Copyright © 2026 Nuno R.F.C.R. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews, and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by applicable copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), actual events, or real locales is entirely coincidental.
“Heat”
The laugh went on for about four seconds, which doesn’t sound like a long time until you’ve spent four months trying to bring one out.
It hadn't been what Elliot expected. He had built a fairly detailed theory of what a Theo Marchetti laugh would sound like, something reluctant, he'd assumed, dragged out of the man against his will, a single grudging huh. What he'd got instead was a real one. Low and warm and slightly wrecked at the edges, the sound of something that hadn't been used in a while and had a bit of rust on it, and it’d gone through Elliot like a hot drink, all the way down, warming things it had no business warming.
And then it stopped. And the box got very quiet.
This was the problem with laughing with a stranger at eleven o'clock at night in a broken lift: afterwards, you were still there. There was no waiter to flag down, no second round, no other table to drift toward. There was just the two of you and the four steel walls and the sudden hideous awareness that a moment had happened and now had to be survived.
Theo cleared his throat.
"So," said Elliot.
"So."
"Six hours."
"Give or take."
"Right." Elliot nodded slowly at nothing. "Great. Love that. Really looking forward to it."
Elliot became aware that he had been sitting in the same position for some time and that his left leg had started the pins-and-needles process of formally seceding from his body, and that shifting position would draw attention to the fact that he was aware of his own body, which, for reasons he declined to examine, felt like a tactical error in the current circumstances.
He shifted anyway. Theo didn't look over.
"Okay, I've been thinking about it," Elliot announced, "and I think we need to establish some ground rules."
"Do we?"
"We absolutely do. Six hours is a long time, Marchetti. It’s a flight to Cairo. People develop societies in six hours." He held up a finger. "Rule one. Floor space. I want it on record that you've currently got about seventy percent of it and I've got the corner by the panel, which is where the draught would be if there were a draught, which there isn't, because we're sealed in a tin."
Theo looked down at himself, the folded bulk of him against the back wall, knees up, forearms across them, and then at the modest triangle of floor Elliot had claimed. He seemed to consider this seriously, the way he seemed to consider everything, as a structural problem.
"Physics," he said.
"Don't hide behind physics."
"I'm six four."
"And I'm five eleven, which is tall, which nobody ever gives me credit for because I keep ending up next to men like you, and it's ruined my whole life." Elliot pointed at the floor between them. "I'm proposing a redrawing of the border. Somewhere around here."
"That's my knee."
"Then move your knee."
"Where?"
Elliot opened his mouth, looked at the geometry of the situation, the sheer amount of man versus the sheer lack of box, and shut it again. "Fine," he said. "The border stands. But I want it minuted that I'm being oppressed."
"You've minuted a lot of things tonight."
"I'm a very thorough person. It's why they let me near the intercompany balances." He settled back against the wall, and something in his chest loosened by a notch, because this, this was fine, this he could do. Banter was a road he'd walked a thousand times and knew every pothole of. The trick was to keep moving. As long as he kept talking, the silence couldn't get in, and as long as the silence couldn't get in, he wouldn't have to notice how the torchlight was doing something across Theo’s forearms, or how his voice at low volume had a texture to it like something you could put a hand on. "Rule two. Battery."
He held up his phone. The screen lit his face blue.
"Thirty-four percent," he said gravely.
Theo's eyebrows moved a fraction. "That's bad."
"That's catastrophic. That's a hostage situation. That's me at four in the morning going well, I had a good run." He turned the screen toward Theo like a doctor presenting a scan. "Thirty-four percent and no charger, because my charger is in my bag, and my bag is on the fourteenth floor, because I came down for a coffee like an idiot, because I thought I'd be gone six minutes."
"Should've brought your bag."
"Oh, thank you. Genuinely. That's so helpful. I'll go back and tell myself." Elliot dropped the phone into his lap. "How much have you got?"
"Eighty-one."
"Of course you do."
"Charge it at the desk. Every shift." Theo shrugged, one shoulder. "Habit."
"See, that's a lifestyle, that's what that is. Some of us are living hand to mouth over here." He was aware he was performing. He was performing quite hard, and the reason he was performing was sitting four feet away with his eyes half-closed, and Elliot had a policy of not thinking about that, a policy he had been enforcing rigorously since approximately the fourth week of March. "New rule. Battery is a shared resource. Communal. From each according to his ability."
"You want my battery?"
"I want access to your battery. In an emergency."
"What emergency?"
"Any. Spotify."
Theo made a sound that might have been the first vertebra of a laugh and might have been him breathing out.
"Torch is on the phone battery," Theo said, and nodded up at the ceiling, at the beam bouncing its overcast glow down onto the two of them. "That goes, we're in the dark. Proper dark. So no. Not Spotify."
And Elliot stopped, because he hadn't thought of that.
He looked up at the torch, the small tough little light doing so much work, the reason this was a bearable room and not a coffin, and understood, in a fast unpleasant rush, that the entire tolerability of the next six hours was currently being borne by one man's phone battery and one man's foresight.
"Okay," he said, in a different voice. "Yeah. No Spotify."
Theo glanced over at that and Elliot felt the look land and busied himself with his phone so he wouldn't have to meet it.
"Text your people," Theo said, after a moment. "If you're going to. Do it now while you've got the charge. Then put it on low power. It'll stretch."
"My people?"
"Whoever's waiting on you."
Nobody's waiting on me. The sentence arrived in Elliot's head fully formed and he shoved it back down where it lived, hard, and said instead, brightly: "Oh, the group chat will have already assumed I'm dead. Priya files a missing persons report if I don't respond within ninety minutes. It's very touching. It's also a lot of pressure."
He unlocked the phone. Thirty-two percent now. He typed with his thumbs, fast:
Elliot: ok so. minor news. I'm trapped in the lift at work
Elliot: blackout. whole district apparently. security says hours
Elliot: if I die you can have the good olive oil Sef, but ONLY the good one, and Dom gets nothing because of the bet thing
He hit send. He watched the little wheel spin, and spin, and fail, and the small red exclamation mark appear beside all three messages like a shrug.
"No signal," he said.
