Above the City of Want

ACT 1 — The Setup Lena The air on rooftops in Manhattan has its own grain—salted from distant nights, smeared with diesel and perfume, and always a fraction thinner than street air, as if the city lifts its veil to reveal a private skin. I tell my students that breath follows intention; tonight my breaths are deliberate, practice for inhalations I haven't yet named. The party is an annual thing for the gallery circuit: donors, collectors, curators, a handful of artists who have learned to charm and disappear with equal grace. I'm here because I'm the gallery's curator now—new title, steady hands, a pulse I like to think matches the city's. I could have stayed home in Arizona, teaching slow-flow in a sunroom that smells of palo santo. But New York is a north star for the part of me that likes good trouble. And tonight there is someone I have not seen in five years. I see him first as a silhouette against the lights, a carved outline where the skyline blurs. He is taller than my memory had generously kept him, shoulders still broad enough to seem like a harbor. Marcus had always filled space like a man who could carry another person through a storm without knowing it. He laughs across a group of tech people—too bright, too easy—and I feel the maps of my past rearrange. We had been reckless together in a simple way: chemistry that read like a manifesto. College basements and borrowed cars, a shared apartment with mismatched mugs and a spider plant he killed despite my pleading. He left for San Francisco when the start-up life called with its promises and mansions of code. He left with a letter and a fistful of apologies that, at the time, felt like the only honest things he could give. And yet when I watch him now—hands moving as he tells someone about a product I don't understand but like to imagine as a lover's tool—my stomach does a small, traitorous flip. I am an adult with a well-stocked HR file and tasteful shoes, but my pulse betrays me. This is not a book moment in which I pull away sanguinely. I cross the terrace because the moon is forgiving and because curiosity has my name on it. He notices me like a man who has studied faces under different light. Our eyes find each other—no prelude of small talk—and the air between us alters its temperature. "Lena Hart," he calls out, framing my name with the old familiarity. "In flesh. I was beginning to think you were a myth I told at investor dinners to make my life sound more interesting." I can't help a smile. "Marcus Vail. The town prince. You look like a man who knows how to get things to happen." I fold the introduction into the banter we used to trade, careful to let my voice hold the memory without turning it into a shrine. He steps closer, and the music becomes a distant tide. "I make things happen for a living. Tonight, I'm here for art because someone insisted I be cultured. Is that code for 'I needed an excuse to see you' or—" "—or you're practicing your lines?" I finish. "Both could be true. Tell me: are you still inventing complicated ways to avoid speaking plainly?" His smile thins into something private. "Plain speaking is overrated. But for you—I'll try. How have you been?" The question is simple. How have you been? A thousand versions of the answer drift like pigeons in my chest: content, bracing, better than before, alone and becoming myself. I take a breath that tastes faintly of the vermouth someone's been sipping. "I've been... building things too. Exhibitions, a small life that fits in a suitcase should I ever want to leave. Yoga, teaching. I moved to Arizona for a while." "Arizona suits you," he says, like he knows the exact brand of desert that might cloak me. "You always were good with wide, open spaces." Something in his tone is both the old and the new: affectionate, slightly clinical. My jaw tightens with a memory of a parted statement, a promise that had smelled of salt and neon. "What about you? Are you still proving that code can be tender?" He laughs, and it's the sound I used to wake up to at three in the morning when we'd talk in the dark. "I write tenderness in a different language now. Cities buy a lot of it. I'm back from San Francisco—my last venture sold, and then I decided to see what happens when I don't run." That admission could be an opening, a small soft place in his armor. I file it away with the rest: details that will make him feel human and make our reunion less like a headline and more like something complicated and real. Between us the terrace glows with fairy lights and strangers, and for a few thin seconds, it is only the two of us reconciling the distance of years with the closeness of a laugh. Marcus When I left Lena, it was because I didn't know how to keep the life we had together while also building the life I wanted. I told myself that ambition was an honest thing, that leaving would both set me free and be the kind, grown-up thing to do. I promised letters I never wrote and explanations that muddled into excuses. I have read and re-read every moment we had, compiling a dossier that both justified me and damned me. Now, five years later, I stand on a rooftop that smells like someone else's perfume and think about how those same choices