Club. Her mind races to those houses: Strawberry Hill, Cholmondeley Castle. Small square windowpanes. Banks of lavender. Ranunculus. Agapanthus. She distracts herself with the complicated words, steady things to hold on to.
“Blows your mind, if you let it.”
His voice brings her back. She’s never considered wonder to be her choice before. Okay, she thinks: I’ll let it. Right here, right now, I am on a rooftop with a crazily handsome young man who is holding my hand and showing me the view of Central Park as if he is Arthur and this is his kingdom.
Eve stares out at the expanse, a thousand colors of saturated green after a rainy spring. The sprawl of the Metropolitan Museum. The vast amounts of time and effort and imagination and ingenuity that created this city. The largesse that placed an enormous public park at its heart.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” she says.
He sets his glass down on the parapet. It is a sign which, despite the decades since a man has flirted with her, she can read perfectly.
This is the time to run away, she thinks, to call it a mistake, to race back to home and safety. If I don’t, home will never feel safe again.
Then that’s the way it will be, she decides. Recklessness is giving her a rush more thrilling than anything she’s ever felt. And there’s a certainty about it, a total lack of fear. The horse is galloping, and she cannot fall off.
She sets her own glass down on the next crenellation over. Those glasses had better not fall, she thinks. They could kill someone.
Micajah’s mouth meets hers. His lips are soft and strong, pressing hers open then pulling away, an invitation to her mouth to push back against his. Instead, she draws back.
“You’re young enough to be my son,” she says.
“So?”
He covers her mouth again, his tongue reaching just the tip of hers, caressing her and then withdrawing, seeming to pull her tongue back along with his. She thinks: I am inside him. She has never thought that before, kissing a man. It feels delicious to follow him so closely. Her instincts flow with an ease she never knew was in her. The lead and the follow of their kissing is seamless. She feels their breath merge, the air flowing between them warmed by their bodies. He is breathing me in, she thinks. I am breathing him in. His DNA is in my veins.
His thumbs stroke her wide cheekbones, his fingers tangle in her hair, finding the edges of her ears, the tender spot where jaw meets neck, the soft indentation underneath her chin. Suddenly his lips leave hers and she feels them on the plate of bone in the center of her forehead, pressing it smooth, then tracing down the ridge of her nose, her upper lip, and dropping a chain of kisses around her mouth. She imagines a circlet of pearls that his kisses have left on her face.
She has never felt anything like this before. His lips, his tongue, his fingers, are caressing the fibers of her mind.
The stone is warm against her back, through the thin cotton of her shirt. She leans against it, freeing more of her energy to kiss him, to concentrate on the sensations of him kissing her.
What am I doing? she thinks. I am kissing this boy, this man, and soon I will be . . . fucking him? She’s only ever used that word to swear with—and even then, not very often. She and Larry didn’t fuck: nothing so gleeful and direct. They “had sex”—though not recently, not for years. When they were first married, less impersonally, they “made love”—though Eve had always felt rather uncomfortable with that phrase too. Did they really make anything together? They made a child, of course, but it was a long time between the making and the evidence of it. On that night, and every other night, Larry would climax and roll away, averting his eyes. Nothing remained that was made.
So, then, she thinks, slashing thoughts of Larry adrift, we will fuck. Maybe. It sounds good. She thinks, This should not be happening. This is not my world. But it is: his tongue is running down the cords of her neck, digging into the hollows of her collarbones. His hands are moving up under her shirt, searching for bare skin.
She trails her hand down his ribcage and back behind her, to push away from the wall and press up into him. She feels an edge, a corner—above it, empty space. The gap between the crenellations. A three-foot-wide shelf of stone.
She edges to the left, settles herself against the edge of the parapet, half sitting, and raises one knee, resting her foot against the wall. Her bent leg presses on the outside of his thigh. She puts her hands on his hips, feels the bones beneath the denim, and pulls him toward her. He stops.
Her heart flips. I don’t know what I’m doing, she thinks. I’ve gone too far.
He draws back just far enough that she can focus on his face, see its oval shape, the tousled dark hair, those beautiful lips, dark brows shadowing green eyes like mossy pools lit by rays of sun. His eyes search hers. Here I go, she thinks, and feels herself slipping in.
He picks her up and sets her on the wall. “Eve,” he says.
Her name sounds different in his voice, firm and definite. That is who I am, she thinks. Eve. The Eve who is here, hearing her name. From the mouth of this man who is about to fuck me. Under the sun and the wide sky, on a roof overlooking New York City.
She lets her sandals drop and curls the arches of her feet over the muscles of his calves.
His hands are under her skirt now, fingers tracing the lace edges of her underwear across the ridges of the tendons, then further down, further in. His thumbs press on her: a question. The energy inside her body jumps toward him.
“Yes,” she says.
The lowering sun is warm on her face, glinting on the top of his dark head. She presses her hands against the parapet to lift her weight as he draws her underwear down, and gives quick silent thanks to Macy’s for putting such high-end underwear on sale. She buries her gaze in the dark forest of his hair as she feels the fabric brush over her knees, across the bony points of her ankles, along the tops of her feet. Gone.
As he straightens up, he grins mischievously. The feeling of her own smile makes her think of running on the beach with Allan when he was four, chasing the waves.
“You are beautiful,” he says.
“So are you.”
“I’m young,” he says, dismissing it. “That’s all.”
His hands are under her shirt again. He presses on the lowest rib, then the one above it, moving from the outside to the center, then away, up and out to the far edge of the next rib. She longs to lean back and lie open to his hands, to let him play music on her, but there is nothing behind her: only the gap between the crenellations, thin air, thirty stories above the ground. She hooks her hands tight on his shoulders.
“You’re safe,” he says. “I’ve got you.”
He wraps one long arm around her back, cradling her, and with the other hand strokes her inner thigh, caressing it open. She closes her eyes and feels him touching her, finding how they fit together.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t let go.”
Her head is full of sparks, all conscious thought disjointed. The vertigo of the empty air behind her, though she can’t see it; the blaze of him etching a path of fire inside her, the granite hard
