The View From the Roof

The loft was smaller than the pictures made it look, but that's Airbnb for you. I got there first, which felt like winning something, and spent the first twenty minutes claiming the bed by the window before Jack could call dibs.

The place was one big room in a converted warehouse downtown. Exposed brick, a bed that was basically a mattress on a platform, a kitchenette nobody would cook in. The listing called it a "sleeps two" situation, and technically it did, but whoever wrote that had never shared four hundred square feet with an ex-boyfriend.

I unpacked on my side, which was the side with the window and therefore the side that mattered. The air conditioner sat in the wall unit and wheezed like an old man climbing stairs. Late July in this city is a joke nobody laughs at anymore.

I got to the bottom of my duffel bag and pulled out a tangle of clothes, and out of the tangle fell my vibrator. It hit the hardwood with a slap that echoed in the empty loft.

"Oh, come on," I said to nobody.

I picked it up and held it like evidence. I'd bought it on a whim last month, a Tuesday, after a work call that had gone badly and a glass of wine that had gone well. The checkout page had asked me if I wanted discrete packaging and I'd thought, what an adorable misspelling. I'd stuck it in the bag for this trip out of pure laziness, meaning to leave it in a drawer at home, and now here it was, sitting on my palm in a shared loft, in a loft shared with Jack.

I shoved it deep into my makeup bag, under the brush layer, and zipped it shut.

Jack was my ex. We'd dated for six months when I was twenty-one and he was twenty-two, back before I moved two cities away for the sales job. The breakup had been so painless it was almost insulting. No screaming, no door slamming. We'd just kind of run out of steam at the same time and agreed it had been nice, hadn't it? It had. Then we both dated other people and texted each other once a quarter like people checking on a house plant.

This trip had been his idea, actually. A week at the coast, a mutual friend bailed on the group booking, and suddenly it was two plane tickets instead of five. I'd said yes before thinking, which is how I make most of my decisions.

He showed up an hour after me, sweating through a t-shirt and dragging his bag like it had personally wronged him.

"Trixie," he said, and grinned.

"Jack," I said, and then he hugged me and I remembered that hugging Jack had always been one of the better things about knowing Jack. He was leaner than he used to be. His hair was shorter. He seemed quieter in a way I couldn't put my finger on, like he'd turned his volume down a notch or two since I'd last seen him.

"You look good," he said into my shoulder.

"You look sweaty."

"That's the humidity complimenting me." He let go and looked around. "Wow, it's small!"

"It's cozy."

"It's a closet with a window."

"It's a closet with a window and a fire escape," I said, nodding at the narrow balcony off the back. "Which is technically the second bedroom."

He dropped his bag. "I get the fire escape."

"You get nothing. You're on the mattress on the floor, pal, and I'm on the real bed, and the fire escape is communal property."

We found a taco place with a rooftop a few blocks away, because everything in this city is a few blocks away if you don't mind sweating to get there. The roof had string lights and plastic chairs and a view of other rooftops, and the tacos were the kind you eat over the plate to avoid a crime scene.

We talked about work. His design gig had gone freelance last spring and he was doing okay, he said, which I've learned means either great or terrible. I told him about my sales numbers, which were fine, and my boss, who was a nightmare, and the guy I'd been seeing in June who'd turned out to have a girlfriend I didn't know about.

"Classic," Jack said, shaking his head. "The secret girlfriend."

"I didn't even get mad. I was mostly impressed by his logistics."

"You've gotten cold, Trix."

"I've gotten efficient. There's a difference."

"There is," he agreed, "but it's a small one."

He'd been seeing someone too, back in the fall. It had lasted four months and ended when she moved to Denver for a job. He talked about it the way you talk about a car that got totaled, sort of sorry but not personally wounded. I found myself watching his hands while he ate. He'd always had good hands. This is the kind of thing you notice about an ex that you do not say out loud, especially over tacos on a rooftop in July.

The pull was small. I want to be accurate about that. It wasn't a lightning bolt, it was more like a draft coming from a window you didn't know was open. I noticed it and filed it away and ordered another margarita.

By the time we got back to the loft, the AC had died.

I don't mean it was struggling. I mean it was done, sitting silent in the wall like a dead appliance, and the loft had climbed to a temperature I'd associate with a slow oven. Jack tried the breaker, then the remote, then threatened it verbally, all to no effect.

"I'll message the host," I said, fanning myself with the little local guide. "But it's ten o'clock and this is a college town, so I'm assuming every portable fan within six miles is gone."

Jack got a reply from the host in four minutes, a promise of a repair guy "sometime tomorrow, probably." The host ended with a smiley face that I did not find comforting.

So we did what you do. We stripped down. Jack lost the shirt immediately and stayed in his shorts. I changed into running shorts and a tank top, and no, I did not put on a bra, because it was a hundred degrees in that loft and vanity loses to heat every time. We sat on our respective furniture, damp and miserable, and looked at each other.

"This is unlivable," Jack announced.

"Agreed."

"I'm going out there." He pointed at the fire escape. "Are you coming?"

The fire escape was barely a balcony, a metal grate you could stand on with room for maybe two chairs that