The Observation Deck

*This one's for anyone who's ever felt more alive under a curious gaze. Hope you enjoyed the view. Thanks for reading.*

Valeria had been told the party would be fun. She had her doubts about that from the start, and by the third hour of the party her doubts had pretty much won the argument. It was held at the converted warehouse that Drew's startup had moved into over the summer, a big open floor with exposed beams and exposed ductwork and exposed everything else, because that was the style now. Somebody had hired a DJ. Somebody else had hired a taco truck that was parked inside the building, which Valeria thought was either genius or a fire hazard, and she was leaning toward fire hazard.

She was thirty-four, a nurse, and she stood at the edge of the dance floor holding a plastic cup of prosecco that had gone warm twenty minutes ago. Drew stood next to her. He was thirty-six and did something with databases that she had never fully understood, and he was wearing the one nice shirt he owned, the navy one she'd bought him two birthdays back. They had been together two years. It was a good relationship, steady and kind and mostly comfortable, which was the problem, or at least it felt like the problem tonight. Somewhere in the last stretch of months the two of them had gone from a couple who could not keep their hands off each other to a couple who discussed grocery lists in bed. She knew couples had dry spells. She also knew that a dry spell that quietly becomes the climate is different from a dry spell.

The dance floor was mostly populated by people from the sales team, who danced the way they pitched, with a lot of confidence and no rhythm. Valeria watched a guy in his twenties attempt something with his arms and decided she'd seen enough. Drew leaned toward her ear.

"Want to get out of here?"

"I don't want to leave," she said. "It's your work thing. I just want to not be standing here."

"Fair." He looked around. "We could get another drink."

This was the sort of thrilling plan they had been executing all evening, and she was aware of how sad it sounded even as she agreed to it. They got the drinks. They came back to the same spot. The DJ played a song that sampled a different song that had sampled an even older song, and Valeria thought about how she used to dance, actually dance, back in her late twenties, when she'd had a couple of short flings and a lot more nerve. Where the nerve had gone she could not say. Probably into the job. Nursing will eat your nerve if you let it, and she had let it.

That was when Marissa appeared. Valeria recognized her from the company barbecue over the summer, a small woman with dark hair cut sharp at the jaw, a UX designer, thirty-two, loud in a way that somehow never got on your nerves. She was dragging her partner Geoff by the hand. Geoff was thirty-five, tall, with the polite stoop of a man who spent his life around shorter people, and he carried two drinks with the practiced balance of someone who had been carrying drinks for his partner for four years.

"There you are," Marissa said. "Drew, I've been looking for you for twenty minutes."

"You have not," Drew said. "You've been at the taco truck for twenty minutes."

"That was ten minutes. The twenty minutes before that I was looking for you." She turned to Valeria. "Valeria, right? You got him to come. Geoff, this is Valeria. Valeria, Geoff. He's the quiet one. I'm the reason he's here."

"He's also the driver," Geoff said, handing Marissa her drink. "Don't let her tell it wrong."

Valeria liked them immediately, which surprised her, because she had been prepared to like nobody. Geoff had a slow dry way of talking, and Marissa talked fast enough for both of them, and between the two of them the conversation actually moved. They talked about the warehouse, about how the founder had spent a fortune on the building and still bought the cheap toilet paper, about the taco truck, about whether the DJ was playing one long song or several. Geoff said the DJ had a single playlist on shuffle and had turned off his brain at eight o'clock. Marissa said that described most of the engineering department too, and Drew, to his credit, laughed at that.

For a while it was just four adults at a party, which is a rare and pleasant thing. Then the dance floor got crowded with a group from marketing who had clearly started their evening before the evening, and Marissa made a face, and Valeria realized she was making the same face, and they grinned at each other like co-conspirators over nothing.

"I need to be somewhere less loud," Marissa announced. "Valeria, you look like you need the same thing."

"Desperately."

"There's the observation deck." Marissa pointed up. Along the far wall a glass-walled walkway ran at the second-floor level, and at the end of it a box of glass pushed out over the main floor, a little room with a couple of couches in it, the kind of meeting space that got put in renderings and almost never used. "Nobody goes up there. That's where the founders hide when investors visit. The glass is one-way from inside, sort of, or at least it's dark, so you can look down at everybody and they can't see you. It's the best view in the building and it's completely wasted on these people."

