I heard the sound of her coming in the front door while she relayed this to Daniel. “We just got home, we’ll be up there in a second.”
Forty-five minutes later, we were still trapped.
Jacob had been trying to troubleshoot from our side, but the issue wasn’t the lock. The door had swollen itself into the doorway. Like a broken finger swelling around a wedding ring.
“I’m just going to cut it,” Daniel said resignedly through the speaker on my phone.
“No, don’t cut it,” Jacob said quickly.
I gawked at him. “What do you mean don’t cut it?”
He nodded at it. “That’s an antique door. It’s probably original to the house. It’s irreplaceable.”
“We are trapped here!”
He peered at me calmly. “Look, my cabin does stuff like this. The foundation settles and the house shifts. Humidity makes the doors stick. It just rained yesterday, that’s probably what’s going on.”
Jacob raised his voice. “Daniel, do you have a dehumidifier?”
“In the basement, yeah.”
“Okay. Set that up in the hallway. Let’s run it overnight. See if we can’t dry out the wood a little. If we can’t get it open in the morning, we can reevaluate.”
“Good idea,” Daniel said from the other side.
I looked at Jacob bleakly. “All night? We have to stay here all night?”
“We were going to bed anyway,” Jacob said. “We have a bathroom, water, we just ate. We don’t need anything—”
“I do! I need…my retainer!” I said desperately. “I can’t live without it!”
He gave me the amused look of a parent entertaining the wild story of a three-year-old.
I couldn’t stay the night in this room with Jacob. I couldn’t share a bed with him. I looked over at it in a half panic. I’d never actually seen a bed that small—wasn’t this a bed-and-breakfast once? Didn’t they specialize in beds meant for couples? Was this a child’s room???
“I could always get a ladder up there,” Daniel called through the speakerphone. “But you’d have to climb out onto the roof—”
“Yes. Absolutely.” I nodded enthusiastically. “Let’s do it.”
“You are not climbing out onto a roof,” Jacob said.
“Why?”
“Because you could fall. And look at the windows. They only open four inches wide. You’d have to birth-canal yourself out of it, you’ll get stuck.”
“I agree, Bri,” Alexis said through the phone. “It’s too dangerous. I think the plan is good, just stay where you are.”
I looked at Jacob in despair.
“Excuse me,” I said, and I took my phone to the bathroom and shut the door.
“Alexis, take me off speaker and go to your room,” I whispered.
There was a pause and the sound of a door closing. “Okay, you’re off speaker.”
“I cannot sleep in here tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because I will have sex with him.”
She snorted.
“It’s not funny,” I hiss-whispered. “Your house has locked me in a thirst trap and I’m so sex starved and into him I’m not going to be able to say no. My legs will probably shoot straight out like one of those fainting goats the second he so much as breathes on me. This is a crisis!”
I could tell she’d moved the phone away from her mouth so I wouldn’t hear her laugh—which I totally did.
“Ali, the man literally propositioned me last night.”
“He asked you on a date,” she said, still snickering. “He didn’t ask you for sex.”
“Yes, he did. We already go on dates. Every day. He wasn’t asking me to get emotionally involved with him, because he’s not emotionally available and he’s seen my dating profile and he knows I’m not either, so what he was actually asking was if I’d be interested in maybe having sex with him.”
“That is a very dizzying argument…”
“So now I’m locked in a room with a man that I’m half in love with and extremely attracted to, who wants to have sex with me, and I’m sorry, but I have about as much willpower as a piece of broccoli.”
She lost it. It took her a solid minute to stop laughing long enough to reply.
“Look, there are extra toothbrushes in the drawer under the sink,” she said, still wheezing. “I can slip your retainer under the door and we’ll take care of Lieutenant Dan. Also, you should know the walls are very thick…”
I groaned, sitting heavily on the closed lid of the toilet. “I cannot believe this is happening…”
“I can.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I grumbled.
“Let’s just say that sometimes things happen here that I can’t explain.”
I put my forehead into my hand. “God. And why is the bed so fucking small?”
“Daniel’s re-staining the old frame. He put that one in the room until he’s done.”
“It might as well be a hammock.”
She was laughing again. “Bri? I think you’ve just made it to the Only One Bed scene.”
“Ha-ha.”
When I hung up with her and came back out into the room, Jacob was crouched in front of the fireplace, poking it with a metal rod.
“What are you doing?”
“Starting a fire,” he said, standing. “It’ll help dry the room out on our side.”
Of course. We’re sharing a tiny bed, and there’s going to be a romantic fire. Perfect.
He stood there giving me that earnest, hat-in-hand, puppy-dog look again. He knew I didn’t want to be here. I sighed and resolved to try and be less visibly miserable. This wasn’t his fault.
He looked over his shoulder at the bed and came back to me. “So…what side do you want?” he asked.
Sides? We were going to have to sleep stacked on top of each other.
I sighed. “What side do you normally sleep on?”
“The right.”
“Okay. I’ll sleep on the left.”
I looked at what I was wearing. I was in a tank top and jeans. My boobs would be everywhere the second I lay down.
“You can borrow a shirt,” he said, reading my mind.
“Thanks.”
“It’s just sleeping,” he said.
Ha. Right.
I changed into the shirt he gave me. It smelled like him and made the whole situation a million times worse. Alexis slipped my retainer under the door, which I actually didn’t want to wear in bed with Jacob, but I’d made such a big deal about it I had to. It made me lisp.
His shirt was long enough to cover me. Barely. I debated sleeping in my jeans, but that idea actually did make me feel claustrophobic, so I just got under the covers as quickly as I could to keep from accidentally flashing him.
When Jacob got in, his entire left side was pressed into my body. After some awkward, apologetic shifting that seemed to be mutually geared at keeping his penis as far away from me as possible, we agreed to sleep back to back. It would have been easier to let him spoon me, or for him to lie on his back with me sleeping curled up next to him in the crook of his arm, but there was no way I was doing either. It was waaaaay too slippery a slope.