Chapter 12 - Wish Lunch Could Last Forever.

“Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty,” I shouted down the hole of the black-as-night stairwell. “Come on, Bill. Get your furry ass back here. William . . . I’m not kidding here. This is getting really annoying . . .”  

“Bill IS fucking annoying. That’s kind of his thing,” I could hear Brian muttering from outside the secret door and it made me smile - no matter what Brian said, he loved that damn cat.

I’d been calling out for over five minutes by that point, with no luck, so my hopes that Bill would actually come when I called him were fading fast. Bill didn’t strike me as the kind of pussy who liked obeying orders. Especially not when there was a big, new, strange-smelling, secret stairwell to explore.

“Can you see him?” Brian called out.

“No . . . not yet. But I don’t wanna go any further. I don’t know how safe these stairs are,” I yelled back, tapping my foot gently on the next step to test it out.

“What’s it look like down there?”

I couldn’t really see much, other than the million cobwebs, the clumps of dirt, and the mounds of dust that littered the small confined space - but I wasn’t going to tell HIM about any of that. Just the thought of all that filth might send my OCD Man into some sort of panic.

“Is it dark?” I rolled my eyes at his question. Of course it was dark, what did he expect? I was in a hole in the fucking wall.

“Yeah, practically pitch black,” I called back.

I thought about it for a second and figured maybe I could take a picture on my phone . . . of the stairway at least. I turned on the flash for the camera app on my phone and began taking pictures - it would help me get a better idea of what was down here too. There was only so much I could see with the light from my phone alone.

“What the hell was that?” I could hear the worry in Brian’s voice as he must have seen the bright flashes of light when I took the photos. Oops, maybe I should have warned him about that.

“Sorry, that was me taking pictures. I thought you might wanna see what’s down here,” I explained, coughing loudly in the process.

The dust down here wasn’t doing my asthma or allergies any good. I could hear myself already starting to wheeze as if I’d smoked forty-a-day. I patted the pockets of my pants looking for my inhaler but quickly remembered it was in the pocket of my hoodie, which I’d thrown onto one of the chairs in the boardroom as I was looking at some of the other paintings on the wall. Fuck! I turned around and shuffled as quickly as I could back towards the staircase entrance. I tried to stay calm, because the moment I panicked my asthma would get worse, and I really didn’t want this to turn into a full blown attack. As soon as I got to the door I bent over to get through the narrow opening and felt myself tumble out onto the floor - a huge cloud of dust following closely behind. All I could see of my man was his shoes as he moved as far away from me as possible.

“My . . .” the coughing continued as I tried to take in deep breaths of clean air. “My hoodie . . .”

“Huh?” Brian asked, completely oblivious as to what I was asking for.

I vaguely pointed towards the chair with my discarded sweat shirt on it as I got up onto my knees, hunching over as I tried to breathe. Brian didn’t move - if anything he took a couple of steps backwards - as if in horror at the dusty, wheezing mess at his feet. I couldn’t do anything other than sit and huff, though. Maybe going down into that stupid stairwell to find the damned cat wasn’t such a good idea after all? Ya think?

“My in . . .” I began, gasping loudly, “my inhaler . . . for my asthma . . . it’s . . . in . . .” I pointed again at the article of clothing just a few meters away.

Brian hesitated, shifting back and forth on his feet, wringing his hands, and looking almost like a pro-boxer doing some bizarre warm-up exercises as he jogged in place. I felt my chest tightening. If I didn’t get to my inhaler soon I knew I would pass out. It had happened before - lots of times unfortunately - and that was not something I wanted to happen today.

“Please?” I sounded pitiful as I begged for his help, but what the fuck, it’s how I felt.

I could see Brian shuffling nervously, bouncing from foot to foot as he debated with himself about what to do. But I couldn’t wait any longer. I started to crawl towards the chair.

“Stop!” He called out loudly. “Don’t move.”

I watched as he ran towards the chair and, with shaking hands, he picked up my sweater. I watched intently as he searched for the pocket, easily locating my inhaler. His whole body seemed to be vibrating with unwanted adrenaline, but he held my inhaler tightly in his hand as he rushed towards me, holding it out for me.

“Here, take it.”

