Going Up! by Amy Lane Page A

that’s appropriate?” his mother asked, not smiling at all, and Zach watched Angelo actually grace Leah with a real smile, one that didn’t seem as constipated and as cramped as Zach felt most of the time.
    “I think something needed to happen,” he said quietly. “And she’s having a lovely time.”
    Some flashes went off, and Zach figured that moment exhausted his family time for the rest of the year as his mother stood up and left. Zach watched Leah dance like she was Cinderfuckingella (her word, when he’d given her the credit card) and then he looked up into the windows that surrounded the high ceiling of the ballroom. It was raining, and in the cutting silver light from the galleria, the rain looked like slivers of crystal. Like wishing stars.
    I wish a prince would rescue me, he thought, half in whimsy and half in despair. Silly wish, right? His parents were rich, and he was a lawyer. Wasn’t he the prince? Okay, then. I wish a knight would rescue the prince in the tower.
    In the distance he heard Leah laugh like a kid in a playground, and he went to tell her that he’d leave her the town car and take a cab home. He knew enough about fairy tales to know that the knight in shining armor never really did show up at the ball.
     
     
    Z ACH LIVED in the penthouse because his dad owned the building. It was that easy.
    Of course, law school at Stanford hadn’t been that easy, establishing his own practice hadn’t been easy, and keeping his relationships to the guys from the escort service wasn’t particularly easy on him either.
    But Zach had always been good at putting a slick face on things.
    He got up in the morning and put on his wool suit—and in San Francisco, it was always a wool suit—with his bright patent leather shoes and his crispy starched collars and hundred-dollar ties. He shaved and slicked back his dark hair, made sure his eyebrows were tweezed and his face was moisturized, and generally ensured he looked and smelled like a man who could protect your future.
    He’d been the same way as a kid, except he hadn’t had to tweeze his eyebrows.
    When he was a kid, his father and mother had insisted on hygiene, and so had his nannies, but the resulting behaviors were neat, orderly habits of mind and he wasn’t going to discard them just because there was a sort of echoing, vaultlike quality to all of his childhood memories.
    And he figured, after that childhood, living in the nice penthouse of Driscoll Towers in the middle of downtown was a perk. He’d take what he could get. Hiding his sex life from his parents wasn’t such a big price to pay, and really? They lived in a mansion down on the peninsula, so about an hour of commute time separated them from him and the guy he’d paid to leave before midnight. Not that there were that many of those, but a guy had to be touched, right? That wasn’t so bad, to be touched?
    But certainly not in an express elevator in the middle of a soulless January.
    Which was currently breaking down. The cab lurched to a halt between the nineteenth and twentieth floor, and then, just as Zach was hitting the button for maintenance, it dropped half a floor and the doors opened.
    Zach got out of the elevator on the nineteenth floor, absolutely bemused. He didn’t even know the express elevator could open in this part of the complex. He got out and turned around, seeing there was a bank of elevator doors instead of just the one like he was used to. He thought, Hunh? but hit the button to the hopefully working elevator, and got in when the doors opened.
    The elevator stopped at the fifteenth floor, to let in a teenage girl in bright-pink spandex with a matching iPod who ignored him, and then at the fourteenth floor, where the doors opened and then started to shut again.
    “Wait! Wait! I didn’t think it was going to open so soon!” The guy was running, and Zach was in the back corner behind the teenager, so he couldn’t stop the doors either. The kid—he looked