"Masts are down with the grid. Some of them have battery backup, but…" Theo tipped his head at the wall, at the twenty tons of steel and concrete and lift shaft between them and the outside world “…we're in a box in the middle of a building. Wasn't going to work anyway."
"So they don't know."
"They don't know."
Elliot looked at the three little red exclamation marks. It was, he thought, an admirably efficient piece of design, the whole of modern loneliness rendered as a punctuation mark. Somewhere out there in a blacked-out city, Priya and Sef and Dom were probably in the place with the lights, drinking warm drinks in a bar with no power, absolutely certain that Elliot Reyes was at his desk being a workaholic, and by the time anyone thought to actually wonder where he was it would be tomorrow.
"Great," he said. "Fantastic. So we're properly alone."
"Yeah."
"No, but properly, though. Like, nobody on earth currently knows where I am. Nobody's going to notice for eleven, twelve hours. If you murdered me right now you'd have a genuinely excellent head start."
"I'm not going to murder you."
"I know. I'm just noting the opportunity. It's a hell of an opportunity."
"Reyes."
"Sorry." Elliot put the phone face-down on his knee. "That's my thing. When I get uncomfortable I go a bit…" he waved a hand "…ambient homicide. It's not personal."
Theo was quiet for a second. Then: "You uncomfortable?"
And that was the trouble with the man, wasn't it. He said almost nothing, and then he said the exact thing, with no apparent agenda behind it, and it went straight past all of Elliot's defenses because Elliot's defenses were built for cleverness and had no protocol whatsoever for directness.
"Bit," Elliot admitted, to his phone. "Small spaces aren't my… yeah. Bit."
"Should've said."
"And what would you have done, exactly? Made the lift bigger?"
"No." A pause. "Would've talked more. Helps some people."
Elliot looked up.
Theo wasn't looking at him, he was looking at the ceiling, at the torch. And Elliot, who could have made six jokes about it, who could feel all six of them queuing up behind his teeth, said none of them.
"That'd be a big sacrifice for you," he said. "Talking."
"Enormous."
"You'd need a lie-down after."
"Days."
Elliot laughed, a real one, out before he could vet it, and in the corner of his eye he caught the corner of Theo's mouth doing its thing, and he thought: oh, this is going to be a very long night.
He let a minute go by. Then, because the silence had started again and because he'd meant it when he said he couldn't do the silence, he asked the thing he'd been half-wondering for four months.
"What do you actually do all night?"
"Hm?"
"Down there. Normal night, no blackout, no idiot in the lift. Twelve hours in a lobby, what do you do? Because I've walked past that desk a hundred times and you're always…" Elliot searched for it "…the same. Same position. Same face. Like the building grew you."
Theo took his time with it. That was another thing about him, Elliot was learning: he didn't fill gaps. He let a question sit until he had something true to put in it, which was the single most maddening conversational habit Elliot had ever encountered and also, he was beginning to suspect, the reason everything the man said landed like a stone in a still pond.
"Rounds," Theo said. "Every two hours. Fire doors, plant room, roof access, car park. Takes forty minutes if you do it right." He rolled his shoulder against the wall. "Monitors between. Log anything odd. Sign in the cleaners at one, sign them out at four. Read a bit, if it's quiet."
"You read?"
"Don't sound so shocked."
"I'm not shocked, I'm…okay, I'm a bit shocked, you've got the aura of someone who does woodwork." Elliot pulled his knees up. "Read what?"
"Whatever's about. Charity shop stuff. Bloke on the fourth leaves paperbacks by the recycling, I nick those." A beat. "Read a lot of thrillers I don't like. It passes the time."
"And that's it? Rounds, screens, stolen thrillers?"
"That's it."
"For twelve hours."
"For twelve hours."
"Every night."
"Five nights a week." Theo's eyes came round to him then, mildly, as though he genuinely couldn't see the shape of what was being asked. "It's a job, Reyes. That's what a job is."
But it wasn't the job. That was the thing Elliot couldn't quite say without saying too much. It wasn't the job, it was the picture the job made when you put it together: a man on his own in a beautiful empty lobby for sixty hours a week, walking the same fire doors at the same intervals, watching a river he couldn't get to, reading books he didn't like, going home at seven to a flat he probably kept very tidy, sleeping through the daylight, doing the school run, and coming back. No one to say goodnight to. No one to say ‘you'll never guess what happened at work’.
It was the loneliest thing Elliot had ever heard described.
‘He's not sad about it’, Elliot thought, and that was the part that got in under the ribs. ‘He's not sad about it at all. He's just used to it’.
"Doesn't it get to you?" he said. "The alone bit."
Theo thought about it.
"No," he said. "You get used to it. After a while you sort of…" and here he did something Elliot hadn't seen him do, which was struggle for a word, his hand moving vaguely in the air as though the word might be somewhere near it. "You stop keeping track of it. It's just how the night goes. Then it's morning and there's the school run and that's the bit that counts, so." He let the hand drop. "It's fine. It's quiet. Quiet's not the worst thing."
‘Isn't it?’, thought Elliot, who had been sitting alone on the fourteenth floor at ten o'clock at night hunting a ghost of four grand, in a building he had no reason to be in, rather than go home to a flat the color of a bruise where the silence had already decided nobody was coming.
"No," he said. "Suppose not."
And they sat with that for a while, the two of them, four feet apart, each privately holding up his own version of the same empty room and finding, without either of them saying it, that the dimensions matched almost exactly.
It was Elliot who broke it, because it was always going to be Elliot who broke it.
"God, this is bleak," he said. "We've been in here forty minutes and we've already done loneliness. What's left? Mortality? Do you want to do mortality now and get it out of the way?"
"You brought it up."
"I did, and I regret it, and I'd like to formally withdraw the question." He tipped his head back against the steel. "New topic. Something stupid. Give me something stupid, Marchetti, I'm begging you."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Anything. What's the weirdest thing you've ever found on rounds?"
Theo considered. "Bloke asleep under the third-floor stairs."
"That's not weird, that's sad."
"He was in a wetsuit."
Elliot's head came off the wall. "What?"
