Late Summer Rooftop

The Bradford Hotel was the kind of place that advertised air conditioning and then delivered a suggestion of it. I checked in at two in the afternoon, sweating through my shirt, and the young man at the desk told me the rooftop terrace opened at five.

"You picked a hot weekend for it," he said, sliding the key card across.

"I picked a hot weekend for work," I said. "The rooftop is a bonus."

It was true, mostly. I'd taken a consulting job for the town's waterfront plan, four days of meetings that could've been a Zoom call, because the town was where Annabel lived. I'd found that out eleven years too late to do anything about it, and then found it out again three weeks ago on her festival website, and I'd sat on the knowledge as a man sits on a lottery ticket he is afraid to check.

The room was fine. The shower was lukewarm at best. I texted her from the edge of the bed, which took me twenty minutes of typing and deleting.

"Craig here. In town through Tuesday. Work. There's a rooftop bar at my hotel. If you're free tonight I'd love to buy you a drink. No pressure either way."

I stared at it for a while. The "no pressure either way" was a lie but a polite one. I hit send and then put the phone face down and went to stand in front of the window, looking at fire escapes and tar roofs and the slice of bay between buildings.

She texted back in four minutes.

"Craig Elliott. As I live and breathe. Yes. Seven. I'll find you."

I read it maybe six times.

The terrace was small, six tables, string lights already on against the early dusk. The air smelled of salt and hot tar, and the cicadas were going hard in some tree below us, working the last of August. I got a table near the rail and ordered a gin and tonic and tried to look like I was not nervous.

Annabel came through the door at seven on the nose, and my first thought was that eleven years had not touched her so much as rearranged her. She was forty-eight now and she wore it like a jacket that fit. Gray starting in her dark hair. Same sharp jaw. She saw me and stopped for half a second, and then came over.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi yourself."

We went for the hug and it was awkward, the kind where you both pick a side and pick wrong, and we ended up doing a sort of half pat on the arms and then laughing about it.

"Okay, that was bad," she said, dropping into the chair across from me. "Let's do it again."

So we did it again, and this one worked, arms in the right places, and I have to admit I held on about two seconds past polite. She smelled like sunscreen and something floral underneath.

"God, Craig," she said into my shoulder. "Eleven years."

"Give or take."

She sat back down and waved at the waitress, a young woman with a tired smile who'd clearly worked a long shift.

"What are you drinking?"

"Gin and tonic."

"Two of those, and a couple of waters while you're at it, and bring the lime wedge situation, because he's going to ask for extra lime and be too shy about it."

I put a hand over my heart. "You remember my lime situation."

"I remember everything about the lime situation." She settled in, elbows on the table, and just looked at me for a moment. "So. Urban planning consultant. Look at you. I found your firm's website after you texted. Very professional. Little blue skyline logo."

"The skyline was Alec's idea."

"Alec still around?"

"Alec is not. He left the firm last year. And I did five years with a woman named Pia, ended in April, and the less said about April the better."

"Oh, hell." She reached over and squeezed my wrist. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine. It had been fine for a while before it ended, if that makes sense."

"It makes total sense. That's how my thing with Charlie went. Two years of fine and then one bad Tuesday."

"Charlie?"

"Three years ago. He moves furniture, don't ask. It didn't take." The drinks came and she took a long pull. "So tell me how you ended up in my town, because I refuse to believe it's a coincidence and I want to hear you say it."

"You know I looked you up three weeks ago."

"I know you looked me up three weeks ago because the waterfront committee sent my office a list of consultants, and yours was on it. I recognized the name and sat there with my coffee going cold."

We both laughed at that, and something unclenched in my chest that had been clenched since the text message.

"I took the job because of you," I said. "That's the honest answer. I saw the town name on the contract and I said yes before I read the scope of work, which, by the way, is not how I do things."

"No, it is not. You used to read menus like they were zoning documents."

"I still do. But yes. I came here hoping you'd say yes to a drink."

"And here I am." She raised her glass. "To poor professional judgment."

"To it."

We talked for two hours, the way you can only talk with someone you once talked with every day. Her festival business was doing well, she'd bought a small house near the harbor with a yard she was constantly fighting, her knees were, in her words, "in their forties while the rest of me is in my late forties, so the knees are the babies of the family."

At some point the waitress brought another round without being asked, which was a level of service I appreciated and Annabel tipped for.

Then I said something I hadn't planned to say. It came out while I was looking at the bay, which made it easier.

"You know what's funny? I almost didn't text you."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm thirty-six now and I feel thirty-six. I've got this." I grabbed a bit of my own stomach by way of demonstration. "My hair is relocating. I caught myself groaning getting out of a chair last month and I didn't even have a reason. And I kept thinking, she's going to look at me and see some tired consultant with a soft middle, and the guy she knew had this whole sharp, skinny, insufferable thing going on."

Annabel laughed. Not a polite laugh, a real one, head back.

"What?"