sound worse in my chest than they ever did in my head. She is smaller than I remember, but every inch of her is magnified by clarity. She moves like someone who has learned the geography of herself—soft hips, shoulders that don't apologize. Her hair is cropped differently, a shade of brown that looks like autumn; her eyes, though, still have the steady, detailed way they take in light. She was an art history major who read like a map and loved like a revolution; she was also the reason I learned to cook something other than instant ramen. The memory is funny and tender. When I call her name, my voice comes out like an offering and an attempt at warding off the old ghosts. She smiles with a practiced gentleness that softens the triangle of regret standing between us. "Marcus Vail," she says, savoring my name like she used to when she typed my emails into drafts and never sent them. "The prodigal returns." For a sliver of time, the humor is a bridge. I lean in because the world demands movement. "I sell beginnings now," I say. "Mostly to investors. But tonight I'm here because I missed your terrible suggestions for gallery lighting." She counters with a look that speaks of many small reckonings. "My lighting has improved. It's you who hasn't called." The sentence lands like a stone skipping across the surface, leaving expanding ripples. I feel them in my chest. I didn't call because I was afraid of larger questions, because silence is a way to be cruel without having to be a coward. Standing here, I want to be both brave and honest, but I'm a man who learned to hedge bets. "I've been... back awhile," I admit. "I sold my company and decided not to transplant my life elsewhere. San Francisco has a way of making you an island. Manhattan makes you a person at the center of everything." She nods, and I wish I could say I am the only thing on her mind. But her face is carefully neutral, a canvas with trace memories smeared across it. The music swells, and I realize I've been speaking like a man in rehearsed absolution. I need to be more dangerous than that. Danger, I've learned, can be opening your truth. "Do you remember the night at the river when you told me you wanted to be an art curator? You lit up talking about the Marlowe show. You were fearless then." She laughs, eyes crinkling with the memory. "I told you I'd run an exhibition that would keep people talking. You said I'd be mad." "Said you'd be brilliant instead." The exchange is soft, the kind of banter that feels like a mutual fingerprint. I want to close the gap. Instead, I ask, "Will you have a drink with me? My knowledge of Vermouth is embarrassingly thin but my cocktail order is steadfast." Her answer is noncommittal until she says, simply, "All right. But you owe me a story. One that isn't about IPOs." Her words are bait and mercy. Lena We drift together across the terrace, a tide of familiar footfalls. The city hums under our feet; a helicopter frays the night with its light. I watch his profile—perfectly chiseled nose, a shadow of the beard he used to shave carefully every other morning—and I remember the way his hands used to fit into the curve of my lower back like a pair of gloves. We talk about small things and larger ones. He has the kind of quick humor that used to make me laugh before nights bled into mornings. He is practiced at deflection; every time a subject edges toward the painful, he sails away with a joke. But tonight there are small concessions: mentions of therapy like a casually stacked bookshelf, references to the city he once left in a way that says both regret and curiosity. "I met someone there once," he says suddenly, and the word sits between us like a vase. "She taught me something about honesty." My pulse catches. "And did you learn it? Honesty can be messy; it might not always be polite." He looks at me with an intensity that presses like a palm across my sternum. "I learned that running is easier than staying. But staying makes more art." There is a truth there that doesn't belong entirely to him. Staying is a form of commitment to a place, to a body, to a person. I tuck the memory under my ribs, a small notecard with the words of five years ago, and smile as if to say everything is in its right place. We are both running narratives designed to make ourselves acceptable. But beneath that, the old friction is still there: fingers that learned the width of each other's scars, kindnesses that were once so blunt they could bruise. At some point, we split from the crowd to a corner of the terrace where the concrete is cold and the city seems farther, softened by distance. He tells me about a gallery he funded in San Francisco that failed spectacularly; I tell him about a sculptor who smuggled a live plant into an installation, who convinced me that nature has more stubborn definitions than most men. He watches me as if cataloguing ways in which I have become unbreakable, softening where the world asked me to harden. When he reaches and tucks a loose curl behind my ear—human contact that used to be our map—it sends a current through me that I have no intention of charting tonight. "Do you ever regret leaving?" I ask quietly. "Every day, for the first year," he says. "Then it became