"Fuck, I'm starving." I reached across the desk for my phone. "What do you want on your pizza?"
Melissa rolled her eyes. "If I try to eat another slice of that shitty pizza from Anthony's I might choke on it and die, then you'd be left finishing this presentation on your own." She pushed back in her chair and stretched. "Let's go to the sandwich place, that way you can get whatever junk you want and I can get a salad."
I looked at my phone. It was 8:15, which gave us probably another 6 hours of working time before we were so fried we couldn't function. In our 6 months running this startup together, we'd pulled a handful of all-nighters, and it was starting to get old.
"Fuck it, yeah, OK." It had already been a long week, and it was only Thursday. This pitch was important, the investors seemed interested and it could be our best shot at getting funded. That said, a walk outside to clear our heads might help.
Melissa stood up, turning and bending to get her purse from behind her chair. She was my business partner, and I know better than to develop feelings for a partner, but I took a second to admire her body. She had lost a lot of the baby weight, but I liked the little bit that remained. She had some more curves where she hadn't before, and it suited her. Her ass had always looked great, but now it was fantastic. It was full and round in her yoga pants and her comfortable-looking tee shirt hugged her body, showing off her giant, taut breasts. A lot of the weight that remained was in her chest. I'm no bra salesman, but if I had to guess she'd gone from a modest C cup to a full D cup after having the baby.
She straightened and I averted my eyes back to my phone. If I'm being honest, my code of ethics was only part of the reason I didn't let myself go there. The other was that she was way out of my league. She had that flawless pale skin that you just want to touch, and naturally pink baby doll lips framed by curly dark brown hair. She never wore makeup and she always looked amazing.
We headed down the hall toward the elevator, chatting about the presentation, the inside intel we'd gotten on the investors and debating how to convince them to invest in our little company. Melissa was texting the whole way, probably checking in on her sister, who had agreed to watch the baby for the night.
I punched the button for the elevator. It lit up, then went out again, which was sort of odd. I hit it again, this time rapid-tapping it. It stayed lit and the elevator arrived. The doors started to open, but when they got about halfway started to close again. "Hey hey, what the shit?" I blurted, sticking my foot into the door to trigger the safety mechanism. Melissa looked up and cocked her head at me right as the doors jumped back into opening mode.
"Uh, what's that about?"
"I dunno, this building's new, guess they're still working out the bugs..." I gave her a playful punch on the arm. "That sounds familiar, right? At least this bug won't accidentally mangle the logins for all our users like the -"
"No no no! Too soon," she interrupted, "and that was YOUR bug, asshole."
I chuckled as we stepped into the elevator.
You know how sometimes things happen where you remember the moments before so clearly, and you go over them again and again in your head? This was like that. I'm chuckling, hand in my pocket, step onto the elevator, Melissa is putting her phone away in her purse as she's mashing the "Lobby" button. I turn as the doors close, the elevator starts to move, we're still smiling and then -
LURCH. Melissa catches herself on the wall, I sort of drop into a half-squat. The elevator isn't moving. Neither are we.
"Oh fuck no." Melissa mashes the "Lobby" button frantically. It's not lighting up. She mashes 20, the floor we just left. Nothing. Beginning to panic, she starts hitting all the buttons as I take out my phone. No bars. No wifi. Shit.
Here's the anatomy of our predicament: The elevator we were in serves floors 18-32 (the top floor of the building) and from there down, only stops at the lobby. There are two of those. There are two more elevators that serve floors 1 (lobby) to 17. I pried open the doors, praying we hadn't gone below floor 18, only to come face to face with cement. Bust.
There was an emergency call button in the elevator, as I assume is required by law. I don't know if it was because the building's so new, or because whatever stopped the elevator broke it, but the call button also did nothing. At this point, Melissa was beginning to visibly panic.
What about climbing out of the car? In movies, you've probably seen people jump up and push open a hatch in the roof of the elevator car to gain access to the outside. If we could open that, I could at least get up there and look around. Maybe there would be a ladder, or maybe I could climb over to the door opening for the elevator that served whatever floor we were stuck on. Worth a shot, right?
I pushed aside the drop ceiling panels in the elevator until I saw the one with the hatch. Well, it turns out that those are more designed for rescue workers to get INTO the car than for occupants to get OUT of the car. Which, I have to admit, makes some sense. It had a latching mechanism that we might be able to force open, but it was just out of my reach.
Melissa was absently chewing on her nail with her arms crossed, looking at the latch.
"Ok," I said, kneeling down, "since it's unlikely you'll be able to hold me on your shoulders for long, why don't you climb up on mine and see if you can get that hatch open? If you can, I'll jump up and climb out to see what it looks like out there."
She nodded and climbed onto my shoulders, and I grabbed her thighs right above the knee and stood up. She had to bend over a little to keep her head from hitting the drop ceiling, and I tried to ignore her tits rubbing against the top of my head as she worked.
She didn't weigh much, which is good, since she was really having to work to bust the latch open. At one point, I handed her my key ring so she could use my bottle opener to apply more leverage. As she worked, I worked at not thinking about her tits on my head or the warmth of her crotch against my neck through her thin yoga pants. I especially tried to not wonder what kind of underwear she was wearing. It was not going well.
I felt something warm drip on the top of my head. "Whoa, what the fuck, is there water coming in?"
"Huh? Oh shit." She wriggled around a little. "I'm so sorry, I'm uh... I'm leaking. I should have pumped before we left. Shit, that's so embarrassing..."
It took me a second to understand what she was saying. As the drop of breast milk on my head soaked into my scalp, I heard the latch pop, and she straightened as she flipped the hatch open.
"Yeah, got it, let me down."
I knelt again, and she stepped off. I could see now that her shirt was wet right under her left nipple. Something else for me to focus on not thinking about...
"Are you ok? I mean, are you going to be OK without pumping?"