Kai hesitates, then drops his arms so I’m freed—though he doesn’t take a step back. I keep my back firmly planted against the stone wall, unwilling to disrupt the feeling rippling between us, the pull to be closer still. We watch each other, waiting for it….
The first time I kissed Kai was when we were in the vacant lot by our building. He was holding an acceptance letter to a music intensive in New York, and I was holding nothing but his hand, and then his arms, and then his cheek as we pulled in to each other and kissed for what was only moments but felt like hours. We were high on the idea of living in New York together, of the tiny coffee shops we would visit and the museums we would sneak into. We dreamed of late-night stops at street-food vendors and a handful of artistic, clever friends, the philosophical sort we’d never find in our school. It was his acceptance letter, of course, but it was our dream, our shared fantasy, and it boiled over in our minds until the only thing left to do was to kiss, to kiss as if we’d done it a million times before.
But we hadn’t—and we hadn’t even done it very often since, though every day pulls us closer together, closer to another moment when our lips will touch.
This is one of those moments. I wait, not letting my eyes waver from Kai’s, and watch the rhythm of his breath. His skin is olive, his hair dark, and it’s falling across his forehead the way it always does. I reach up to brush it aside, but Kai leans in before I can do so, letting his breath dance across my skin for a moment. I let him pull me up onto my tiptoes and press in until our lips touch. His hand is on my back, my fingers drifting down the front of his chest, and in my head a thousand fires spring up all at once.
It’s several quickened heartbeats before we release each other; Kai’s hand immediately trails along my forearm before he laces his fingers with mine. I lean close to him; he grins at me, looks around the corner…
“Coast is clear,” he says, and we come out of hiding. For a moment, I wonder if we shouldn’t hold hands, just in case his grandmother sees us—cutting class plus holding my hand? Grandma Dalia would be furious. Kai seems less concerned, though, which quietly pleases me—his desire to touch me is stronger than his loyalty to Grandma Dalia, which I know is no small thing itself. Kai drums his fingertips on my knuckles and moves so that our lower arms are curved around each other as we get closer to our building.
It was a pretty place at one time—I’ve seen photos of it when it was brand-new, back when Kai’s grandmother lived here as a little girl and this was still a decent neighborhood. The stonework above the door is still kind of pretty, actually—marble carved into a lion’s face with a cloth banner around it. But the lion aside, 333 Andern is mostly a pile of bricks with an ever-changing sea of graffiti on the outside walls.
Kai hands me his key chain and I select a small silver key, then use it to open the door leading into the basement. We creep past the washing machines, all of which have OUT OF ORDER signs on them, and around bottles of cleaner so old that the logos look all wrong. Up the back stairs, one flight, two flights, three—eight altogether, each with its own litter and grime and collection of rattraps, until we reach the rooftop access door. I select another key from Kai’s key chain, a key he isn’t supposed to have, and insert it in the lock. Slowly, carefully, I open the door—it usually squeaks, but over the years I’ve perfected opening it silently. I slip through, Kai close behind me, then turn back to shut it.
I exhale when I turn around. This is the only thing about the building that’s not only still pretty, but beautiful. Kai and I found it when we were little, prompting his grandmother to declare the rooftop strictly off limits and install a new lock. It was only a matter of time before he stole the key and I had it copied before she missed it. His grandmother would kill us—well, me, anyway—if she found us here. But how could we stay away? I think, gazing across the rooftop.
Roses, roses everywhere. What was once a large rooftop garden is now a mess of rosebushes, wild and resistant to the constant breeze. The roses have devoured an old trellis, long fallen and decaying, and were on their way to eating an iron bench before Kai and I cut the thorns away and rescued it. They’re still in bloom—they’re almost always in bloom, save around Christmas. Bright reds and fuchsias and shades in between, blooms so big that when Kai moves down the path we forged through the briars they almost hide him completely. I follow him to the bench, then pull out my math book and sit on it so I don’t get rust all over my clothes. We’re silent for a few moments, the comfortable sort of quiet that exists only with someone you’ve known forever.
“Two hundred seventy-three days until we’re in New York,” Kai finally says, sighing as he gazes across the rooftop. Looking backward, all you can see is roses, but forward, over the building’s edge, past the courtyard and the bars and the parks, is the Atlanta skyline. It looks massive yet cage-like. The buildings aren’t places to go but enormous walls, keeping us in.
“I’ll have to get a job,” I say. “I guess I could… waitress or something.”
“You can do a lot more than waitress,” Kai says a little tensely, and I feel the ghosts of old arguments rising between us. It’s not that I want to be a waitress or cashier or parking lot attendant. It’s that when your best friend is a prodigy, it feels a little dumb, auditioning for choir or joining the science team or the newspaper—you wrote an article on the student council election? Great—Kai went to San Francisco to play with an international youth symphony. The symphony flew him first-class.
It’s not Kai’s fault. I know it and he knows it, but I think he’s stuck at an intersection of responsibility and pity for me. He’s always trying to make up for it and feels the need to push me into doing something, anything, when the truth is all I want is for him to pull me closer.
I lean into him as a particularly cold breeze whips across the rooftop. “Anyway. I can be a waitress even though I’m under twenty-one, right? I was thinking about this. Even if we pull off me sleeping in your dorm room—”
“You’re not sleeping in my dorm room; you’re just an accomplished vocalist helping me practice in the evenings,” he reminds me, repeating the lie we constructed together. He’s better at lying than I am, but I’m the one who researched vocal classes on the Internet, who learned a bunch of music terms, who practiced the confident, tall way that singers sit in chairs. Kai can invent the lie, but I’ve always been better at the details, I suspect because while he’s always been busy doing, I’ve been busy watching.