"Full wetsuit. Half three in the morning. Third floor." Theo's mouth twitched. "Never got an explanation. He said 'sorry, mate,' and left."
"He said sorry mate? And left? In a wetsuit?"
"Walked out the revolving door. Never saw him again."
"That's the best thing I've ever heard. That's…no, that's genuinely the best thing I've ever heard, I want to know everything, I want dates, I want the CCTV, I want to build a documentary about this man…"
And they were off, and it was easy, suddenly, absurdly easy, the two of them trading nonsense in a dead lift: the wetsuit man, and the cleaner who'd taught Theo to swear in Portuguese, and the executive on eleven who'd once got stuck in this exact lift with a birthday cake and eaten a third of it before help arrived. Elliot laughed until his stomach hurt. Theo did the almost-smile eleven separate times and twice went past it into something fuller, and Elliot caught both and filed both and told himself he wasn't keeping count.
It was somewhere around then, somewhere in the middle of the cake story, with his head back against the wall and his guard about a third of the way down, that Elliot noticed he was warm.
Not uncomfortably. He'd taken his lanyard off at some point, and there was a faint dampness at the back of his neck where his collar sat, and the air in the box had lost the sharp cool edge it had had an hour ago and gone soft and close, the way air does in a room with too many people in it.
‘Huh’, he thought, distantly, and reached up and undid his top button, and thought nothing else about it at all.
Which was, on reflection, the last comfortable moment he would have for some time.
*
By half twelve it wasn’t a lift anymore. It was an oven with a button panel.
Elliot had watched it happen: nothing, nothing, nothing, and then suddenly everything is warm and rising and there's no obvious moment where it turned. The HVAC had died with the grid at twenty past ten. That meant two hours of two adult bodies breathing in a sealed steel container with no air exchange, no vent, no draught, nothing.
"Is it me," he said, "or has this become genuinely medical?"
"It's not you."
"Because I've got a very high heat tolerance normally. I did a summer in Seville. I was fine in Seville." He peeled his shirt away from his back and let it fall again, which achieved nothing. "This is different. This is… this is a Pot Noodle situation. We are being rehydrated."
"Air's not moving."
"Yes, thank you, Marchetti, I'd worked out that much…"
"Two of us. Small box. No vent." Theo said it in that flat cataloguing way, as though reading the situation off a clipboard. "Gets to about thirty-five, thirty-six in here. Levels off. Doesn't get worse after that."
Elliot went still. "How do you know that?"
"Training."
"They train you for this? They sat you in a room and said, one day you'll be trapped in a lift with an accounts clerk and it will reach thirty-six degrees?"
"Roughly."
"And what does the training say to do about it?"
"Nothing." Theo tipped his head against the wall. "Sit still. Don't panic. Panicking makes you hot."
"So does being at thirty-six degrees, mate, that's the… okay. Fine. New rule. Rule six. We don't talk about the temperature, because talking about it makes it worse, it's like when someone mentions they need the loo." Elliot fanned himself with his own hand, which did nothing, and looked at it with contempt, and stopped. "Right. Distraction. We need a distraction. Twenty Questions."
"No."
"You haven't heard the format."
"No."
"You're a very difficult man to entertain, has anyone told you that? People must find you exhausting."
"They find me quiet."
"Same thing. Worse, actually." Elliot sat forward, which was a mistake, because sitting forward made him aware of the damp patch where his shirt had been against the wall, and he leaned back again into it, defeated. "Fine. Not Twenty Questions. I'm cooking something. Give me a second."
"You don't have to…"
"Shh. Cooking." He held up a finger. Theo, to his credit, shut up. "Okay. It's called Best and Worst. I name a category, we both give our best and our worst in that category, and then I decide who won."
Theo's head turned slowly. "You decide?"
"I decide, yes."
"How's that a game?"
"It's a game with a judge. Loads of games have judges. Gymnastics." Elliot settled back, pleased with himself. "Category one. Best and worst thing about working nights."
There was a pause during which Elliot became certain the man was going to refuse outright and the next six hours would have to be filled some other way, and then Theo said, to the ceiling, "Best is the walk to the car park at seven. Nobody about. Sun's coming up over the river, all that. Worst is Sunday nights, because…everyone else has had a Sunday."
Elliot opened his mouth. Nothing came out of it.
"That's…" he said, and had to reroute, because ‘that's devastatingly sad and beautifully put and I need a moment’ was not a thing he was going to say out loud at half twelve in a hot box. "Strong opener. You've clearly been thinking about this."
"You asked."
"I did. And you answered, which is a new and frankly destabilizing development in our relationship." He cleared his throat. "Right. Mine. Best thing about working nights: the whole floor's yours, you can put music on out loud, nobody's watching what you eat. Worst thing: you get to about ten and realize you've stayed late for no reason at all, and there's still the going home to do."
He heard it after he'd said it. That was the trouble with games, you got into the rhythm of them and things came out sideways.
Theo didn't say anything. But Elliot felt him not saying it: "I award that round to you. Sunday nights. Genuinely upsetting. Very strong."
"Thought you were judging fairly."
"I'm judging honestly. Different thing." He was sweating properly now. He could feel it at his temples and the small of his back and the backs of his knees, which was a new and undignified frontier. "Category two…"
"Reyes."
"…best and worst lie you've ever told, which I appreciate is a big swing for round two but I feel we've earned it…"
"Reyes."
Something in the tone made him stop.
Theo was sitting forward now, elbows on his knees, and his head was down, and he was doing something with his jaw, that particular set Elliot had seen from across a marble lobby a hundred times and read, wrongly, for four months, as disapproval. He knew better now. Now he could see it for what it was: a man about to say a thing he didn't want to say.
"Sorry," Theo said. "I have to…is it all right if I take my shirt off?"
The sentence arrived in the small hot space and sat there.
"I'm not…" Theo went on, and this was the astonishing part: the man was embarrassed. Not smug. Not performing. Actually mortified, addressing the floor, one hand already at his collar and stalling there like it needed a permit. "I've got the vest on underneath. It's just this thing's not…it's polyester, it doesn't breathe, and I'm…" a short exhale "…I'm cooking, mate. I'll keep it on if you'd rather. It's fine. Say if it's weird."