less a regret and more an adjusting. Regrets become less dramatic if you put them on a schedule." The humor is a shield again, but it's thinner than before. I wonder at the man who left, who decided his dreams were bigger than a life with me. I also wonder at the man who now stands before me, smiling like an apology. We exchange contact details as if we are being cautious adults, but our fingertips brush, and it's like a spark between an exposed wire. The world tilts mildly, and I have to steady myself against the ledge of the terrace. Marcus When Lena's fingers graze mine, the sensation is elemental. Years of absence cannot erase the chemical shorthand we developed—how her palm liked the weight of my hand, how she traced the inside of my wrist when we needed to be calmed. For a half-breath I consider telling her everything: the nights I lay awake and tried to imagine the shape of her breathing in another room, the shame that tasted like copper after a success that had not included her. But tonight is for small things; if I want the rest, I will have to earn it. I will have to dismantle the reasons I left and offer up new, credible explanations that are not thinly veiled repentance. That takes time. For now, I let my fingers linger, a tacit promise. The party shifts, a ripple of voices pulling us back. Someone yells out a name in a way that makes both of us laugh; laughter is an easy bridge. We promise to meet again, exchange a time that we both know is flexible, and step back into the current of other people's conversations. I watch her walk away and feel a gravity I had not expected. As the night winds down, I circle back to the stairwell that leads to the roof, a route that seems private and salted by memory. I find her again by the service door, pretending to consult her phone, though the glow of the screen illuminates nothing but the curve of her mouth. "You disappeared," I say. "Disappearing is not your form of punctuation." She turns, and her eyes catch mine like a net. "Neither is lingering. But you—you're getting better at it, aren't you?" "Sometimes staying is a choice and sometimes it's a sentence. I'm trying to learn which one it will be for me." She studies me, and there's a hesitation in her expression that tells me she's considering an unknown currency between us. "What if I told you I'd like to see how you spend that currency?" I step closer, learning the architecture of her face again. "Then you'd be very brave." "Or very bored of being careful." She smirks. "Come on, Marcus. Show me something new." And then she moves into the stairwell with me—close enough that our bodies share the same slice of air—and in the hush of concrete and elevator hum, we talk like people discovering how a life might fit together. ACT 2 — Rising Tension Marcus The stairwell smells faintly of lemon cleaner and the city's collected stories. We lean on a landing, knees almost touching, and the sound of the party is a distant heartbeat. I tell her the truth in small, careful parts—about the sale, about the emptiness that followed success, about the woman in San Francisco who taught me to name feelings I used to avoid. I expect her to judge, to retreat into precisely measured replies. Instead she listens as if she is absorbing a sculpture: patient, turning the thing in her hands, finding a new angle. She objects to nothing, which unnerves me. Lena's natural inclination used to be to cut to the bone and laugh about the wound. Maybe she has learned patience. Maybe she has grown and chosen not to punish me for the past. God, I want to be worthy of her generous silence. We move from confessions to trivialities. I learn she practices yoga under the desert sun and that she teaches not only poses but ways to anchor to self. I tell her about the charity I fund that brings technology classes to underserved kids. She teases the earnestness out of me—"You, saving the world—but make it aesthetic"—and I laugh, an honest, easy sound. There are moments when the stairwell light catches a bruise-like shadow on her neck and I ache with a possessiveness that surprises me. Who else has been near her? The thought is irrational and petty, but it's an animal thing. She senses it and presses closer, not possessively but in a guarding way, as if to say I am here and rightfully mine to be defended. She flinches when a group bursts through the door above, their laughter scraping at our bubble. The interruption is small and mundane, but it reminds me how public we are. My fingers brush hers as we step out into the corridor, and the charge is immediate. "You're dangerous in stairwells," she says, as if issuing a friendly warning. "Not intentionally," I reply. "But I've always liked underground places. They felt honest to me." She laughs—a sound that tilts something warm inside me—and then she surprises me. "Honest like dark alleys, or honest like candor?" "Both," I say. "Honesty smells like dust sometimes. But it can also smell like you—tea and sunlight." She inhales sharply and then calls my bluff with a smile. "You think you can charm me out of my armor with metaphors?" "I think I can start a conversation with them," I say. "Is that a worse sin?" Our banter is a practiced dance: diversion, flirtation, the