I didn’t even think about what a huge deal this was for him, I was too busy dying from lack of oxygen. I snatched the inhaler from his hand and popped off the lid before taking a deep breath and spraying it down my throat. Then I did it again. After a few more puffs, I could feel my airways opening back up. Thank fuck and whoever invented Albuterol!

“Thanks,” I wheezed, my voice sounding croaky and my chest aching a little with each word I spoke.

I turned to Brian and tried to give him my most reassuring smile.

“All better now?” He asked. “You really scared me.”

“You?”

He nodded and even through the bushiness of his beard I could see him biting nervously at his lip. “Yeah, I thought you were going to just stop breathing.”

I could see the genuine concern in his eyes, but I could also see him scratching wildly at his arms through his shirt sleeves. I got up from the floor and instantly realized I was filthy as fuck. I didn’t have to look down to see that, however, since I could tell just from the horrified look on Brian’s face.

“I need to . . .” Brian hooked his thumb over his shoulder and bolted from the room.

Seconds later I heard the shower running in his apartment and knew he was in there scrubbing himself clean.

I didn’t know what to do next, I was covered from head to toe in dust and the last thing I wanted to do was traipse through his place and contaminate the whole building. If I did that, he’d probably NEVER leave his shower and, as appealing as the idea of my man all wet & soapy was, that didn't seem very productive. So I patiently stayed where I was until I heard the bathroom door opening back up about twenty minutes later.

“Brian, where’s your vacuum?”

I heard him shuffling down the hallway and then saw him stop outside the dining room door, dressed in new clothes, and looking remarkably delicious with his wet hair all curled up from the shower. “It’s in the closet down the hall.”

“Grab it for me, will you?” I asked, “and I’ll clean this up.” I heard him sigh with relief as he walked off to retrieve the vacuum. Seconds later he stood hovering with it outside the room. “Leave it there, I’ll come get it.” As I took it from him, I made sure that our hands didn’t touch, but damn, I wanted to touch him. He smelled so clean and . . . yummy. It took me a moment to recognize the scent, but it was D&G’s ‘Light Blue’ and, fuck me, if that wasn’t already my favorite smell, it would be now.

“Thanks,” I mumbled, managing to keep my lust-filled thoughts to myself, but only just barely.

I quickly vacuumed up the mess around me all the way to the wall. I made sure the door to the tunnel was pushed mostly closed but left it cracked open just enough that Bill could find his way back out. After I’d thoroughly vacuumed the carpet, I turned the hose on myself - why not, right? It was of course then that Brian decided to wander by. He stopped outside the door and looked at me like I was crazy.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m dusty . . .” I really didn’t know how else to answer that.

He shook his head and continued to watch me suck the dust from my clothes as best I could. “This is quite possibly the weirdest shit I have ever seen,” he chuckled softly.

“Well, I didn’t want to walk out and dirty your floor with my clothes,” I tried to explain; vacuuming my clothes didn’t seem so weird when I first thought about it, but now . . .

“Let me grab you something to change into,” Brian suggested - and although this was his idea, he sounded completely freaked out by it.

“Thanks,” I yelled out at his retreating form.

Moments later Brian returned and threw a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt my way. “They’ll be huge on you, seeing as you’re a midget.”

“A midget?” I scoffed. “I’m not THAT much shorter than you.”

“You keep telling yourself that, but you’re like a little oompa-loompa,” he laughed at his own joke and I couldn’t stop myself from joining in.

“I promise to wash them and bring them right back.”

“It’s okay,” Brian shook his head. “You can keep them.”

And while I knew the reason Brian didn’t want the clothes back was because of ‘contamination’, I still loved the idea of taking these home with me and wearing them around the house. In a weird way it was like I was going to be taking a little of Brian back with me. Too bad they’d been recently washed and didn’t smell like that cologne.

With Brian still standing there looking at me, I started to get changed. I didn’t even think about whether I should be doing it or not; I just wanted out of those dirty clothes. I removed my long sleeved tee first, and the moment the material was over my head I could feel his stare burning into me. I looked up and found his eyes were glazed over as he took me in. Without thinking, I ran my fingers over my stomach and down towards the button of my pants, loving how sexy I felt standing there.

“Do you want me to finish getting changed in the bathroom?” I asked, huskily.