‘Say if it's weird’.
Elliot had, in his time, been asked a number of difficult questions. He'd been asked by his mother whether he was seeing anyone. He'd been asked by an auditor to explain a variance he'd invented. He had once, memorably, been asked by Marcus whether he thought he was actually capable of loving someone or just very good at the choreography.
None of them had been as difficult as ‘say if it's weird’.
"It's not weird," he said. His voice came out slightly wrong. He corrected it upward into brightness, the way he corrected everything. "God, no. Take it off. Take it all off, honestly, we're beyond decorum, we're two men in…I mean…you know what I mean."
"Right," said Theo. "Cheers."
And he did.
He did it badly, was the thing. That was what Elliot was unprepared for. He'd had, and this was humiliating to admit, even privately, even in the sealed vault at the back of his head where he kept the things he'd never say, he'd had a version of this in his mind, from around week six, a version in which a man like Theo removed a shirt with some kind of intent behind it. What actually happened was that Theo Marchetti fumbled the buttons with hands too big for them, got the third one caught, swore softly at it, and then, defeated, hauled the whole thing off over his head like a farmer at the end of a long day, and got briefly stuck, and had to fight his way out of one sleeve while the lift rocked slightly on its cables.
He emerged from it flushed and disheveled with his hair stuck up on one side and folded the shirt into a rough square and set it down beside him and said, "That's better," and went back to sitting exactly as he had been.
And Elliot stopped breathing.
Because the vest was a plain black thing, sweat-dark at the chest and the small of the back, and it hid nothing. It wasn't meant to. It was a functional garment, and it did what functional garments do on bodies like that, which is to describe them.
Elliot had known Theo was big. Everybody knew Theo was big. Big was the fact you registered from across a lobby, the thing that made the revolving door look apologetic. What he hadn’t understood, what the uniform, in its cheap and shapeless way, had actually concealed, was the quality of it. There was nothing soft in the shape of him. The shoulders came out of the vest heavy and round and separated, each one a distinct thing, and the chest below them was deep and broad and hair-dark at the neckline, and the arms, God, the arms, thick through the bicep and thicker at the forearm, veined along the inside where the heat had brought everything to the surface. When he shifted to get comfortable, the whole architecture moved with him: shoulder, chest, the flat plates of the stomach under the damp cotton, the muscle sliding under the skin at his side. It was less like watching a man adjust his position than watching machinery idle.
And he was hot, he was properly, physically hot, and it showed. There was a sheen along his collarbones. His hair was damp at the temples and pushed back where he'd dragged a hand through it. There was a slow bead of sweat that came down from behind his ear and travelled the length of his neck and disappeared into the black cotton at his shoulder, and Elliot watched the entire journey of it.
Then Theo lifted the hem of the vest to wipe his face, and Elliot looked away so fast he hurt his neck.
‘Reconciliation report’, he thought, in a rising panic. ‘Q3 intercompany. Four thousand, one hundred and sixteen pounds. Holdings versus Logistics. Four thousand, one hundred and…’
"You all right?"
"Fine!" said Elliot. It came out at a pitch he had not previously used in adulthood. "So…anyway…best and worst lie, you were about to…"
"Was I?"
"Yes. Go."
There was a pause, and in the pause Elliot risked one glance sideways, which was a catastrophic error in judgement, because Theo had leaned back against the wall with his arms loose at his sides and his head tipped up and his throat exposed, and the light from the torch was doing something unforgivable across the width of his chest, and he was, and this was the truly unbearable part, he was completely oblivious.
He had no idea. That was the whole of it. Elliot had spent enough years in enough bars to know exactly what a man looked like when he knew what he was doing with his body, the small self-conscious adjustments, the angle chosen and held. Theo did none of it. He sat there sweating and enormous and half-undressed with his eyes shut, thinking about absolutely nothing, entirely unaware that he had just detonated something in a four-foot radius. If you had told him what he looked like he wouldn’t have believed you. He would have found it embarrassing. He'd apologized, ‘say if it's weird’, as though he were imposing.
That, Elliot thought, with a kind of despair, was so much worse than if he'd known. A man who knew was manageable. A man who knew you could file under arrogant and go home. This one didn't know, had never known, had spent twenty-seven years being built like that and apparently thought of it as roughly equivalent to being tall, a logistical fact, a thing that made shirts fit badly.
"Best lie," Theo said, eyes still closed. "Told my mum I liked the shoes she got me when I was fifteen. Wore them till they fell apart. Hated them."
"That's not a lie, that's a kindness, you can't…" Elliot's voice cracked slightly in the middle and he covered it with a cough. "You can't enter kindness into a lying competition, it's against the spirit of the game."
"You didn't set rules."
"There are implied rules. There's an implied…" He had lost the sentence. He genuinely couldn’t locate the end of the sentence. It’d been there a second ago and now there was only a man's forearm resting across a knee, veined and damp and about the circumference of Elliot's calf, and the total collapse of executive function. "There's an implied thing," he finished. "About the spirit."
Theo opened one eye. "You've gone weird."
"What?"
"You've gone weird. You've stopped talking properly." The eye stayed on him, mild, unbothered, and God, that was worse, the sheer absence of suspicion, the man's total confidence that whatever was happening had a boring explanation. "Is it the heat? Some people get funny."
"Yes," said Elliot, seizing it with both hands. "Yes. The heat. Exactly. I'm…yeah, I'm a bit…it's the heat."
Elliot pressed the back of his hand against his own forehead in what he hoped was a convincingly medical gesture and stared very hard at the seam where the doors met. "Your go. Worst lie. And then I think we should maybe stop this game, actually, I think it's peaked."
Theo considered it for a long moment.
"Told someone I was happy," he said. "For about nine years."
And the whole box went quiet.
Elliot turned his head. Slowly, this time. Not for the arms, not for the chest, not for the drop of sweat, he turned because a man had just put something down in the middle of the floor and was sitting there looking at the ceiling as though he hadn't.
"That's my worst," Theo said. "You judging or what?"
And there it was: the door, swinging shut. Quick and practiced and almost gentle. ‘You judging or what’. Take the thing back off the floor. Return to the game. Nobody has to look at it.
