Asking for Trouble (3 page)

“Sydney,” Tom said as if talking to a fearful child. “Are you all right? You look a little pale.”

“Pale? Me? I can’t get out of here. I’m going to be plummeting to my death any second now, with a maintenance man and a date from a television game show, who don’t seem to realize the danger we’re in. And I’m pale? Why should I be pale?” She turned back to the telephone and dialed 911 with a prayer on her lips.

“Sydney?” Tom’s voice was as quiet and composed as an undertaker’s. His arm circled her waist. His other hand covered hers over the receiver of the phone and helped her to replace it on the wall. “No one is going to answer the phone, but you don’t need to worry. We’re perfectly safe here. This man says ...”

“Jerry,” she said, her voice sounding dull in her ears. “His name is Jerry.”

“Jerry says it’s an electrical problem. He says this thing was inspected three weeks ago, and it’s as strong and safe as it was the day they installed it. Isn’t that right, Jerry?”

“Hell if I know. I wasn’t here when they installed—”

“Isn’t that right, Jerry?” Tom said, sending a quelling expression over his shoulder.

“Sure. You bet.”

She trembled in his arms, which under any other circumstances would have pleased him. As it was, it stimulated his concern for her.

“See, Sydney? Now why don’t you sit down here beside me and we’ll talk and get to know each other better.” He chuckled. “Actually, I was hoping we could be alone for a while tonight. Restaurants are always so crowded, and you have to be careful not to talk with your mouth full of food.” With his hands on her elbows, he picked her up and turned her around as if she were a mannequin. “This’ll be great. We can talk and have an extremely late dinner when ... when we’re finished,” he said, choosing his words carefully.

“Want that drink now?” Jerry asked, extending the flask out to her.

Sydney managed to hold up a hand in refusal as she concentrated on lowering herself to the floor. Alcohol was the last thing she needed. She didn’t handle it well, and she had her hands full already trying not to lose her mind.

Something in her realized that Tom was right, that there wasn’t anything to do but wait. But the greater part of her was so filled with fear, she could hardly breathe.

“Maybe just a tiny sip?” she heard Tom saying in a soothing voice. He was seated next to her with one arm holding her close. He held Jerry’s flask to her lips.

“Makes me silly,” she said, shaking her head.

“That’s okay. You could use a little silly right now,” he said, as hot liquid scorched the back of her throat and burned its way to her abdomen. “You’re so tense, I’m afraid you’ll snap in two.”

Coughing and sputtering, she placed her hands over his and pulled the flask away from her face. After the initial shock of the liquor, she simply sat there for several long minutes trying to gather her thoughts and some of her dignity.

How on earth did I get into this mess? she asked herself, trying hard to remember the exact reason why she’d done such an uncharacteristic thing as agreeing to be a game show contestant.

Six weeks earlier, Sydney had come home from a date drained and listless. Her roommate had glanced up from the late night game show she was watching on television and had commented frankly, “You look like hell.”

“I feel like hell,” Sydney had said, flopping down on the couch beside her. “There ought to be a law against CPAs dating each other. It breeds monotony and contempt, and it’s mentally and spiritually retarding. It ought to be right up there with incest and ... and ... is marrying your first cousin the same as incest?”

“Yeah. I think so,” Judy said, amazing Sydney with her ability to follow two conversations at once. She’d never looked away from the program. “This is what you should do, pal.” She motioned to the TV. “I haven’t seen one contestant that was a CPA in all the times I’ve watched it.”

Sydney sat up and took interest.

“Great,” she said after several minutes of watching the show, chewing on popcorn taken from Judy’s bowl. “He’s a musician and she’s a mud wrestler. Who would they set me up with? A bull breeder?”

“They have yuppie types too. Architects, bank executives, lawyers. And where is it written that a bull breeder can’t be a great date? It’s not what they do that counts, you know, it’s who they are. Accountants are born dull and sort of ... linear. That’s why they’re good at what they do.”

“Thank you so much,” Sydney muttered, never having considered herself dull or linear. She reached for more popcorn.