stakes rising with each footfall. We are keeping the tension taut like a string, stretching it until music vibrates through it. We exchange small truths and mutual dare—meet tomorrow for coffee; go to the museum together; see a play; let it be artless; keep it casual. Each suggestion feels like a test, a way to gauge whether the other is still the person who could fill the hollowness. Lena He is equal parts bravado and apology. There is a softness that wasn't there before small successes, the kind of tenderness men develop when they are tired of being admired for achievement and want to be known instead. I watch him trade the currency of accomplishment for the small, rarer currency of vulnerability. I am tempted by his open hand. But trust is not a dress you can put on in the stairwell and make it fit. We walk through the gallery floor where a large-scale installation floods with blue light, and an artist's sound piece vibrates in the belly. The crowd is a dim river and we are two stones in it. My palm brushes his again and this time I don't pull away. It's not only the memory I am tending to; it's the person in front of me, educated by mistakes, softer in some places, more deliberate in the others. A friend spots me and insists we meet for a table near the indoor terrace. Marcus stays—too close to be mere chance—and I introduce him to the small group with a confidence that simultaneously embarrasses and comforts me. He smiles with that perfectly tailored grin, the one I once fell asleep listening to. He is capable of being everything and nothing at once: a clever billionaire, a man who can quote art criticism, and the boy who taught me how to make poor coffee sound like an adventure. The night fragments into short slices of conversation, each one a rehearsal. We talk about exhibitions, investments, the best takeout dumplings. Each time we return to each other, there is a current that hums like a tuning fork. Our banter sharpens into a cat-and-mouse routine—who is chasing who?—and I find I secretly like knowing he is chasing. When the group disperses, we take the elevator down, a metallic cocoon where the reflection is a temporary truth. He watches me in the glass like someone studying an old photograph; I watch him as if he is still an inhabitant of my memories. Then, like a man who has rehearsed a thousand small gestures, he tilts his head. "There's a hotel with a rooftop bar two blocks over. There's a corner couch with cushions that will forgive you for everything." The proposition is casual, and yet it includes a promise. The city is late and loving, and I feel reckless enough to accept. We walk. The night is a watercolor—headlights smeared into ribbons, people like dots of charcoal. The hotel bar is warm, with a jukebox that remembers the 90s. Marcus orders two scotch sours and leans back like someone who has earned the right to be easy. I sip my drink and let the citrus cut the edge of my restraint. The tension turns ritual: stolen glances, half-smiles, a fingertip grazing a knuckle that lingers long enough to suggest a map. We talk until the bar dwindles into a hush, trading stories that excavate our histories. He brings up things about my family with tender accuracy—he remembers the way my mother laughs—and I feel myself lowering walls without meaning to. He places his hand over mine on the couch, a simple, deliberate claim. The contact sparks like thermal paper reacting to heat. I know the choices we are heading toward; I also know that sometimes there is grace in heading toward something instead of away from it. We leave the bar in a fog of mutual decision, the air biting and clean. The city seems to press the light out of the sky to leave us with private stars. Marcus When Lena presses herself to my side on the couch, the world sheds the layer of sensible choices and reveals the animal beneath. The days of my youth were a series of risks in love, and now the stakes are higher. I am wealthier, smarter maybe, but the thing I want most is the truth: to be beside someone without the distance of regret. We walk across the street toward her hotel, the sidewalk a white line that draws us forward. I want to be brave and stupid at once. The night's whole architecture seems arranged for confession. "Stay with me for a little while," I say, not as a demand but as a plea. She looks at me like someone weighing whether a wound might finally heal if treated with care. "This could be unscripted, Marcus. We could be reckless and then regretful. Or we could be honest and see what happens." I take both options like a menu and write 'both' across them. "Then be reckless with me. And then, if we regret it, we'll write better regrets." She laughs—softly, the way rain laughs when it finds pavement—and then we are upstairs in a room that smells like lemon oil and linen. The lighting is merciful. She goes to the window and draws the curtains a fraction, letting the city's electric breath edge into the room. I reach for her and this time we don't stumble over old curfews and haunted apologetics. It's simpler: our mouths meet, and the memory is immediate and thorough, like an old song that you know the chorus to. Hands remember the architecture of hips, the small ridge of a