Rooftop Slow Burn

Sue here, forty-two, landscaper, hands like sandpaper no matter how much lotion I buy. Eighteen months without sex, which, if you're keeping score at home, is longer than some of my perennials go without blooming. And honestly? The online dating thing was starting to feel like a part-time job with no benefits. So when Quinn messaged me back in March and actually asked questions instead of sending a shirtless bathroom mirror photo, I figured I owed him one real date.

We'd been texting for three months. Three months! Who does that anymore? Most guys want to meet by message number four or they lose interest entirely. But Quinn was patient in a way that didn't feel like a tactic. He'd send me photos of the rooftop garden where he lived, ask me which of his herbs were getting leggy, send back a thumbs up when I told him to cut back the mint before it staged a coup. He worked at a gallery downtown, he was forty, he'd gotten out of a long relationship four years back, and he never once made me feel like I was being interviewed for a position.

So Thursday night in late June, I drove across town to the converted warehouse where he lived. I parked under a streetlight that flickered like it was auditioning for a horror movie, sat in the car for a full two minutes, and had the following conversation with myself in the rearview mirror.

"You look fine. You look great. Why are you wearing a blazer? Who wears a blazer to a rooftop in June?"

Nobody, that's who. I left the blazer on the passenger seat like a coward and climbed out in my good blouse and the one skirt I own, the one without a single drip of stain sealer on it. I'd scrubbed my nails with a nail brush for twenty minutes before leaving. My calluses didn't care. They're permanent. Hands that haul mulch five days a week don't soften up for anybody, not even for a date I'd been half looking forward to since spring.

The buzzer crackled. "Hey! Sue? Come on up, I'll meet you in the stairwell!"

Quinn's voice was warm and a little breathless, like he'd jogged to the intercom. That helped, somehow. The idea of him being nervous too.

He met me at the fourth floor landing, and oh, he was taller than I'd pictured, and his hair was doing this thing where one piece fell over his forehead and he hadn't fixed it. He stuck out a hand, then changed his mind halfway and just opened his arms.

"Can I hug you? I feel like we've earned a hug after three months of texting."

"Please," I said, and he did, and it was a good hug. Real hug. Both arms, held for a beat longer than polite, and he smelled like sunscreen and something green, basil maybe, or whatever he'd been pinching off his plants all day. My hands landed on his back and I thought, briefly and unhelpfully, that he could probably feel every callus right through his t-shirt.

If he noticed, he didn't care. He stepped back, held me by both shoulders, and grinned.

"Okay, wow, you're real. I half expected you to be a bot. Nobody is that helpful about mint for free."

"I'm real," I laughed. "Slightly overpriced, but real."

He took my hand on the way up the last flight, which surprised me in a good way, and pushed open the roof door, and I stopped dead on the threshold. I know gardens. Gardens are my whole life, I've designed them for doctors and dentists and one very demanding widow with opinions about boxwood. But a rooftop garden in a coastal city at golden hour is its own animal. Potted herbs in mismatched containers marching along a low wall. Jasmine climbing a trellis like it had somewhere important to be. A fire pit with a little stack of split wood beside it, and beyond the parapet, the whole quilt of the city, fire escapes zigzagging down brick faces, laundry lines strung with somebody's sheets going soft in the breeze.

"Quinn. This is incredible. How long did this take you?"

"Four years. Well, three years and one very expensive mistake with a fig tree." He steered me toward a weathered wooden bench near the jasmine, its boards gone silver from sun and salt air. "Sit, sit. Wine?"

"Wine would be amazing."

He came back with two glasses of something cold and pale, condensation already running down the sides, and we clinked without ceremony. The wine was crisp, a little tart, exactly right for a June evening. I took a long pull and felt my shoulders drop an inch I hadn't known they were up.

"So tell me about the gardens," he said, settling beside me, close enough that our knees almost touched but not quite. "The real ones. The ones that pay you."

