Pressured

The storm hit around three in the afternoon. By four, the lodge was shut. Road closed up the pass. Gondolas stopped. Snow coming sideways so hard the windows sounded like someone was throwing gravel at them.

I was twenty-eight that week, by the way. Twenty-eight, and stuck in a ski lodge in the Alps with nothing to do and no way out. Not a bad problem to have, honestly. I'd been here eleven days already for a shoot, and the shoot got shut down that morning because two of the trucks couldn't make it up the mountain. So I'd been sitting in my room watching the same movie on my laptop for the second time when my phone buzzed.

Nicki.

We'd been together about a year and a half by then. Met her at a lodge party two years back, up in Vermont, back when I was twenty-six and she was thirty and complaining about a fire door somebody had blocked with a planter. I liked her before she even looked at me. She was a fire inspector, still is, and she had this way of talking about exit signage like it was poetry. Eleven days into this trip she'd been inspecting the place, which is the only reason we were both stuck in the same building in the first place. Small blessings.

The text said: come down to the basement. Printing room. Now. And then, a second later: bring nothing.

I sat there on the bed for a minute. Rain, snow, whatever, coming down hard outside. My first thought was that something was wrong with the inspection. My second thought was the way she'd looked at me at breakfast. She'd been stressed all week. Some manager up here had been giving her grief about paperwork, and she'd had to crawl through three mechanical rooms in two days, and last night she'd come back to my room smelling like dust and machine oil and she'd barely said ten words before falling asleep with her boots half off.

So. The basement. Bring nothing.

I put my jacket on over the sweater I'd already been wearing all day. I checked the hallway both ways like an idiot. Nobody. Everybody in the lodge was up in the bar by then, getting loud about the roads. I took the back stairs.

* * *

The basement of this place is weird. Half of it is the old boiler level, all concrete and pipes, and then there's a corridor on the far side that nobody seems to use, and at the end of that corridor there's this old printing press room. The lodge used to print its own posters, some guy at the desk told me once. Programs, posters, whatever. Now it's just stacked paper and a big dead press and a roof that leaks in one corner, which Nicki had already written up, because of course she had. She wrote everything up. There was a puddle in that corner the size of a rug.

The elevator at the end of the hall had an OUT OF ORDER sign on it that looked older than me. So I took the stairs down, all of them, and my knees were already complaining by the time I hit the concrete.

Nicki was standing by the dead elevator with her arms crossed.

She's thirty-two. Fire inspector, five years now, so she carries herself like she owns every building she walks into. Short dark hair. She'd changed out of her work jacket into just a flannel, sleeves pushed up, and she was leaning one shoulder against the elevator door like she'd been there a while.

"You got my text," she said.

"I got your text." I came down the last step. "You know the elevator doesn't work, right? I'm writing that up."

"Ha." She didn't move. She just watched me come toward her, and the look on her face was not a relaxed look. It was a hungry look. I know that look. I've been on the receiving end of that look for a year and a half.

"Bad day?" I asked.

"Worst one this week, which is a competition." She pushed off the elevator and stepped toward me. "Some guy upstairs tried to tell me the fire doors were compliant. I showed him the photos. He showed me a printout from 2019. I'm still recovering."

"So you texted me to come look at a printing press."

"Sure. The printing press."

"Nicki."

"What?"

"You didn't text me down here to talk about the printing press."

She smiled. Slow. She does this thing where she looks at my mouth first and then my eyes, and it takes about a second and it feels about a second long. "No," she said. "I didn't."

The storm was doing its thing somewhere far above us. Down here you couldn't hear it. You could hear the pipes and the hum of some old machine and the drip, drip, drip from the leaky corner into that puddle.

"Everyone's in the bar," she said. "Lockdown for the night. Nobody's coming down here. Nobody ever comes down here."

"That's kind of the vibe, yeah."

"And you came."

"I came."

"You ran down three flights."

"I jogged."

"You took the stairs two at a time and I heard you from the landing." She reached out and took the collar of my jacket. Not pulling. Just holding it, between two fingers, like she was checking the label. "So."

"So."

"I've had a day," she said. "I've been crawling around these basements for a week. And there's a storm, and I can't leave, and my girlfriend is one floor up watching a movie she's already seen, and I decided I was done being patient."

"You were patient?"

"I was extremely patient. At breakfast. In the corridor by the staff wing. When you stretched in front of me this morning like that, in the hallway, in front of the inspector from Zurich."

"I stretched. It was a stretch."

"It was a crime scene is what it was." Her hand slid from my collar down to the zipper pull and just rested there. "So here's the deal. I'm asking. Plainly. Right now. Do you want to fool around with me, in this gross old room, right now, while the whole lodge is locked down?"

The drip in the corner. The hum of the pipes. My heart doing its job.

"You're asking me," I said, "in a room with a leak and a dead printing press."

"I'm asking you in a room with a lock on the door and no cameras and nobody in it but us."

I looked at the door. There was, in fact, a lock. An old one, the kind with a thumb turn. She'd checked, obviously. She's a fire inspector, she knows every lock in that building, and the fact that she'd already figured out which rooms lock from the inside and picked this one was, honestly, doing a lot for me.

