The city lights in the distance painted a second sunset across the night’s sky.
Sounds of suburbia beat a staccato in his chest, echoing his heartbeat with the roar of engines and bustle of the nightlife. He lays the picnic blanket across the cold rooftop, plaid meets concrete and quenches the chill in an instant. Perching himself atop it, he stares at the stars and drinks in the air; it tastes of the moon.
Part of him wants to reach up and grab them, hold the dancing infinities in his hand even if they burn, just to know what the world feels like before it all slips away.
That is what he fears most, he thinks. That if the city was to pause, for just a moment, he might be able to hear his own body creak under the weight of the many lives he was supposed to be living, all the places he was meant to be experiencing that weren’t here, that weren’t right now.
If it were all to stop, the echo might replace itself. He might hear the eulogies for the person he should’ve been, the one everyone wanted: the one that got away.
But then he hears her shoes, those non-descript, worn flats that work fractures into his chest with each distant step. He can imagine them, pink and flecked with the day’s dirt she refuses to clean, wearing it as a trophy of a day well-spent.
Her hair is contained, though only barely, strands of red flicker free like the waning gasps of a wildfire. A smile met him, the sort that was born from days of hoping for nothing else but the person you so desperately wanted to see and finally, at long last, striking the treasure you yearned.
And, as he’d realised for months, she was his treasure.
The anxiety that had run free was quenched in an instance, the oxygen stolen by that same wildfire she wielded with a shy smile. To the others, for what little their opinion mattered, he supposed she might have looked plain. But to him?
To him, he looked as though a sculptor had ached a lifetime for a masterpiece and made it, in none of the ways he expected.
Words came to his lips but were stopped there, caught in his throat under lock and key.
“You’re late,” he finally gasps, though nothing of what he originally intended.
“You’re early,” she rebukes. “You’re always early.”
“I missed you.”
“I missed you too,” she conceded. “I just had further to walk.”
“Too far,” he says.
“Too far,” she agrees. “But I’m here now. Shall we rattle the stars?”
He leaps to his feet faster than he thinks is possible and takes his hands in her own. It’s a practised feat, almost a tradition of lazy Saturday nights on random rooftops.
It was something that made no sense, it defied all reality. But that, he supposed, was what love was; when something seems to defiant of reality, of normalcy, but makes sense to only two.
A hand found her hip and a hum found her lips, singing the tune of an old song and it was like that, they danced, swaying in the coolness of a weekend night.
“You couldn’t choose something different?” He asks with a smile at the song choice—it’s an old question.
She giggles hard enough, at nothing in particular, as she leans her forehead against his. “It’s my favourite,” she says. “You wouldn’t deprive me of that, would you?”
“Never,” he says, and he’s not sure he’s ever meant something so much in his life. “But you’re lucky I didn’t have to wait any longer, I would’ve drank your wine to survive.”
“You wouldn’t have,” she scoffs, using the hand resting on his shoulder to slap his chest.
“I wouldn’t,” he agrees. “I would have waited forever.”
Her hand returns and they continue to sway, “I’d have never made you wait that long.”
“Aren’t you kind?”
“Shut up and tell me about your day,” she laughs.
“Long, but alright. You?”
“Boring,” she says, brushing her nose against his. “But better now.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He peers into her eyes as she continues giving his nose feather kisses with her own, there’s fire in them. This distant passion that roars like the ocean in his ears. [2:32 PM] He wonders if this is how people drown.
“You have no idea what I feel for you,” he breathes gently and she pauses, meeting his eyes in a perfect, solitary moment.
“Oh yeah?” She whispers back. “Describe it, the little words always mean so much to me.”
“I can’t,” he says. “Not everything feels like it could be something else.”
Blinking, he wonders if it is to hide some sort of unbridled emotion in her eyes.
“Well, do you know how you feel?”
“Of course,” he says. “It just doesn’t have a name.”
“Well, I think it’s the best feeling without a name in the world.”
“I agree,” he smiles and feels that magnetism in his heart that floods to his lips.
It draws them together, closer than they already are until there is no gap between them. A promise of passion is formed between them, aching through their veins.
When her lips meet his, that fracture in his chest threats to tear him apart.
She tastes not of foreign fruits and exotic scents. She tastes of the day she has lived, of the laughter that’s passed her lips and the lives she’s enriched on this day alone. She tastes like no one ever would and, even in the heat of the moment, he mourns the fact that they must separate and he must live without such a taste constantly on his lips.
The hunger for the taste consumes him until they’re forced to gasp for breath, leaning his forehead against hers as the swaying begins anew.
Is this who I’m meant to be? He asks himself.
It doesn’t matter, he hears her say. It is who you are, and that is enough.
He doesn’t even have to ask her, he knows what she’ll say. In her arms, he knows wherever he stands, that is where he needs to be.
There are two atop the roof, now maybe one. This is one such night that defies reality, a night only they understand.