“Well, what could it hurt? To go on this program, I mean.” Judy took a fistful of popcorn and dropped it into her mouth a piece at a time. “You work late hours. On the rare occasions you do go out, you go to IRS seminars. The only men you ever meet are CPAs. You need some variety in your life.”

This was no great revelation to Sydney. She knew she needed variety. But who had time for variety? And if one had the time, who felt like hanging out in singles bars and nightclubs filtering through the assortment to find just one man who was tolerable?

After a few days of deep deliberation Sydney had decided to try it. She’d called the studio, gone in for the interview, filled out the questionnaire, and within two weeks she’d gone to watch three computer-selected videotapes of men she could choose from before the taping of the game show.

Sydney had found the choice to be quite easy, actually, and only briefly wondered if it had been set up that way by the people at the studio. She’d picked the most handsome man of the three and the only one who had used complete sentences when he’d spoken. Tom Ghorman.

Sitting beside him—so near calamity—she refused to regret her actions. The game show was perhaps the greatest risk she’d ever taken in her life, and Tom Ghorman excited her more than any man she’d ever met. If she were about to die, it was good to know that in her brief existence she had taken at least one risk and that she was capable of feeling great excitement and arousal. She was thankful for that.

“I’m really sorry,” she said at last, feeling weak all over. “I’m not claustrophobic. I just ...”

“Hey. Don’t worry about it,” Tom said, smiling as she looked at him. “It’s over. And if I didn’t have you to impress with my male bravado, I’d be screaming and beating on ol’ Jerry here. So, you see, we’re helping each other.”

Her tiny smile of gratitude seemed stingy in contrast to all he’d done for her. He was being very kind and extremely understanding. What must he think of her? Sydney wondered as she raised his hand and the flask to her lips once more.

“So, you two don’t even know each other, huh?” Jerry commented as if it had finally sunk into his head. “Kind of a weird way to spend a first date.”

Tom assisted Sydney with another sip from the flask as he answered, “Oh, I don’t know. I’ll bet if you gave ten men the choice of getting stuck in an elevator with a beautiful woman or going to the movies or a restaurant with her on a first date, nine of them would choose the elevator and the other one would be gay. I couldn’t have planned this any better.”

“You got a point there,” Jerry agreed, watching his flask with a possessive eye. “Did I hear that you met on TV?”

While Tom explained the circumstances of their date, Sydney was busy taking note of her present situation. For instance, she decided the floor of the elevator was very comfortable. She especially liked leaning against Tom’s broad chest and the way his hand brushed up and down her arm in a soothing, reassuring manner. He smelled good too.

When she kicked her shoes off and pulled her legs up under her, she found that if she scooted up just a bit, she could lay her head on his shoulder and watch his thick dark hair move against the collar of his shirt as he talked to Jerry. She wondered what it felt like, and what shampoo he used.

She started to wonder a lot about him, actually. He was in human services, according to his videotape. Did he control crazy women in defective elevators for a living? He looked good in blue too. Was it his favorite color? Should she have worn her blue satin dress instead of the pink linen? She’d asked her cat the night before, and after some hemming and hawing they’d finally decided on the pink, but what if he hated cats and would have preferred her in blue? He had nice hands, she noted, her mind shifting quickly, her attention span atypically short. Had he gone to college? Did he play a sport? He has such nice teeth, she thought, just before she speculated as to whether or not he’d worn braces. He was kind of funny too. ...

“What
did
Mister Completely write?” she asked, coming suddenly to the party, her voice a little louder than usual though she was feeling amazingly relaxed and jolly.

Jerry and Tom looked at her as if she’d just returned after a long absence. Tom glanced at the flask still clutched in their hands and then back at Sydney, assessing her carefully.

“The joke, remember? When we first got on the elevator? What book did Mister Completely write?”

“Hole in the Mattress.”

She snorted a giggle through her nose and then laughed aloud as Jerry and Tom exchanged knowing glances and began to laugh too.

“Maybe we can give this back to Jerry now,” Tom said, slipping the flask from her fingers. “You seem to be feeling better.”

“I do,” she said, more proud than amazed. “Let’s tell more jokes.”

Tom’s chuckle made his chest vibrate, and when he gave her shoulders an affectionate squeeze, she sighed and felt warm and happy all over.