Brian licked his lips and shook his head, his body was now leaning heavily against the frame of the door. “No. Stay right where you are.”

My fingers reached for the button of my pants and I snapped them open, sticking my hand inside and giving myself a little squeeze. I heard him groan loudly as I did it, feeling incredibly empowered by the way I was turning him on. I looped my thumbs into the top of my pants and tugged them down, leaving me standing there in just my tight, black boxer briefs.

“You’re so fucking pale.” His eyes continued to travel up and down my body. “Like some kind of sexy vampire.”

“Well, the sun isn’t my friend,” I teased, loving the feel of him looking at me like this. I felt kind of slutty, but the good kind of slutty, you know? So I didn’t care.

“I . . .” he struggled with his words but was determined to say what was on his mind. “I wish I could touch you.”

Hearing him say that made my heart feel as though it was being squeezed tightly. “I know . . . I wish you could too.” I didn’t want to make him feel guilty by saying that, but I needed him to know I wanted him just as much as he seemed to want me.

I picked up the clean t-shirt he’d thrown at me. It was huge, just like he said it would be, and I could hear him laughing quietly from the doorway. Next, I pulled on the sweats. I ended up having to roll them up a couple of times at the waist so they weren’t dragging on the floor.

“And you don’t think you’re a midget,” he teased.

I fucking loved this; how we could switch so easily from one thing to another. It didn’t feel awkward or forced. It didn’t feel like we’d only met a week or so earlier. It felt natural.

“Now, pick up your dirty shit and put them in this,” he said as he chucked a plastic bag my way. “We clearly have more research to do.”

Brian set me up on his laptop in the office - after supervising me while I used about two dozen of his wet wipes to clean as much of the dirt and dust off my hands and face as I could reach - and I set to work. I remembered some sites our Art & Architecture professor had recommended to us for finding blueprints on historic buildings, so I started there. Our building was a tricky one because it wasn’t important enough to be found on the major historical building indexes, but it was old enough that it wasn’t on the regular county sites. It took me a good forty-five minutes to track down the blueprints, with my Egbert hovering nervously in the background, but I was eventually able to pull something off the net.

“These are useless,” Brian grumbled, leaning over my shoulder to look at the screen showing page one of the building plans. “They don’t show the damn secret passage at all.”

“Well, if they did, it wouldn’t be a SECRET passage, now would it?” I teased him as I scanned through the other pages to confirm that there was no hint of the hidden staircase on any of them. “It looks like that whole section of the building was supposed to be an empty ventilation shaft according to these. Which, by the way, was quite the innovation for 1885, when breathing was considered borderline extraneous. Hence the crappy air quality in the Pittsburgh area of the era.” I clicked through a few more pages and then decided to give up. “Sorry, Eggy, there’s nothing on here that’s going to help us.”

“But, then, how do I know where the fuck that damn staircase goes? All these years I had no idea that was even there. I don’t think Don knew either or he would have been bragging on it and making shit up about Prohibition speakeasies or some other crap. But . . .”

“What?” I asked. I could tell this was bothering my man more than it should by the way he was jittering and rubbing his hands together. “I mean, YOU might not have known it was there, but from the looks of the place it’s original to the building. Which means it’s been there all along without causing any problems. The stairs might be rotten, but I don’t see why the passage itself would cause any problems as long as the building is structurally sound.”

“It’s not that,” Brian insisted, biting at his gorgeous bottom lip and temporarily distracting me from what he was saying with fantasies of me doing the same thing. “. . . if it opens to the outside, anyone could come in. I’ll have to call in somebody to install locks or something and . . .”

“Whoa, there, cowboy,” I tried to derail the OCD train before it got too much steam behind it. “There’s no evidence that the passage even leads anywhere, Eggy. As far as we know, it’s just an internal staircase that goes down to the main floor. And nobody’s come in that way before, right, so why would you think people would all of a sudden start invading your tower now? I think you’re probably over-reacting.”

“I hate people telling me I’m over-reacting,” my flustered fussbudget grumbled.

“Sorry, Eggy. I didn’t mean anything by it,” I rushed to reassure him. “It’s just that - I promise you - I didn’t see any indications that anyone else had been in there anytime this century. Trust me on this. Nobody’s going to sneak up on you using THAT staircase.”

