenched so tight I could feel the tendon jumping beneath my fingers. His pulse hammered through the fabric of his jacket, fast and hard and completely at odds with how frozen the rest of him had gone.
"It’s just a nosebleed," I said. I kept my voice low, close, barely louder than his breathing. "The stress and the allergy. It’s just your body reacting. You’re okay."
He didn’t say anything. But he let me hold the tissue to his face. He let my hand stay on his arm. And after a few seconds, his breathing started to come back down.
We stood like that in the elevator lobby while the maintenance crew worked behind us and people walked past doing that thing where they were absolutely looking but pretending they weren’t. Me holding a tissue to my boss’s bleeding nose. Both of us looked like we’d just come through something that neither of us could explain to anyone who hadn’t been in that box.
The bleeding stopped. I pulled back. Looked at my hands. His blood on my fingers, dark against my skin. He was looking at them too, and whatever was on his face wasn't the disgust I'd expected. I'd braced for the recoil, for the sanitizer, for the look he gave me at the farmers market when my coffee touched his shirt. But he just stared at my bloodied fingers, his brow drawn, his mouth slightly open, like he was trying to understand something and the answer kept moving out of reach.
"You should wash your hands," he said, his accent thick. "It’s unpleasant."
He looked at me then. Not the way he usually did, like I was a problem on his schedule. This was different. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt it.
Three seconds. Maybe less. Then it closed. I watched it happen in real time, the way his expression smoothed out and his shoulders squared and the man from the elevator floor vanished behind the one who ran a gaming empire and never let anyone see him sweat.
He stepped back, lowering his voice. "Not a word of this to anyone."
"It won’t leave that elevator," I assured.
