The Lift Between Floors

The lift shuddered, groaned and stopped. The lights flickered and settled into a dim emergency glow. Somewhere above them an alarm rang twice and gave up.

'Brilliant,' said the woman in the grey suit. 'Absolutely brilliant.'

Yusuf pressed the emergency button. A tinny voice told them an engineer was on the way and would be there in about ninety minutes, it being a Friday evening. His phone had three per cent battery. Hers was in her desk drawer upstairs.

They sat on the carpeted floor with their backs against opposite walls. Her name was Leila; she worked on the fourteenth floor for an insurance firm and he worked on the sixth for a company that made apps nobody needed. They had shared this lift perhaps two hundred times without exchanging a word.

In the half-dark, it was easier to talk. Within the first half hour they had covered jobs, cities and the worst dates of their lives. By the second, their legs were stretched out side by side and her shoes were off. By the third, she had moved to his wall.

'Is this a bad idea?' Leila asked, very close to him.

'Probably,' Yusuf said. 'Do you want to anyway?'

She did. So did he. They kissed in the stalled lift with the emergency light humming over them and the city going dark outside, and for once neither of them was in a hurry to be anywhere else.

The engineer arrived after an hour and forty minutes. He found them standing on opposite sides of the lift, very neatly dressed, and remarked that they seemed remarkably calm.

They took the stairs down to the street, hand in hand.