And I talked. I told him about the widow with the boxwood, about the dentist who wanted a pond and a low-maintenance garden in the same sentence, about the community plot I volunteer at where an eighty-year-old man grows peppers that would make a grown chef weep. Quinn listened the way I'd almost forgotten people could listen. He asked follow-up questions. He remembered the name of my business, Green Thumb Sue, which I'd mentioned once, in March, and said it out loud like it was a real thing and not a pun I'd built a career out of.

"You must have strong hands," he said, and then immediately went pink, like he hadn't meant to say it out loud. "I mean. From the work. Obviously."

I laughed so hard I nearly sloshed wine on the bench. "Quinn, I have the strongest hands in three counties and they feel like leather. You could grate cheese on my palms."

"Can I see?" And when I hesitated, he added quickly, "You don't have to. I just think they're probably the most interesting part of you, and I've been wondering about them since you told me you built a retaining wall alone."

So I gave him my left hand, palm up, and he held it in both of his like it was an artifact from a museum, tracing the callus at the base of my thumb with one fingertip. His hands were cool from the wine glass. The jasmine was going sweet and heavy in the dusk. A breeze came off the water two streets over and stirred the whole rooftop, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and the air between us went thick and slow in the best possible way.

"Sue," he said, quietly.

"Yeah," I said, which wasn't an answer to anything, but he seemed to take it as one, because he leaned in an inch.

And that was when somebody hammered on the fire escape railing like the building was on fire.

We both jumped a foot. I actually sloshed wine this time, right onto my own knee, which is the universe's way of keeping me humble. Quinn turned toward the noise with his whole face caught between laughing and groaning.

"That'll be Eric," he said. "Nobody else climbs that thing. I've told him a hundred times the door works!"

A man came over the parapet wall with the grace of a man who has done something stupid many times, a bottle of bourbon in one fist and his other hand out for balance. He was broad, silver at the temples, and wearing chef's clogs with his off-duty clothes, which told me everything before anyone said a word.

"I knocked at your apartment," the man called, climbing down onto the roof proper. "You weren't there, and then I saw the roof door was unlocked, and I thought, Quinn never leaves that unlocked unless he's up here. And here you are. Oh. Oh. You have company."

"Eric." Quinn stood, half exasperated and half grinning, and I could tell this was an old dance between them. "Sue, this is Eric, my best friend since culinary school. Eric, this is Sue. She's a landscaper, she fixed my mint, and we are in the middle of something."

"Clearly." Eric shook my hand with a warm, flour-dusty grip and held up the bourbon as a peace offering. "I'm so sorry, I swear I'm not staying. I just closed the restaurant, I had a rough service, and I was going to drink this alone in my apartment like a sad little man, and I thought, Quinn would let me whine at him for ten minutes and then go."

He looked at Quinn. Quinn looked at him. There was a whole silent conversation in there, old friends math, and I felt my evening, my lovely slow-burning evening, wobble on its axis. Not ruined, I told myself. Not necessarily. But changed. The bench suddenly felt smaller, and the jasmine's sweetness seemed to belong to the first half of the night, the half that was already over.

"Ten minutes," Quinn said, and squeezed my knee once under the table of the moment, warm and brief. "And then he goes."

"I go," Eric agreed, already popping the cork. "Scout's honor."

"Ten minutes," Eric repeated, pouring three glasses anyway, because apparently chefs can't hold liquor without distributing it. "So. Sue. Landscaper. You fixed his mint?"

"I overwatered it," Quinn admitted, sitting back down beside me, closer than before. "Like, criminally. I committed mint crimes."

"You committed mint crimes. I love that." Eric laughed and dropped into the folding chair across from us like it had personally offended him once. He was forty-two, I'd learn, two years older than Quinn, and he had the kind of tired, warm face you get from standing over a stove for twenty years. "Sue, can I say something? You have the look of a woman whose evening was going great and I wrecked it. I'm so sorry. My timing is legendary. Ask him about the surprise birthday party I threw him. I showed up