"Craig. I'm forty-eight. I'm twelve years older than you. Do you know what I see when I look in the mirror? A whole ecology of changes. And do you know how much I care?" She held up a finger and thumb almost touching. "This much. Because I earned every one of these years and this body carried me through two festivals a summer and a thousand miles of walking neighborhoods with a clipboard, and it works, and I stopped auditioning it for anybody a long time ago."

"That's a very healthy attitude and I hate that mine isn't there yet."

"Your attitude will get there. Mid thirties is when it happens. That's when the math changes and you realize nobody worth having is adding you up." She pointed her glass at me. "Also, to be clear, you look good. The soft middle is not a scandal, Craig. It sits on you like you eat regularly, which is attractive in a man my age, believe me."

"Your age?"

"Fine, our age. Our combined age is eighty-four and that's a lot of wisdom and I'm claiming most of it."

I laughed and drank, and the light over the rail was going from gold to pink, and the cicadas had settled into a steadier drone, and I thought, this is the part I remembered wrong. In my memory of us the talking was the good part and the rest was the fireworks. Sitting there, I realized the talking had always been the fireworks.

"Can I say something else honest?" I asked.

"You're on a streak. Keep going."

"The reason I sat on that text for three weeks isn't just the stomach thing. It's that I've thought about you, on and off, for eleven years, and I was scared the reality would be smaller than the idea. And it's not. It's bigger. You're bigger."

She looked at me, and her face did something careful.

"That's a big sentence for a first drink," she said, but her voice had gone quieter.

"I know."

"Well." She finished her drink and set the glass down with a click. "I live twenty minutes' walk from here. I have wine that's better than this and a porch with a view of my losing battle with a garden. If you wanted to keep talking."

"I want to keep talking," I said, maybe too fast.

She grinned. "Then finish that and let's go, before I come to my senses."

We got up to leave and the terrace had filled behind us, couples at every table, a bachelorette party near the rail that was getting louder by the minute. Annabel looked at the crowd and then at me.

"Actually, wait," she said. "One more stop. There's a corner over there, past the planters, that nobody ever uses. I've spent enough evenings up here to know the dead zones."

"Lead on."

The corner she meant had two chairs and a half wall and a big potted something casting shade. You could still see the bay but the party noise dropped away. We sat, closer together than we needed to, and the waiter found us eventually and took an order for two more waters.

"So," she said. "Waterfront plan. Four days of meetings. Are they paying you enough to suffer through a coastal zoning board?"

"They're paying me enough. The board might be the fun part. There's a woman on it who has referred to the harbor as 'our precious jewel' four times that I've counted."

"That'll be Dot. She's been calling it that since before you were born, I think."

"Very funny."

"I'm funny. It's one of my things." She reached over and put her hand on mine, just resting it there, like it was the most ordinary motion in the world. "You were saying."

I was not saying anything. Her hand was on mine and my brain had gone somewhere else entirely. Her fingers were warm and there was a smudge of blue ink or paint near her thumb, some freelance artist residue that had survived a night out.

"You still draw on yourself," I said. "You used to show up to class with charcoal on your elbow."

"I still show up everywhere with charcoal on my elbow. It's a brand at this point. People assume it's intentional." She did not move her hand. "Craig."

"Yeah."

"Are you going to keep sitting there acting like my hand isn't on yours, or are we going to deal with that?"

I turned my hand over so our palms lined up. She laced her fingers through mine, slow, watching it happen, and the electric feeling that had been humming under the whole two hours came up through my arm and settled in my chest.

"There," she said. "That's better. I've been wanting to do that since I walked in at seven exactly and found you already here. You're a punctual man. I'd forgotten that about you and I liked being reminded."

"You always ran four minutes late."

"And you always pretended to be annoyed about it. We were a whole system." She squeezed my hand. "Tell me if I'm reading this wrong. Because if I'm reading it wrong, we'll laugh about the wine and the porch and it'll be a lovely evening with a person I liked a lot once. But I don't think I'm reading it wrong."

"You're not reading it wrong."

"Good. Then come here and kiss me, because I've been sitting on that thought for two hours and it's getting heavy."

I leaned in and kissed her. Slow, the way you do when you have waited eleven years and want to get it right. Her mouth was warm and she made a small sound against me and her free hand came up to the side of my jaw. Somewhere behind the planter the bachelorette party screamed about something. Neither of us cared.

When we came up for air she kept her hand on my jaw and looked at me from two inches away.

"Well," she said. "That held up."

"Did it?"

"It absolutely did. Eleven years and the man still kisses like he's got somewhere to be and nowhere else he'd rather be. Which is a confusing sentence and I'm standing by it."

I laughed and kissed her again and this one went longer, her fingers curling into my collar, my hand finding the small of her back where the chair met her shirt. When we broke apart she was breathing a little differently and so was I.

"Okay," she said. "New plan. This corner has a view and a whole lot of people within eyeshot of round three, and I am interested in round three. There's a stairwell at the back, the fire escape one, service stairs, no cameras, no tables. I used to sneak up there with a thermos when the terrace got loud. Interested?"

"Very."