collarbone. Our kisses are not frantic; they're the kind that read like a long, deep exhale. I break away enough to watch her face, to memorize the way her eyelashes lift when she thinks of something else. She bites her lower lip as if to hold back an old habit and then kisses me like terms are negotiable. It is tender, then urgent. It is us, scaled for a new chapter. Lena There is a tenderness to the way he undresses me with his eyes, patient and reverent. I feel seen in a way that isn't theatrical, not the kind of seeing that catalogs for future use. He is tasting me now for who I am after the years we've both spent doing the things we thought necessary. Our clothes become an argument of fabric and heat. He slides a hand along my spine, fingers finding the tiny divot above my lower back, and I remember that precise geography so well that my body answers on reflex. His mouth follows, kissing a trail that makes my breath stutter like a page turn. The room is thick with the scent of him—the quiet perfume of aftershave and something like citrus and cedar, a combination I had once compared to a house being built. We take our time. The city hums under the window like a patient audience that needs no ends. There is a slow, deliberate choreography to our rediscovery—touches that begin as reconnaissance and deepen into claim. I feel his hands learning me again, mapping differences without judgment. He murmurs things I have wanted and feared to hear: apologies folded into pleasure, promises unadorned. At some point, words stop mattering. Our mouths and hands compose the conversation we failed to have before: apologies in the press of a palm; forgiveness in the acceptance of a kiss. I let myself be guided not by caution but by curiosity. It is a dangerous move, to choose curiosity over fear, but it is the only honest one in the room. We are slow and patient and then suddenly impatient. He traces the line of a hip, the valley between my breasts, and I arch into him like a well-practiced pose. When he finally takes me with a steadiness that is almost scientific in its focus, it feels less like payment and more like a beginning. The first collusion is careful—a melding of lips, teeth grazing, hands cataloguing—but it quickly becomes urgent. We move against each other in a rhythm that is both reminiscent and newly chartered. There are sighs that taste like release and sounds that stitch us back together. ACT 3 — The Climax & Resolution Marcus We collapse onto sheets that smell like the hotel and our joint decision. The room is lit by a thin spill of streetlight and our breathing. I want to memorize every detail: the way her collarbone holds the last of the light, the soft line of her jaw when she lets herself be unpinned by pleasure. My hands explore as if learning a language I once knew but let fall into disuse. She answers me in kind—her nails leave feathered trails down my back like punctuation. I love the way she makes sound, small and candid; love is a slow repetition of affectionate small betrayals. I have orchestrated boardrooms that felt like cathedrals in comparison, but they did not teach me how to worship another person with their consent and delight. We move through matching tempos of breath and desire. There is tenderness in how she guides me; there is demand in how she reaches. The sex is not a plot point. It is an act of seeing and being seen. At one point, she cups my face and says, "Tell me what you never said. Tell me the truth that scared you back then." There is a fierce, abrading honesty in the request. I have rehearsed this speech a thousand times in the quiet of hotel bathrooms and on planes. But now, with her in my arms, I speak it out loud: "I was afraid. I was afraid that staying would make me small in ways I hadn't yet invented. I saw my ambition as a shape without permission to be shared. I thought by leaving I was being generous—giving both of us a chance to find what we were supposed to be. Instead, I made us into a narrative where only I could be the protagonist." She listens like someone drinking water after a long desert day. "You were cruel in the way you told yourself that cruelty was freedom," she replies quietly. "But I understand your fear." "I don't expect forgiveness to be cheap. I don't expect you to forget. But I want to try to be different. To be present. To stay." She presses a kiss into my forehead, a small signature that holds a thousand contingencies. "Presence is a practice," she says. "But tonight is not only about promises. It's about the truth of this—us, here." We move then from confessional to corporeal, hands and mouths wordlessly composing the syllables of contact. I take my time because time suddenly feels like an indulgence I can grant myself. I trace the planes of her body, memorize the places that make her breath hiccup. She rides me with an ease born of familiarity and a hunger heightened by the years apart. When we finally reach the precipice, it is not a single explosion but a series of crescendos: breaths, trembling muscles, laughs that slip out in the spaces where we are honest because honesty is no longer terrifying. Afterwards, she is curled against me, a fit that feels both new and old. Outside, the city keeps its