Elliot looked at him, at the ridiculous, magnificent, sweating, entirely unaware shape of him, arms loose, head back, offering up a nine-year lie in the same tone he'd used for the wetsuit man, and understood two things simultaneously and with total clarity.
The first was that he was in significantly more trouble than he had realized at any point in the preceding four months.
The second was that he was absolutely not going to judge that round.
"Draw," he said. "I'm calling it a draw."
"Can you do that?"
"I'm the judge. I can do anything." Elliot let his head fall back against the steel and shut his eyes, because it was the only place left to look that wasn't a problem. "Also I'm retiring from judging. Effective immediately. The panel is dissolved."
Theo huffed, that almost-laugh, the rusty one, and said nothing else.
Bu the trouble with retiring from judging was that it left Elliot with nothing to do but exist, and existing was going extremely poorly.
He gave it eleven minutes. He knew it was eleven minutes because he checked his phone twice, ostensibly for the time and actually for something to point his eyes at that wasn't a man's shoulder.
‘Say something’, he thought. ‘Anything. You're the one who talks. That's the deal, that's the whole arrangement, he does the silence and you do the noise, and if you stop doing the noise then there's just…this’.
"Do you know what the worst part is?" he said.
"Of what?"
"Of the situation. Broadly."
Theo turned his head. He'd stopped sweating quite so hard, the box had levelled off around thirty-five like he'd said it would, which was somehow more insulting than if it had kept climbing, the idea that this was now simply the ambient condition of their lives, and he'd got his forearms across his knees again, and Elliot had made a private and binding commitment to himself not to look at the forearms, which he was honoring at a rate of about sixty percent.
"Go on then," Theo said.
"There's no narrative. That's what's killing me. Six hours in a lift, and nothing happens. Nobody's going to come, nothing's going to break in, we're not going to have to climb out through the roof and shimmy along a cable, which, for the record, I was fully prepared to do."
"You'd have died."
"I'd have died heroically, which is the important bit…"
"You'd have died," Theo said, "and then it'd have just been me in here with a body, and I'd have had to explain it, and there'd have been a form."
Elliot stared at him. "Did you just do a joke?"
"No."
"You did. That was a joke. That had a turn in it…"
"Wasn't a joke."
"Marchetti, I judge these things professionally…"
"You retired."
"I've un-retired, and I'm ruling that a joke." Elliot pointed at him. "Four months of nothing. Four months of floor fourteen, late, like a…like the speaking clock. And it turns out you're funny."
"I'm not funny."
"You're a bit funny."
"I'm quiet," Theo said. "Quiet people get a reputation for being deep or funny or whatever. Usually they've just got nothing to say."
"That is the single most…" Elliot stopped, because he'd been about to say ‘that is the single most self-effacing thing I've ever heard and I'd like to take it apart with a screwdriver’, and something in him flinched from the sincerity of it. He rerouted. "That's very humble of you. Suspiciously humble. Humility is often a strategy, you know?"
"Is it?"
"It's my whole strategy. I'm relentlessly self-deprecating and it's a con. It's so that when someone else says the bad thing, I've already said it, and then it doesn't count." He heard the words leaving his mouth in the order they were leaving it and couldn’t do a single thing to stop them. "It's very effective. Ten out of ten. Would recommend."
There was a pause.
"Yeah," Theo said. "I know."
"You know."
"I've watched you do it." He said it simply, without any weight on it, the way you'd note that someone took sugar. "Downstairs. With the others."
And Elliot went very still.
"What others?"
"Your lot. The ones you come down with at lunch." Theo shrugged, a slow roll of one enormous shoulder. "Girl with the red glasses. Bloke who's always on the phone. The tall one who laughs before you've finished the joke."
"That's…" Elliot's brain performed a series of rapid identifications, "Nadia. And Callum. And Big Rob."
"If you say so."
"You know my colleagues."
"It's the job. I know everyone." But something had happened to Theo's voice on the last few words, some minute recalibration, and he'd gone back to looking at the ceiling. "You do a thing," he went on, and now there was a carefulness to it. "When they laugh. You look away. Every time."
Far above, a cable ticked.
"You've never once looked pleased," Theo said.
Elliot did not say anything. Every single sentence in his considerable arsenal had been designed for a different weather system entirely. He had responses for hostility. He had responses for flirtation, for disappointment, for the microaggression of being asked if he had a girlfriend by a man from Logistics. He didn’t have a response for a security guard describing, accurately, in a hot dark box at one in the morning, a habit Elliot hadn’t known he had.
Because he did do that. He knew, the instant it was said, that he did. He got the laugh and he looked away, every time, because looking at it meant receiving it, and receiving it meant needing it, and needing it meant everyone finding out that the whole apparatus ran on something as embarrassing as need.
He picked up the ball and ran the other way with it. It's what he did. It was, as established, a con.
"Right, well," he said brightly. "Guess I'm going to have to change my entire lunch routine."
"Reyes."
"…I'll come down the fire stairs, I'll wear a hat…"
"Reyes."
"What?"
"You're doing it right now." Theo said.
Elliot's mouth stayed open around a joke that never arrived.
He shut it.
For a long moment neither of them said anything at all.
Elliot came back to it in about ninety seconds.
"It's not…" he started, and stopped, and started again. "It's not a tragedy. I'm not sitting here going ‘oh, my terrible burden’. I've got a good life."
"Minuted."
"Good." He pulled his knees up. The steel behind his back was warm as a hand. "It's just that…being liked and being known aren't the same thing and I worked out very early which one I was better at."
He hadn't planned to say it. He'd planned to say something adjacent to it, something with a laugh in the tail. It came out clean instead.
"How early?" Theo said.
"Eleven-ish? Twelve." Elliot found he was looking at the doors rather than at Theo, and understood suddenly why Theo did that, why the man conducted his entire emotional life addressed to a piece of furniture. It was so much easier. You could say almost anything to a door. "There's this thing that happens when you're a kid and you're…obviously whatever you are, before you've got any words for it. Where you can feel the room deciding about you. And you get about a two-second window to tell everyone what the joke is. And if you're fast enough, you get to be the funny one instead of the…" he moved a hand "…other thing."
