Melissa was halfway down the block before she realized what she was doing, which was walking away.
It was after midnight when they burst through the emergency door to the roof of the apartment building and froze, waiting for the alarm to go off. Nothing happened. William raised two paper-bagged bottles of malt liquor above his head.
Victory!
They were on top of a ten-story building at the corner of Fourth Street and Avenue A. It had taken them surprisingly few attempts to mash random buttons until a tenant buzzed them in.
There were no lights up here, but Melissa could see just fine. The building was nestled in the East Village, surrounded by walk-ups that rarely topped six floors. Sleek towers jutted up from the Financial District to the south, the imposing bulk of Midtown offices to the north. The night sky trapped light and dispersed an otherworldly glow across the city. Its presence seemed fixed and timeless, as if it had blanketed the sky long before Manhattan rose from the dirt and would remain long after Manhattan fell.
Broken glass glittered in the corner next to the skeletal remains of a folding chair.
“See?!” William said, voice pitched to near hysteria. He spun around in a slow circle. “This is a million times better than being cooped up in a sweaty club.”
“You’ve never been to a club,” Melissa said.
“I still want to go to one, but screw Azimuth. I’m glad we didn’t get in. We can have our own club up here, just the four of us.” He sat down on the roof and uncapped one of his forty-ounce bottles.
Daniel plunked down a plastic bag stuffed with more bottles (the guy in the corner deli had barely glanced at their IDs) and snatched Melissa’s hand. Before she could react, he was guiding her through the steps of a surprisingly elegant waltz, which they’d practiced together one wintry afternoon, instructed by a YouTube tutorial. Daniel was in graceful athlete mode, and she let herself be swept along the rooftop. The boys were trying hard to cheer her up. She wished she could let College Melissa recede and simply live in the moment, but the city—her city—in all its humid nighttime glory was too overwhelming to ignore.
An icy beat thumped from William’s phone speaker.
“Club Rooftop is now in session,” he said. As Melissa spun, she saw Christina take a seat next to William and reach for the bag. Club Rooftop, she thought. That would make a cute selfie caption; maybe she could salvage this night yet. But the photo had to be something more interesting than the four of them just hanging out, even if the backdrop was gorgeous. Daniel spun her to face downtown. Office lights tapped out patterns in walls of glass, and she thought of coded messages before Daniel shifted her view uptown. She felt his cheek pressed against hers and remembered introducing him to the wonders of face moisturizers on a different wintry day in far-off Fremont Hills. She became aware of his heart hammering through his entire body, alarmingly fast. He was surging with adrenaline, pouring excess good cheer onto her.
Let yourself be charmed by this.
What did it mean when you had to think about letting your boyfriend charm you instead of automatically feeling charmed? Thoughts like these were easy to cast aside
during their Wednesday alone time, when she could tear off his shirt and lose herself in the contours of his body and quit thinking about everything else. But in full view of William and Christina and a million strangers glancing idly out of their high-rise windows, they might as well be written in the sky.
“We should do this every year on the exact same night,” he said. “Meet up at Club Rooftop and dance.”
“You and me?” she asked. “Or all four of us?”
He hesitated. She spun to the east. Tompkins Square Park was a dark square patch in the city’s fabric. “Just you and me,” he said. “It’ll be our thing.”
He turned her to the west, and the view was eclipsed by a curious silhouette: a raised platform upon which sat a massive cylinder the size of a squat grain silo, capped with a pointy hat. Identical structures dotted the city’s rooftops. She’d noticed them on her first college visit. Google told her they were water towers. From the street they seemed like quaint anachronisms, wooden relics of a bygone era. Up here, the building’s water tower loomed sinister and creepy, and she was glad to dance away. His hand moved up under her top and skimmed the light sheen of sweat in the hollow of her lower back.
“It seems like the kind of thing people would do for a reunion,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “People who hadn’t seen each other in a long time.”
She felt his body tense. “Or,” he said, “it’s the kind of thing a couple might do. Like celebrating an anniversary.”
“The beginning of something,” she said.
Daniel laughed. “Or the end.”
She almost pushed him away, astonished at his flippancy—what kind of a boyfriend laughs before saying that? She decided to play it casual. “What’s funny about that, exactly?” She gave his chest a little tickle.
“Oh, shit.” He stopped dancing and pulled away. “I am so sorry. Jesus. I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
“You just meant to think it.”
“Yeah. I mean, no. I mean…you know how I told you that sometimes I get the feeling I’m writing the movie of my life as it’s going along,