"The best view in the building," Geoff repeated, and he said it in a tone Valeria couldn't quite place, flat and mild and maybe a little amused.

"Up for it?" Marissa asked.

Drew looked at Valeria. Valeria shrugged, which meant yes. Anything meant yes tonight, honestly, other than standing at the edge of a dance floor holding warm prosecco until the founder gave the speech and the DJ played the same song again.

They went up the metal staircase at the back of the floor. The deck was exactly as advertised, a glass box hanging over the party, dim because the overhead lights had been left off, the whole dance floor laid out below like a diorama. From up here the marketing group's dancing looked less like dancing and more like a medical event. The four of them settled onto the couches, Marissa and Geoff on one, Valeria and Drew on the other, with a coffee table in the middle holding the drinks. Below them the DJ played something with a heavy bass line and the crowd moved like kelp.

"Okay," Marissa said, tucking her legs up under her. "This is much better. Now I can judge everyone safely."

"Is that what we're doing?" Drew asked.

"That's always what we're doing. Geoff, tell them what we're doing."

"We're judging everyone safely," Geoff said.

Valeria laughed. It occurred to her, sitting there in the dark glass with a stranger's dry voice and her boyfriend's arm along the back of the couch, that this was the most fun she'd had at one of these parties in two years, and that Drew's shoulder was touching hers and she had barely noticed, and she noticed it now. Small thing. She catalogued it anyway.

Marissa took a sip of her drink and looked down at the floor for a while. Then she looked back at the three of them with the expression of someone about to propose a toast, or a dare, or both.

"So," she said. "Geoff and I have a game we play sometimes. At parties. We call it show and tell, which is a stupid name, but Geoff named it, so."

"I regret naming it," Geoff said mildly.

"It's a stupid name," Marissa agreed. "The game is good though. It's simple. You show something and you tell something. And it escalates, because the drinks go down and the night goes on." She swirled her cup. "And you're on a glass deck over a room full of people who have no idea you're up here, which is honestly the whole point. Watching and being watched. It's the best game for a night like this."

Valeria felt something shift in her chest, a small cold bright thing, interest or alarm, the two feelings being close cousins at parties. Drew went still beside her in a way she read as curious rather than opposed. Below them somebody from marketing fell down and got up laughing.

"How do you start?" Valeria asked, and heard her own voice come out steadier than she expected, and a little lower, and she decided not to take it back.

Marissa looked at Geoff, and Geoff looked at Marissa, and between them passed some whole conversation that took under two seconds and had presumably been going on for four years. Then Marissa set her cup down on the coffee table with a small deliberate click, leaned over, and kissed him.

It was not a peck. It started soft and turned into something slower, her hand coming up to the side of his jaw, and Valeria, who had been expecting to look away at exactly this moment, found she did not look away at all. She watched Geoff's hand settle on Marissa's waist. She watched Marissa's mouth move against his, unhurried, like they had all the time the deck could hold. Below them four hundred people danced and nobody looked up.

They broke apart. Marissa's cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright and she was looking directly at Valeria, not at Drew, when she said, "Your turn."

Valeria's brain did a sort of lag, the way it does when someone asks you a question in a dream and then waits for an answer in real life. She felt Drew shift beside her. She felt her own pulse, ridiculous, at the base of her throat.

"This is the dare portion of the evening," Marissa said. "Just so we're all clear. No pressure. But also, full disclosure, I would like to watch."

"That's the tell part," Geoff said. "She just told."

Valeria turned her head. Drew was already looking at her, and his face was doing the thing it did, the careful neutral thing that meant there was a whole committee meeting happening behind his eyes. Two years of reading that face had taught her the committee could be lobbied.

"Okay?" she asked him, quiet, just for him.

"Okay," he said. "Yeah. If you're actually okay." And then, with the small crooked smile she'd bought that navy shirt for, more or less, "She did say she'd like to watch."

"Committee's unanimous, then."

Valeria leaned in and kissed her boyfriend on a glass deck above a party, which was a sentence she would not have predicted for her Thursday. He tasted like the beer he'd been nursing and his hand found the back of her neck and for a second it was just the two of them, familiar and warm, the way it had been a hundred times on a hundred couches. Then she remembered. Marissa was watching. Marissa, thirty-two years old, UX designer, was sitting six feet away with her drink forgotten, watching Valeria's mouth on Drew's, and the knowledge of that went