"And you were fast."
"I was lightning. Genuinely, it was the great gift of my life. Some kids have football, I had timing." He smiled at the doors. "By fourteen I could clear a bus stop. It's a real skill. It's just…you know. It's a skill you have to keep doing. You can't put it down. The minute you put it down, somebody looks at you properly."
"Where was this?"
"Coastal. Down south. The kind of town where there's a pier and everyone's related." His mouth twitched. "Massive house, four of us kids, my mum's whole family two streets over. Very loud. Nobody ever finished a sentence, you had to fight for the floor. There'd be nine people in a kitchen built for two, all shouting, all interrupting each other, and if you wanted to be heard you had to be the funniest thing in the room."
"Sounds all right."
"It was brilliant." And it had been. "There's no trauma here, sorry to disappoint. My mum cried when I told her and then made me a cake. My dad's response was, and I quote, ‘right, well, don't tell your nan yet, she's got the hip’." He laughed. "I came out at seventeen and it was fine. Which is why the whole…" he gestured vaguely at his own chest "…is so annoying, honestly. You can't even blame anyone."
He risked a look sideways.
Theo was watching him. Not glancing, watching, full and steady, his head turned and his dark eyes fixed and something working behind them, an intensity so far outside the man's usual register that Elliot's first instinct was to check whether he'd said something offensive.
"What?" he said.
"Nothing." But Theo looked away as he said it, down at his own hands, and there was a beat of something Elliot couldn't read at all. "Seventeen."
"Seventeen."
"That's young."
"Not really. Some people are twelve now. Kids are terrifying." Elliot let his head fall back. "God, I'd have loved to be twelve now. Absolute waste of a bus stop skillset."
"Your mum made a cake," Theo said. Flatly. As if confirming a figure.
"Lemon drizzle. Which, I want to be clear, was not a symbolic cake, that's just what she makes. She made one when the dog died as well." He grinned at the ceiling. "The lemon drizzle covers a lot of ground in our family."
Theo made a sound. It wasn't the almost-laugh. It was something else and when Elliot looked over the man had gone back to his own hands, turning one of them over, examining the palm as though there were something written on it.
"That's good," Theo said.
And there was a whole world in the way he said it.
Elliot almost asked.
He got as far as opening his mouth, and the shape of ‘what about you’ was actually sitting on his tongue, and then he thought of the man's jaw setting, and the door swinging shut, and ‘you judging or what’, and he closed his mouth and let it go by. It cost him something. He was a person who filled silences. Leaving one open, deliberately, for someone else's sake, was close to a physical act of restraint.
"Anyway. That's the origin story. Funny kid from a loud house. Very tedious, no wolves."
"Not tedious."
Somewhere around then, Elliot noticed that they were closer.
He couldn't have said when it happened. But at some point in the last twenty minutes he had shifted, to escape a bolt-head digging into his shoulder blade, he told himself, which was true, there had been a bolt-head, and the shifting had brought him along the wall and around the corner of it, out of his triangle by the panel and onto the back wall, the same wall, so that the two of them were no longer facing each other across the floor like a negotiation but sitting side by side in the L of the corner, hip-adjacent, close enough that when Theo moved his arm the air moved.
Neither of them mentioned it.
"Right," he said, and his voice came out lower than he meant it. "Your go."
"For what?"
"Origin story. I've done mine. There's a debt now." He tipped his head against the steel and closed his eyes, so that the man wouldn't have to be looked at while he did it. "Go on, Marchetti. Tell me something true."
The silence went on for a long time.
Long enough that Elliot thought he'd overplayed it. Long enough that he began assembling an exit, a joke, a retraction, ‘forget it, forget I asked, category three, best and worst crisps’, and had it loaded and ready and was about to fire it into the gap.
And then, beside him, Theo said:
"I was married."
"Okay," he said.
"That's it, really." Theo turned his hand over again, examining the palm. "At twenty. Daniela. Divorced at twenty-five. Got Mateo out of it, so." A short exhale that was not quite a laugh. "Best deal I ever made, when you look at the numbers."
"Twenty."
"Twenty."
"That's…" Elliot did the maths and had to do it twice. "That's seven years ago. You were a baby. I was still doing shots out of other people's shoes at twenty."
"Yeah, well." Theo shifted, and his shoulder came within an inch of Elliot's and stayed there. "Different sort of twenty."
The heat pressed down.
"We'd known each other since we were eleven," Theo said. "Same school, same street, her mum and my mum did the same shifts. She was…" and here the flatness went out of his voice and something warmer came in, and it was so unexpected that Elliot turned his head to look at him. "She was my best mate. Properly my best mate. Only person I could talk to. I'd go round hers and just sit in her kitchen for four hours saying nothing much and she never once asked me what was wrong."
"That sounds nice."
"It was." He said it like a verdict on a case. "Really nice. That's the whole problem."
"How d'you mean?"
Theo took a while. Elliot had stopped finding the pauses maddening somewhere around midnight. He'd started finding them almost restful. He was learning the rhythm of it. The man wasn't stalling. He was building, laying the thing out properly in his head before he handed it over, because he only intended to hand it over once.
"Everyone said we should get married," he said. “You two, when's it happening, you're basically married already. And she'd laugh and I'd laugh and…" he shrugged "…the thing is, it was true. We did everything together. I'd have done anything for her. So when it came round to it, and her nan was ill, and she wanted her nan to be there, it wasn't…It was just the next thing. Easiest yes I ever said."
"And?"
"And I meant it," Theo said. "I loved her. I still do, she's on my phone as In Case Of Emergency." He rubbed a hand down his face. "I just…meant a different thing than she did."
‘Told someone I was happy. For about nine years’.
"So what happened?" Elliot said. Very quietly. He had never in his life been this careful with his own voice.
"Nothing happened." Theo's hands had come together, one thumb working slowly across the knuckles of the other. "Mateo was one. She was up all hours with him, I was doing doubles at the warehouse, we were…knackered. Both of us. And she came down one night, about two in the morning, and I was sat at the kitchen table not doing anything."
"Okay."
"She stood in the door for a bit and then she said…" and Theo stopped.
