At the top, our hair goes flying in the wind. We lean our bodies against hard concrete, peering over the edge, at the city turned minute beneath us. “We’re taller than anything,” he says and reaches for my hand. Our palms are sticky against each other, sweaty in the thickly hot June air. His fingers, long and tanned from our day sprawled on the sand at Coney Island, run perfectly along the bones beneath my skin. I smile at him, “You especially.”
The sun is slipping down below the river, turning his skin warm and pink. There are masses of tourists around us trying to get a look over the side, and we are jostled on both sides until our hips bump into each other. He laughs easily, slides his arm around my waist. I lay my head back against his chest, feeling the dampness of sweat through his t-shirt, and say, “Why do other people exist?” Our bodies shake together with complicit laughter.
It is not entirely dark now, but the sky has turned to a grayish blue and the sun is nowhere to be found. I press myself further into him, because tomorrow is Sunday which is also the day he leaves. I am grateful to be up here with him, with something so large brought down to something I can take in with one look. “I feel like I could easily hold this city in my hands from up here,” I say. “Easily.” His grip on me tightens, his fingers bunching up my shirt and grazing the skin on my hip. “But soon,” I continue, “we’ll be back down there on the ground where it’s all too much, where I can’t get at it all no matter how much I want to.”
“But isn’t that part of the fun?” he asks. “Trying to take as much of it in as possible, knowing that even when you think you’ve seen or done it all, there are still endless amounts more for you?” And what I want right then is to kiss him, but I don’t want to do it with these people around us. So I settle my nose against his rib cage, feeling it expand with every breath. “It’s sort of scary sometimes though,” I say quietly into his shirt. “I feel too small for something this big.”
I circle my arms around him and laugh a little. “Are we talking in code about our relationship right now?”
“Does it really scare you?” He’s turned his head and I feel his breath, his lips against my hair.
I hesitate, thinking I should lie to him now, but I finally say, “Yes.”
The sky turns dark blue and I wait for him to say something, but he’s quiet. I watch the lights flicker on in a building that must be twenty blocks away. I watch a line of taxis all stuck together and honking. I watch the city breathe in and out beneath us. When he finally speaks, his voice sounds the way it does when he first wakes up in the morning, boyish and vulnerable, and he says, “Me, too.”
At the bottom, we tilt our heads back to take in the dizzying height of the building. And when he brings his head back down to 34th Street, he kisses me. I don’t feel smaller.
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