She liked Tom Ghorman. He wasn’t stuffy and number oriented like most of her dates. He laughed as easily as he breathed, and nothing, including the fact that she might be a little tipsy, seemed to bother him. He didn’t even know that she was a senior manager with the firm, and he liked her anyway, accepted her for who she was. She really did like Tom Ghorman.

“You’re okay for a girl, Sydney Wiesman,” he said in a low voice, much the way his nephew might, but with a certain admiration in his eyes that only an adult male could bestow.

She wanted Tom Ghorman to like her too. Not enough to pretend to be someone she wasn’t, but absolutely enough to be flattered by his praise.

She enjoyed the way his gaze lingered on her legs, or drifted down to her mouth, or further down across the curves of her breasts and hips when he thought she wasn’t looking. It made her feel pretty and feminine. Oh, she knew sexual attraction wasn’t the most important aspect of a relationship, but she was undeniably human and ingrained with the notion that a little healthy sex appeal never hurt anyone.

She took a deep breath, filling her senses with Tom’s scent. There was no thick, cloying aroma, no perfume that was sweet enough or strong enough to gag a horse. It was simply a light, mysterious musky smell that fascinated her.

T
HE THREE OF THEM
sat on the floor of the elevator regaling one another with their repertoire of jokes, and she soon discovered that what she liked best about Tom was his laugh. She went out of her way to hear it over and over again.

“So the new hillbilly dogcatcher stepped forward and said, ‘The reason I ain’t caught no dogs yet, is cuz I don’t know what I’m ’posed to catch ’em at.’” Sydney articulated in her best hillbilly dialect.

Tom’s laugh, low and rumbling, filled the elevator with cozy good cheer and did queer things to Sydney’s pulse. She got the distinct feeling that he was laughing more at the way she told the joke than the joke itself, but it didn’t really matter.

Jerry’s prediction that there would be plenty of air to breathe in the elevator seemed to be true. Actually, it had been some time since she’d given it any thought. And if she pretended very hard that she could open the doors anytime she wished, she found the sight of their firmly closed surface almost tolerable.

But between the hot air they were blowing at one another and the fact that the air-conditioning was somehow involved with the elevator malfunction, the small enclosed box had become an oven. She had long since removed her jacket and released the tail of her camisole-style top from the waistband of her skirt.

When she’d finished with her series of hillbilly jokes and passed the limelight on to Jerry, she leaned back against the wall again and was gratified to feel Tom’s arm still behind her. The warmth of his skin beneath his shirtsleeve and the tight power of his arm against her bare back were like candy—sweet, forbidden, and too tempting to resist. In no distress at the moment, however, she felt obliged to sit forward to release him, but his hand curled around her upper arm and held her steady.

He acted as if sitting with his arm around a near total stranger, his hand brushing lightly over her skin and driving her nuts with tiny tingles, were the most natural thing in the world. But it didn’t feel natural to Sydney. It was something new and enlivening, something she wanted to investigate further.

Every time she moved beside him, every time he felt her take a deep breath and sigh, it was an erotic torment. He wanted to touch her. He longed to feel the texture and warmth of her skin with the tips of his fingers, against his naked body and in his mind. He had a yen to lower her gently onto her back and make love to her slowly, thoroughly, until she screamed in ecstasy.

She looked at him, but he pretended to be listening to Jerry. Countless times he’d caught himself staring at her. She was going to start thinking he was perverted if he wasn’t more careful, he thought. But he couldn’t get over the feeling that he’d seen her before somewhere. Not really
seen
her, on the street or in the newspaper or at a party. But seen in a visualized sense, like in a dream or a fantasy. Yep. The more he labored over it, the more certain he became that he had known her before, that she’d stepped out of his fondest dream.

Jerry, due either to his limited supply of clean jokes or his seemingly limitless supply of liquid spirits, introduced several ribald stories before Tom switched the evening’s entertainment to humorous personal anecdotes.

She wasn’t sure if his story about a championship football game in high school was meant to be extremely long and tedious, but there was a smile on his lips when Jerry fell asleep, lolling to one side for several minutes before he finally toppled over onto the floor, snoring atrociously.