He stopped completely.
Elliot didn’t say anything. He had never wanted to say something so badly in his entire life. He could feel the sentences stacking up behind his teeth, but he understood that every single one of them would be for his own benefit and not for Theo's.
So he sat in it. He sat in the awful open silence, sweating, four inches from a man's bare shoulder, and let it be as long as it needed to be.
It went on for maybe fifteen seconds. It felt considerably longer.
"She said a thing," Theo said finally. "That I'd…that there was something I'd never said. To her, or to anyone." His voice had gone very level, planed flat.
The whole box was still. Elliot could hear the man breathing, and the small tick of the cooling cable, and under it the enormous silence of a dead building, forty storeys of nothing, the two of them the only two conscious things in it.
"And did you…" Elliot said, and heard how it was going to end, and pulled up short of the edge.
It was right there. The question was right there, one word long, the most obvious question in the world, and every instinct he had as a person who filled gaps was screaming at him to close the distance and finish it. ‘And did you say it? Have you ever? Said it once, to anyone?
He looked at Theo's hands. The thumb had stopped moving. The knuckles had gone pale.
He can't, Elliot thought. He's got right up to it and he can't, and if I make him, he'll hate me.
"…did you keep the flat?" he said.
Theo's head came round.
"What?" Theo said.
"The flat. After. Who got it? Because it's always a whole thing, isn't it, the flat. My cousin's still in litigation over a conservatory." Elliot let his head fall back against the warm steel and shut his eyes, casual as anything. "And I've decided I'm invested in the domestic logistics. Sue me. I'm an accounts clerk. Assets and liabilities is basically my love language."
There was a very long pause.
And then Theo laughed.
He kept his eyes shut. He didn’t trust his face.
"She kept it," Theo said. "Obviously she kept it. She'd got the baby."
"And where'd you go?"
"Mate's sofa. Six months. Then a bedsit above a barber's in Bermondsey," he made a gesture, "Then the place I'm in now. Two bed. Second one's Mateo's, he's got the dinosaur stuff up, it's…yeah. It's all right." A beat. "It's got a balcony you can't stand on. Structurally. There's a notice."
"A balcony you can't stand on."
"It's more of a concept of a balcony."
"Marchetti, that's the funniest thing you've said all night."
"Wasn't a joke."
"It was absolutely a…" Elliot opened his eyes and turned his head and Theo was already looking at him, and the sentence went out of him.
They were close. He had known they were close, but he hadn’t fully registered the actual distance until he turned his head and found the man's face at the end of it, maybe ten inches away, close enough that Elliot could see the individual damp strands of hair at his temple and a small white scar through one eyebrow and the fact that his eyes weren't brown at all, not really, they were a very dark grey with something warmer coming up through the middle of them where the torchlight got in.
Move, Elliot thought. Move your head back. Right now. Casually.
He moved his head back. It took considerably more effort than it should have.
"Anyway," he said, at a volume just above nothing. "The flat. Good. Glad that's…glad the flat's sorted."
"Yeah."
"Structurally unsound balcony aside."
"Yeah."
Elliot stared at the opposite wall, which had nothing on it, and felt his pulse in his throat.
Beside him, Theo shifted. Elliot braced for the withdrawal, for the man to take the opportunity to put six inches of air back between them, which is what any sane person would do. But instead, Theo reached over, picked up the folded uniform shirt from where it sat by his other hip, and held it out.
"Here," he said.
"What?"
"For your back." He nodded at the wall behind Elliot. "You've been leaning off that bolt for an hour. Put that behind you."
Elliot looked at the shirt.
"You've been keeping track of my bolt," Elliot said.
"It's a big bolt. Do you want the shirt or not."
"I want the shirt," said Elliot, and took it, and their fingers didn’t touch, because Theo let go of it half a second early, and they both pretended that this was normal.
He wedged it behind his shoulder blade. It was warm. It smelled of the man, clean sweat and cheap detergent and something else underneath, cedar or tobacco or neither, the smell of another person's life, and Elliot leaned back into it and shut his eyes and thought, with a kind of quiet horror: ‘oh, I'm gone. I'm completely gone.’
"Better?" Theo said.
"Better," said Elliot.
And they sat, side by side against the same wall, shoulders four inches apart, at ten past three in the morning, and neither of them said a single further word for eleven minutes, and it was, Elliot realized somewhere in the middle of it, the most comfortable silence he had ever sat inside in his entire life.
He was so tired. The adrenaline had gone hours ago and taken the wit with it, and his head kept doing the thing where it tipped and caught itself.
"You should sleep," Theo said, out of the dark.
Elliot's head tipped again, and this time it took slightly longer to catch itself, and when it did his temple was nearer the man's shoulder than it’d been, by an amount too small to be described as a decision. "What time is it?"
A pause while Theo checked. "Ten past three."
"And they said middle of the night."
"They did."
"So any minute now, really."
"Any minute," Theo said.
Elliot let his eyes close properly, and the last thing he was aware of, before the long soft slide into whatever came next, was the sound of Theo beside him breathing, slow and steady and close, and the ridiculous, unbearable, entirely unearned comfort of it.
*
Elliot didn't sleep, exactly. He went somewhere adjacent to it.
It was the kind of not-sleeping that happens at four in the morning in a warm place when your body has given up filing objections: a long grey drift where time stopped moving in a line and started moving in patches. He surfaced twice. The first time the torch had dimmed to a brown glow, battery saving, some setting Theo must have found, and the box had gone the color of a photograph left in a drawer. The second time he couldn't have said what woke him, only that the quality of the silence had changed, and that his shoulder was warm in a way that had nothing to do with the ambient thirty-five degrees.
He was leaning on him.
Not head-on-shoulder, nothing so committed. But at some point in the drift he had come to rest against Theo's arm, upper arm to upper arm, the whole length of it, and the man hadn’t moved.
"You're awake," Theo said.
"No."
"Your breathing changed."
"That's a huge invasion of privacy, Marchetti."
"It's a monitoring thing. It's part of the…"
"You've been monitoring my breathing?"
"It's in the training."
