keycard

*This one came from the image of two competent people stuck in a dumb situation and letting gratitude lead somewhere physical. Thanks for reading... hope it lands.*

Shae had been jiggling the door handle for the third time when she finally gave up on it and turned around to look at Nick, who was standing there holding his keycard like it had personally betrayed him. She was thirty-five years old and had planned two hundred events at this college, and in all that time she had never once gotten locked in a room, so the fact that it was happening on a Saturday night in a basement storage annex felt almost funny, in a way she wasn't ready to laugh at yet.

"Okay," she said, and she kept her voice level, because she was the type who kept her voice level at work no matter what happened. "Walk me through it again. You had the card. You swiped the card. The light turned green."

"It turned green, I saw it turn green," Nick said. He was thirty-four, two years into the security job after six years in a warehouse, and he had never in his life been written up for anything. "I pulled the door shut behind us so it would latch, that's what you're supposed to do, and then I wanted to double check it was locked because, you know, accreditation, everybody's been paranoid all week, so I tried the handle from the inside and it just turned. No resistance. Like the lock isn't even engaging."

"So the handle's broken."

"The handle turns, it just isn't connected to anything. There's no inside release, look, no thumb turn, nothing. The latch is stuck or the strike plate is bent or something, and the reader only works from the hallway side."

Shae looked at him for a while, and her face settled into a flat expression that he correctly read as you did this, even though she didn't say it out loud, because saying it out loud would have started something and there was nowhere to go afterward in a room with no exit.

"Fine," she said. "Call it in. You're security, you've got a radio or a phone or whatever."

Nick had both, actually, a radio on his belt and a cell phone in his pocket, and the radio gave him nothing but static because the basement annex was apparently one of the dead spots on campus that everyone knew about except apparently whoever had designed the radio system. So he used the phone and called the main security desk, which on a Saturday after midnight was staffed by exactly one person, and he listened to it ring six times before the voicemail greeting started.

"You've got to be kidding me," he said, and hung up without leaving a message, then dialed again and left one anyway, because leaving a message was the professional thing to do even when the professional thing to do was obviously useless. "Hey, it's Nick, I'm in the storage annex off the pool corridor, the east door malfunctioned, we've got two people stuck inside, could somebody come swipe us out, anytime tonight is great, thanks."

"Two people," Shae said. "Nice of you to count me."

"Well you're stuck too, that's the whole point." He tried the maintenance line next, and got a recording that said the weekend crew was scheduled from six a.m. to two p.m., and that emergencies after hours should be directed to security, which circled him right back to the voicemail he'd already filled.

Shae sat down on one of the cardboard boxes by the shelving, then thought better of it because the box said fragile in faded marker on the side and she didn't want to explain a crushed box of banners to anyone on Monday. She had come in tonight, on her own time, unpaid, because the accreditation team was arriving Monday morning and the storage closet had been on the facilities request list since September and nobody had touched it. She had a flashlight app, half a granola bar in her jacket pocket, and a Tuesday deadline, and none of those things were going to open a stuck latch.

"I don't have any pull on the weekend staff," she admitted, after Nick had tried the desk one more time and gotten the same greeting in the same chipper voice. "The facilities guys know me, they like me, but they don't answer their phones for me on a Saturday. And the dean who could actually order somebody down here, she's at her sister's wedding in Ohio, I know this because I ordered the chair covers for it."

Nick laughed before he could stop himself, a short dry laugh that bounced off the cinderblock, and then Shae laughed too, and the blame shifted somewhere in that laugh, sliding off him and off her and landing on the door, which deserved it, or on the college, which deserved it more. It was after one in the morning. The fluorescent tube overhead buzzed and flickered at intervals that had no pattern to them. Somewhere above them a pipe ticked as it cooled.

"So six o'clock," she said. "At the earliest. Assuming the weekend guy reads the voicemail, which he won't, because nobody listens to voicemail, I don't even listen to my own."

"Six o'clock," Nick agreed. He checked his watch and did the math out loud, because he was that kind of person. "Almost five hours. I've worked longer shifts standing still, honestly, but you've got somewhere to be I'm guessing."

"I've got a Monday," Shae said. "I've got approximately four hundred folding chairs to account for and a fire marshal coming at nine. But no, nothing tonight that can't wait." She looked around the room while she said it, doing the thing she always did in unfamiliar spaces, which was inventory them. Industrial shelving on three walls, stacked with folded tables, boxes of lanyards, a dead potted plant somebody had abandoned in 2019 judging by the dust. Banners in unrolled paper sleeves. A cooler nobody had cleaned out. And leaning against the far wall, half behind a rack of folded chairs, a gymnastics mat, the folded-in-thirds kind, blue vinyl gone grey at the edges, the velcro straps still holding it shut.

"Okay," she said, standing up and brushing off her jeans. "If we're going to sit in this basement until dawn, we're at least going to sit on something with padding, because that floor is bare concrete and I already have the knees of someone who spends too much time on concrete floors." She worked the mat loose from behind the chair rack and dragged it toward the middle of the room where the light was steadiest, the vinyl squeaking against the concrete the whole way.

"Fair point," Nick said, and came over to help her unfold it, because it was the kind of mat that took two people unless you liked wrestling, and he flipped the last third open and stood there with his hands on his hips, surveying it like a man surveying a campsite.

"There," Shae said, sitting down cross-legged in the middle of it, which was, she had to admit, more comfortable than any surface she'd encountered in the building all week. "See, this is event planning. I find the seating solution. Somebody else just has to swipe us out by six."

"I'll put it in my report," Nick said, and sat down across from her, and for a while neither of them said anything, because there didn't seem to be much to say, and the pipe overhead ticked, and the light buzzed, and the mat smelled faintly of old rubber and gym class, which was honestly not the worst thing either of them had smelled that year.

They sat there for a while, Shae with her legs crossed and Nick with his back against the shelving, and at some point she stopped thinking about the door and started thinking about how strange it was that she wasn't more upset than she was. Stuck in a basement with a security guard she barely knew, and she felt fine. Better than fine, actually. Calm, in a way she hadn't felt since the short thing with the caterer had ended three years ago, which was not a comparison she intended to say out loud.

"You know what I keep thinking," she said, picking at the grey edge of the mat. "It would have been really easy for you to make this weird. The calling, the voicemail, all of it. Some guys would've gotten huffy about it, or blamed me for coming in on a weekend, or done that thing where they pretend everything's fine and then get snippy."

Nick shrugged, which in the flickering light looked like a slow ripple going through his shoulders. "Warehouse work teaches you that getting mad at a situation is like getting