However, he still didn’t look convinced, so I was forced to resort to the photographic evidence. I pulled a USB cable out of my messenger bag and hooked up my phone to the laptop, allowing me to upload all the pics I’d taken of the hole. I hesitated a couple of seconds, debating with myself whether or not showing my OCD beauty pictures of all the dirt living inside his walls was a good thing or not, but in the end I decided it was best to allay his current anxieties about an intruder right away and then deal with any unintended fallout from the expected dirt-pocalypse later. Just to be safe, though, I figured I needed to make sure OCD Man was seated and calm before I showed him the pics.

“Come here, Big Guy,” I directed, hooking the closest unused armchair with my foot and dragging it over so he would have a place to plant himself. “Sit down.” He hesitated, which made me smile because, what did he think I was trying to do - get better access to his hot, hard bod so I could grope him against his will, or something? Not that the prospect wasn’t appealing, mind you. But I would save that for later. “Calm yourself. I just want to show you something.”

My big scaredy cat reluctantly complied, taking the seat but acting like he was expecting me to spring on him at any second - he’s so adorable sometimes, isn’t he? I ignored him for the moment and returned my attention to the computer, clicking around till I got the first photo opened. It was a lovely shot of the area leading down from the top landing of the stairway, showing a virtual wall of cobwebs across the path.

“Now, don’t panic,” I warned him as I turned the computer screen so he could see it better. “I’m only showing these to you to prove that nobody’s been using that staircase to sneak into your building. See?” I clicked on the next photo, one showing a little ways further down the shaft of the staircase, which was even more coated with ancient, filthy, spiderwebs and uninterrupted dirt. “Trust me, no one has been up those stairs in the better part of a century. And that’s even assuming that the wood isn’t so rotten that they’d fall right through it. You’re perfectly safe from intruders coming in that way.”

I could feel the shudders of revulsion that rocked through him as I clicked through the rest of the photos. The struggle between his admitted OCD and what I suspected was a strong competing diagnosis of Agoraphobia, was real. My poor Eggy - so beautiful and yet so flawed - probably why I couldn’t stay away from him. I’d always been a sucker for the vulnerable type. And to find someone who was simultaneously vulnerable and also temperamentally dominant . . . well, let’s just say I was intrigued. But, getting back to the pictures we were reviewing, there was no denying the evidence which proved that no human had come through that muck in quite a while.

“Okay. I . . . I see what you’re saying,” he conceded. “But, what if those stairs go someplace I don’t know about? Maybe the stairs themselves are safe - I see your point that, obviously, nobody has come up them in ages - but I’d feel better if I knew where the fuck they went. You know?”

“Well, not sure how we figure that out without accurate blueprints. I mean, if we could be sure it was safe, we could try following the stairs down, but I don’t know if I want to risk that unless we get someone in to look it over and make sure it’s okay. And, I take it from the fucking delicious way you’re crinkling your nose up at that suggestion, that you’re not in favor of that option. So . . .”

He didn’t bother to answer me other than to shake his head at the suggestion of bringing an outsider into his fortress of solitude. I didn’t have any other ideas, so I just sat there, waiting, and admiring the way he pulled at the hairs on his chin while he thought through the matter. I really needed to get a grip on myself, and control the lust response I kept having to this man before I made a total fool out of myself. But the view was just soooo nice, you know?

“I think, maybe, there might be other paperwork about the building down in the basement. I . . . I don’t go down there much . . . I remember my Grandfather kept boxes of shit down there, though. Do you think there might be some blueprints down there that would help us?”

“I didn’t even know there was a basement to this place, actually,” I responded, returning to the plans I’d found online. “Huh. There it is. That’s interesting. Not a lot of older buildings have basements, I thought.”

“I think all the places in this area do,” he corrected me. “The original street level was lower than it is now, so all the buildings have a lower level that eventually got buried when they leveled the streets and repaved back in the early twentieth century. Which is one of the reasons I never go down there - there’s no exit or light or anything.”

“Well, it’s worth a try,” I suggested. “You wanna go on an adventure with me, Eggy? We can pretend we’re on a ‘Journey To The Center of The Earth’ or something. It’ll be a blast.”