Shit.
Shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshit. The word looped in her brain.
She pounded the Down button furiously, with a growing sense of horror. Nothing happened.
At least, something happened, but it wasn't good. The elevator ground to a slow, screechy halt, shuddered twice and then stopped.
Shit.
She was stuck in an elevator between the thirty-third and thirty-second floor of the building where she lived, with Sherlock Holmes and…Sir Anthony Strallan.
'Fuck. And damn. And why the bloody hell does it always happen to me? Fuck...'
She was rapidly running out of adjectives to correctly describe the situation.
What was even funnier was the look on Sir Anthony-I'm-too-old-for-you Strallan's face. Priceless. He looked like he'd never heard a curse or swear-word in his long and miserable life. But, then again, he probably wasn't expecting the 'fair young maiden' he'd jilted two years ago to have grown up sufficiently to use 'naughty words'.
On the other end of the spectrum, there was Sherlock. Which basically summed up everything he was currently doing.
Edith actually growled in frustration as the stubborn elevator refused to move.
Sherlock leant against the wall looking slender, tall and chiselled in that oh-so-sexy trench coat thing of his, with the collar turned up to make his cheekbones look even more cheekbone-ish.
Sir Anthony stood awkwardly in the corner, stooping slightly, holding a cane.
'Seriously, who does that these days?' Edith asked Sherlock suddenly. She watched Sir Anthony's face go an unbecoming shade of beetroot.
She enjoyed it.
The love she felt for him had died the minute he walked out of that church, but the humiliation had stayed with her. How could he have done that? He kept saying how she'd given him back his life, only to walk out of hers like it was her fault. Mary had certainly thought so anyway and made a point of bringing it up at every family dinner. When she wasn't flirting at Sherlock.
Time will help! They'd all crammed the phrase down her throat, being loving and encouraging with all the grace of a sunburnt rhinoceros. In fact, Matthew said it so often that he'd got stuck on replay, and every time he opened his mouth around her the ghastly words had come out in a robotic automaton voice. Robert had said it only once, preferring the cricket scores to his fuming daughter.
Time had helped. Though Edith would never admit it to anyone for fear of getting Matthew stuck again, she now could think of that awful day without immediately wanting to rip everyone in sight apart with a chainsaw and shove them in a pie, and, like Titus Andronicus, make Strallen eat it.
'Middle-aged peers with bad limbs and inferiority complexes who were crippled with self-doubt when thinking of marrying one young Earl's daughter.' Sherlock said calmly.
Sir Anthony seemed to suddenly find the floor very interesting, and certainly the sun seemed to be able to penetrate the metal of the elevator and give his ears sunburn.
'This isn't going how I thought it would.' He muttered.