Page 30 of Based on You

"I will." He dropped his hand, turned on his heel, and headed for his office.

I watched him go until the door clicked shut, then made myself turn back to my monitor.

I spent the rest of the day drowning in work. Past seven, I still hadn't finished everything on my plate, and I needed to get home to tackle my writing on top of it. I knew if I stayed any longer, the executives would drag me into the Beatrice Holm celebration. They didn't like me, but they'd never pass up the chance to shove a drink into my hand just to see what kind of mess followed.

I packed my bags and fled the building.

The train ride home took twenty minutes. I lugged my heavy bags on both shoulders the final three blocks from the subway station to my building.

At my door, I pushed my key into the deadbolt.

It slid in, then stopped.

I tried again, pulling it out and shoving it back in, twisting left, then right. Nothing. The key just sat in the cylinder without catching the pins. Frowning, I stepped back and looked at the door, then glared at the key, then tried a third time, slowly. The key turned halfway and jammed.

The lock had been changed.

Panic flaring, I knocked. I knocked again, louder, which made no sense because I lived alone and there was no one inside to answer, but my fist hammered the wood anyway. I ran to the neighbor's door and pounded on it. Nothing. I tried the door across the hall. Nothing. I sprinted down to the lobby and found the super's office dark. I dialed his cell, and it rang and rang before dumping me into voicemail. I stood in the dim lobby, gripping my phone and staring at the rusted wall of mailboxes.

My laptop was locked inside. My clothes were inside. My external hard drive with all my backups was inside. Everything I owned that wasn't shoved into these two tote bags was trapped behind that door.

I dialed the landlord next. It rang twice. Voicemail.

Beaten, I sank onto the cold lobby steps.

I'd texted him. I'd followed up. I'd been plain about renewing the lease and given him room to respond, and he'd handed me nothing. Now I was sitting in my own building's lobby with two bags and no way through the door he'd apparently decided to seal without a word of warning. He wasn't answering. The super was gone. The building loomed quiet around me, and none of it gave me a way out.

I was stuck, and being stuck pressed down on me, because every direction I reached for hit a wall. I couldn't get into my home. I couldn't reach a single person with the power to help. Worst of all, I couldn't write without my laptop, and I needed to write, because Sunday was coming. V.M. Ashby hadn't missed a midnight deadline in three years, and I wasn't about to let a coward of a landlord who couldn't return a text be the thing that finally broke my streak.

I couldn't call my parents. My mother would weaponize it on the spot, spinning it into a lecture about the poor life choices that had led me here, and I didn't have the reserves to survive that conversation. I couldn't call Sloane either. She was out of town and unreachable.

Sitting there with my phone gripped tight, I made myself think. The novel draft was backed up to the cloud. I could log into the platform from any secure computer, and the desktop at the office would do. I checked the time. Only an hour since I left, so the launch party was probably still going strong in the event hall downstairs. I put together a foolproof excuse in my head, flagged down a passing taxi, and headed straight back to work.

When I got to the Beckett Media building, the lobby still swarmed with partygoers, flushed faces from departments I rarely crossed paths with. A few of them looked at me with vague recognition, knowing me only through whatever twisted version of the CEO's assistant had made the rounds. I kept my eyes straight ahead and slipped into the private elevator, riding it all the way up.

The executive suite was pitch black. Simon was either downstairs at the celebration or already home. I crossed the still floor by memory, dropped my bags at my desk, and sank into my chair.

I booted up the office desktop and opened the platform. The Sandra chapter loaded on the screen. I read through it once, made three quick fixes, and scheduled the upload. Then I opened a blank document for the next chapter and kept writing, dragging the scene forward line by grueling line until Sandra landed somewhere new and the chapter had the shape it needed.

I hammered out the chapter after that, then started on the one after, typing until the glowing words began to blur and my head kept dipping forward and snapping back up.

Blinking, I checked the time in the corner of the monitor. Well past midnight.

I pushed back from the desk with a sigh. The floor lay dark and still around me, and every bone in my body was begging to be horizontal.

I glanced over my shoulder at the corner office behind me. The main light was off, the heavy oak door slightly ajar. Tucked inside, against the far left wall, was the plush dark leather sofa I'd stared at a hundred times from the doorway.

Running on fumes, I got up, pushed the heavy door open, and stumbled inside. The leather couch was cool under me as I collapsed onto it, the smooth material against my cheek. City light bled through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the far end of the room, throwing long pale shapes across the carpet. I was still in my pleated work dress. I still had my shoes on.

I hadn't planned to cry. The tears showed up on their own, welling after a day that had run too long and too strange. The breaking point, after getting locked out of an apartment I couldn't get back into, forcing me to hole up in a borrowed office inside a building I didn't own. I was just so tired. The hot tears tracked sideways across my nose, soaking into the expensive leather, and I was too worn out to even try to stop them.

I'd been carrying so much for so long. The demanding job, the secret writing, the negligent landlord, the judgmental family, and the forbidden feelings I wasn't allowed to have for the man whose office I was crying in. The white-knuckled grip I'd kept on all of it finally gave out.

I lay there and cried until my chest was empty. Then I let my heavy eyes slide shut.

I fell asleep.

At some blurry point in the night, the dark around me shifted. I heard the click of the office door. The change in air pressure tugged me up through the thick layers of sleep without waking me all the way, some small shift in the room my exhausted brain caught before it understood. And then warmth pressed close, certain of where it was going. Two strong hands slid under my body, one bracing my back, the other sweeping beneath my knees, and I was lifted into the air without effort.