endless vigil, lights pricking at the dark like a million tiny witnesses. I feel, absurdly, like a young man who has realized the only thing worth more than success is the company of a woman who knows him, challenges him, and refuses to be a footnote. Lena The fatigue that follows our heat is clean and honest, like the quiet that comes after a storm. He holds me in a way that says, without words, I am not leaving tonight. I know not to frame it as absolution; promises made on a mattress can be fragile. But the warmth of his arms is a near-sacrament. I let myself sink into his chest, listening to a heart that has steady rhythm now, a sound much like the metronome I use to help students find balance. There is a peace in the aftermath, but also a bright, restless energy that feels like the beginning of a project. He strokes my hair, and I think about the woman I was when we first met—impetuous, certain, in love with the idea of not settling. I added years to that woman in a quiet, deliberate way. "Will you stay this time?" I ask, hearing the simplicity and the weight of the question. He exhales like someone making a promise on a profile. "I'm staying wherever you want me to be. Not because I'm trapped but because you're worth staying for." His answer is not perfect, but it is real. I run a hand along his spine like I am exploring a map. The marks there are the geography of a life that wanted to teach itself the art of steadiness. We speak long into the night, about small mundane things and large terrifying ones. We delineate boundaries and stoplights and ways to communicate when one of us makes a bad choice. We draft small contracts of honesty and kindness: weekly dates, calls when the night is too tempting to be alone, and a rule to never leave without telling the other why. They are modest terms, but terms are scaffolding for trust. In the morning, we walk the city like a pair of people who have reconfigured an old map and found a new route. We have coffee from a cart that pours the same burnt brew we used to complain about, and it tastes like a relic of us. We make plans that are both fragile and kind—an exhibit proposal together, a retreat weekend in Arizona where she will teach a class and he will build the schedule. It isn't a fairy tale. We both carry scars and have habits that will irritate each other. But we also carry curiosity and a willingness to keep practicing the humility of staying. The final image of that weekend is us on the rooftop again, this time at dawn. The city sleeps like an unread book; the light folds itself gently across our shoulders. Marcus drapes my jacket over my shoulders without a word and then takes my hand. There is electricity in the contact, but it's tempered by a kind of companionable warmth. We look out over the endless geometry of life below—streets like arteries, windows like eyes. He squeezes my fingers and says, almost shyly, "I'm glad I came back." I return the squeeze and smile, thinking of all the ways we will fail and forgive, all the quiet afternoons and public triumphs. "Me too," I say. "Me too." Epilogue — The Aftertaste They will both later tell friends that it was the city that invited them, that Manhattan had a hand in restoring what time threatened to atrophy. They will tell different versions, as lovers do—he will speak of second chances and the poem of hers that he once misread; she will talk about patience and the man who finally learned to stay. But the truth is more granular: real intimacy is a series of tiny consensual surrenders. It is the way he learned to listen to her when she had nothing to sell and the way she allowed herself to be reckless again because she trusted his intent. It is late nights in the gallery counting votes for a controversial piece, early mornings teaching arm balances to sunburned retreat-goers, and the quiet ritual of shared laundry. Most of all, it's how they learned to translate each other's languages—the technical, cold metaphors of a man who once believed in metrics and the tactile, breath-attuned vocabulary of a woman who thinks with her body. In that translation they found mercy. Months later, they host a small opening on the same rooftop where they first met again. The city wraps around them like a witness that is pleased. They stand side by side as friends—no, more than friends—drift in and out of their orbit, offering congratulations and wine. When the crowd thins, they move to the same corner where they once plotted a different future. He slips an arm around her waist and she leans into him, the rooftop lights throwing their shadows long and domestic against the concrete. No dramatic declarations are necessary. The work of staying is quieter than fireworks. It is a look across a table while dishes soak in the sink. It is the deliberate act of asking how the other is, and listening when the answer is complicated. And when they kiss later that night—slow and certain—the city hums approval. Above the city of want, two people who once let distance write them into separate chapters choose instead to write a common paragraph, full of rough drafts and better handshakes. They have learned that reunion is not a return to an old shape but an invitation to build something new, together.