The whole of Elliot's arm was still pressed against the whole of Theo's arm and neither of them had done anything about it and it was now, officially, far too late to.
He should sit up. That was the correct move. Sit up, stretch, make a joke about his neck, restore the four inches, resume the arrangement.
He didn't sit up.
"What time?" he said instead.
A pause. "Twenty past four."
"Christ."
"Yeah."
"That's nearly six hours."
"Five and a half."
"Five and a half hours in a lift." Elliot let his head roll back against the wall. "You know what the worst thing is? I'm going to have to go back to my life tomorrow and it's going to be significantly less interesting than a broken lift and I don't know what that says about me."
"Says you need to get out more."
"I need to get out of here more, primarily…" He stopped. "Wait. Was that another one? That's three tonight."
"Wasn't a joke."
"You've…" Elliot turned his head, meaning to look at him properly, meaning to perform the outrage, meaning to do the bit.
But Theo was already turned toward him.
The bit went out of him.
"Reyes," Theo said.
"Yeah."
"I don't know what I'm doing…"
"Yeah," said Elliot. "Me neither."
Neither of them moved for a moment. And then somebody did, and afterwards Elliot could never establish who, could never get the tape to play back slowly enough, could only ever conclude that it’d been both of them at once, some tiny mutual failure of resolve, an inch given from each side.
Ten inches became six.
The heat had a different quality this close. Elliot could feel it coming off the man's skin, a specific warmth with a body at the center of it. He could see the damp at Theo's hairline and the pulse going in his throat, fast, much faster than that terrible composure had any right to allow. He could smell him properly now: the clean sweat, the cheap detergent, the cedar-or-tobacco-or-neither thing that had been in the folded shirt at his shoulder blade for the last hour and a half.
And then, as Theo exhaled, as the man's breath moved across the six inches between them and Elliot's brain caught it and did nothing else for a moment, nothing at all, every other process suspended, he registered that too.
It wasn’t what he expected. He hadn't expected anything. It hadn't occurred to him to expect. But it was good. Warm and slightly sweet and faintly of coffee gone cold hours ago, and under that something almost mineral, something that was simply the man himself, the particular chemistry of one specific person, the smell that was left when you took away everything a person could buy or apply or perform.
It was, Elliot thought, the most intimate thing he had ever encountered in his life.
Because you couldn't get here by accident. Nobody arrived at the smell of someone's breath by accident. You had to be six inches away and staying, past the point where you could plausibly claim to be doing anything else, past every excuse available to either party, and Elliot had spent his entire adult life engineering situations that stopped comfortably short of this, and now here he was, in a broken lift, at twenty past four in the morning, closer to another human being than he had let anyone get since he was seventeen years old.
Keep this, he thought.
He committed it to memory the way you memorize a phone number in the seconds before your battery dies.
Six inches became three.
He could feel the man's breath on his mouth now. He could see the individual dark hairs of the beard along the jaw and the white scar through the eyebrow and the way Theo's eyes had gone half-lidded and unfocused. Somewhere in the deep architecture of Elliot's chest a thing he had kept nailed down since he was seventeen years old started, quietly, to work itself loose.
‘Don't be funny’, he told himself. ‘Whatever you do. Don't you dare be funny’.
He wasn't. For once in his life he wasn't. He tipped his chin up half an inch and closed his eyes and let it happen.
And that’s when the world came back on.
All of it. All at once. Every light in the lift and every light in the shaft and every light in fourteen floors of Pellicorp Tower, the emergency bulb blazing white overhead, the fluorescent strip flickering and catching and holding, the ventilation fan slamming into life with a roar like a plane taking off, the floor indicator waking up and running a diagnostic and pinging, a bright, cheerful, obscene little ping, and the whole car lurching six inches down on its cables as the brake released.
They came apart like the two ends of a snapped rope.
Elliot got his back against the wall so fast he cracked his elbow on the handrail. Theo was on his feet, how, Elliot had no idea, the man had gone from sitting to standing in a single motion, with his back turned, both hands braced on the panel, breathing like he'd sprinted up the shaft.
The light was appalling. After five and a half hours of brown torchlight the fluorescents were surgical, forensic, an interrogation, and everything they'd been doing in the dark was suddenly available in high definition: the sweat, the wreckage, the two feet of floor where three inches had just been.
"Right," said Theo, to the panel.
"Right," said Elliot, to the wall.
The lift shuddered. Somewhere below them machinery engaged, took the weight, and began to descend.
Theo grabbed his shirt off the floor. Elliot watched him drag it on over the vest and do the buttons wrong and not notice, and there was something about that, the misaligned buttons, the shaking hands, the enormous man reassembling his uniform at speed like a soldier hearing an alarm, that landed in Elliot's chest harder than anything that had happened all night.
Fourteen. Twelve. Nine. The floor numbers ticking down. The fan roaring. Neither of them saying a word.
Then the radio at Theo's shoulder crackled and came alive, and a voice, awake, brisk, appallingly normal, said: "Marchetti, Control, do you read? Power's back across the district, mate. Lift systems rebooting. You still in there? Over."
Theo pressed the button. When he spoke, his voice was completely level. It was, Elliot thought, an extraordinary piece of work.
"Control, Marchetti. Receiving. We're moving…coming down now, should be ground in about a minute." A beat. "Both fine. No injuries."
"Blimey. Five and a half hours. You must be climbing the walls in there, over."
And Theo, eyes forward, hand on the radio, face like weather, simply said:
"Not as such." A pause, precisely as long as it needed to be. "Get the engineers to have a proper look at this one, though, will you. It wants going over.”
He paused. He never turned around to face Elliot again. But seconds before the lift doors finally opened, he added:
“Something in it's been running hot for months…and nobody's noticed till tonight."
(To be continued…)
Out Of Order's story will continue. If you’re reading along, I’d love to hear from you.
Leave a comment with your thoughts, feedback, and your favorite moment. Your feedback is appreciated.
I don’t have a Disqus account, but I want you to know that I read every single comment you post here. Your words, insights, and emotional reactions mean a lot. This story exists because it’s being read, and because it’s being felt. Thank you for being part of that.
If you enjoyed this story, consider supporting the author on Patreon.
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