"Yes," I said. "Obviously yes. You didn't need to drag me down three flights for that."

"I wanted to drag you down three flights for that." She stepped in close, finally, and her hand flat on my back, and she was warm and she smelled like cold air and coffee. "Also I like watching you come down stairs."

"Also that."

"Also that." She tipped her head toward the room behind her, the dark one with the dead press and the stacks of old posters and that one wet corner. "I found this room Tuesday. I've been thinking about it since Tuesday."

"Four days."

"Four days of a very long week." Her thumb hooked in my waistband, not going anywhere yet, just waiting. "Last chance to go back upstairs and watch your movie."

"It was a bad movie."

"I know. You texted me about it."

I grabbed the front of her flannel and pulled her toward the dark.

The room swallowed us. Dark except for one caged bulb near the door that Nicki flipped without looking. She'd obviously rehearsed this part too.

The press sat in the middle like a dead whale. Cast iron, green paint flaking off it, levers and wheels nobody had touched in decades. Stacks of old posters leaned against the walls, curling at the edges. Ski season, 1978. Apres-ski night. Prices in francs nobody would pay now.

And that corner. The leak. Drip, drip, drip, into a puddle the size of a rug, and the air in there smelled like wet paper and machine oil.

"Charming," I said.

"It's perfect," Nicki said. "Don't insult it."

She backed me up until my shoulders hit the side of the press. Cold iron through my jacket. She kept one fist in the front of my sweater, and she looked at me for a beat like she was making sure.

Then she kissed me.

Hard. No warm up, no gentle. Her mouth open against mine, one hand flat on the press beside my hip, the other coming up to my jaw to hold me exactly where she wanted me. I made a noise into it. She swallowed it.

Drip. Drip. The pipes hummed.

"God," she said against my mouth. "Four days."

"You could've just knocked on my door."

"Where's the fun in that." She kissed me again, shorter, then pulled back an inch. "I wanted the staircase. I wanted you jogging down it like someone caught sneaking out."

"I'm twenty-eight."

"And you jogged."

"I jogged."

She laughed, low, and then she was kissing me again and I stopped keeping score. Her thigh slid between mine and pressed up and my head went back and she followed it, mouth moving to my neck, teeth just dragging, not biting yet. Teasing. She knows exactly how long I can stand the teasing, and she always goes one minute past it.

Something cold hit my shoulder.

"Ow. What the!"

Drip. Right through my jacket, cold enough to make me flinch. The leak had range. It was coming down through some crack in the ceiling above the press, landing right where she'd pinned me.

"Move me," I said.

"No!" She grinned against my throat. "The water's part of it. I've been thinking about the water since Tuesday."

"You're deranged."

"I'm thorough." Another drip hit my shoulder, then the side of my neck, and I hissed and she made a happy little sound like she'd won something. "See? Cold. You jump. I like when you jump."

"You're a fire inspector who's turned on by water damage."

"Opposites attract."

She got my jacket off my shoulders. It dropped somewhere behind the press and I heard it land in the puddle corner and neither of us cared. Then her fingers went to the top button of my sweater, the button-up one I'd worn all day, and she looked up at me.

"This too?"

"Nicki, it's freezing down here."

"So I'll keep you warm." She popped the button. "That's not a no!"

"It's a yes with a complaint attached."

"Noted." She worked the next button, then the next, unhurried, like she had all night, which, fine, we did, but I did not have all night, my skin was doing that thing where it feels too big for me. "Complaints go in the box by the door."

"There's no box."

"I'll write it up."

The sweater came open and she pushed it off my shoulders and the cold air hit my chest and I gasped and she watched me do it. She does that. Watches. Like she's filing it.

"Look at you," she said. "Standing in a basement in a dead lodge in a storm."

"You brought me here."

"Best write up of my career."

Then she bent her head and bit my collarbone. Not soft. Real teeth, a slow close of her jaw, enough to make my knees have an opinion. I grabbed the edge of the press behind me. The iron was cold and my palms were not.

"Nicki."

"Mm." Still biting.

"Nicki, oh my god."

She let go, licked the spot once, and lifted her head. Her mouth was right at my ear. Her breath was warm and the room was cold and the drip kept going, patient as anything.

"Here's what I want," she whispered. "I want to put you up on this press. I want to get on my knees right here on this filthy floor and take my time with you until you forget the storm. Then I want to push you back on the paper stacks and fuck you until you're loud, and I do mean loud, Bianca, and I want the whole locked-down lodge to hear nothing, because nobody's coming down here, and I checked."

My mouth opened. Nothing came out for a second.

"That's," I said. "That's the plan."

"Starting when?"

"Starting with your yes. Each thing, one at a time. You know how I do this."

I do know how she does this. She asks, I answer, and then she keeps asking, every step, like she's reading me a checklist she wrote in her head four days ago in a mechanical room somewhere.

"Yes," I said. "Knees. Now. Please."

"There it is."

She kissed me once, quick, almost sweet, and then she went down.

The floor was concrete and cold and she did not care. Her hands slid up the backs of my thighs and she looked up at me from down there, flannel sleeves pushed up, hair starting to come loose, one eyebrow up.

"Pants too? Asking."

"Yes."