two
Duke Dolce
I must have lost my ever-loving, mother-fucking mind.
That’s what I’m thinking when we pass the subway entrance, when we turn right.
But holy shit. Colt fucking Darling is in New York.
Maybe I have lost my mind, and this is some fevered hallucination, his shimmering reflection in a shop window where reindeer with garland around their antlers stream by on our right, where the street on our left is busy with holiday traffic.
We step around heaps of trash bags, a crowd outside a bakery that some influencer made famous for their cranberry cake.
“This way,” I call, holding out a hand to Colt, just to see if he’ll reach for it.
Of course he doesn’t.
It’s Colt fucking Darling, the boy I bullied relentlessly for all of high school.
Except he’s not a boy anymore. He’s a man, all hard and tan, with more piercings than before, in his ears and eyebrows and nose, and a piercing below his lower lip that is way too hard to keep my eyes from straying to. What is he doing here?
Besides, obviously, making me lose my ever-loving, mother-fucking mind.
Why else would I be bringing the worst mistake of my life to a place that I hold dear, almost sacred? Showing him away from the busy street, down an alley, through a side door, and up the echoing back stairway of a building I shouldn’t have access to?
“Are you taking me somewhere to kill me?” he asks.
“Maybe,” I say, starting to jog up the next flight, just to see if he’ll do it. Some old, asshole part of me can’t help myself. Or maybe it’s not so old. Tigers get sober, but they don’t change their stripes. I can’t blame it all on the drugs and alcohol I used to consume.
With this guy, my brain helpfully reminds me. I used to get fucked up with this guy.
But fuck that. I’m not using because of Colt fucking Darling. Unlike him, I’ve never gone back. You couldn’t tempt me if you shoved a whiskey bottle up my nose.
Making him race to catch up on the stairs, though? Going faster up the next flight, just to hear him breathing hard? Yeah, that’s too tempting to resist.
We’re only halfway to the top of the building when he’s breathing so hard he sounds like he’s about to die.
Or cum.
That’s an even more unwelcome thought. Because fuck if I’m going down that road again. Fuck if he’s going to make me beg like a pathetic little dog the way he used to. I was always chasing after him, a moth to a flame, unable to resist, unable to fucking stand up.
I’ve learned self-control since then, though, and I want him to know it. I don’t know why. I shouldn’t care what he thinks of me. But I do.
I still fucking do.
“So, you’re going to give me a cardiac arrest and kill me without even pushing me off a building?” he asks behind me.
I smile and finish the flight of stairs before I turn back, grinning at him as he huffs his way up.
“That’s what you get for smoking so much in high school.”
“I still smoke,” he says, reaching the landing. He leans over, resting his hands on his knees, to catch his breath.
To be fair, the guy kept up a lot better than I expected. Not everyone can run up ten flights of stairs without stopping.
“You’re doing good.” I smirk at him and then add, “Little buddy.”
He looks up at me from under that perfect fringe of blond hair, his eyes narrowing. “Fuck you.”
“You’ll have to catch me first,” I say, patting him on the back. Then I start jogging up the next flight. I hope watching my ass for the next ten flights of stairs reminds him what he’s missing.
When we finally reach the top, I lead him out onto a roof that’s a million times better than that shitty warehouse roof where we spent one night during our senior year.
Of course, that time we had someone else with us, so we weren’t alone.
Gloria.
Fuck.
I realize my mistake as we stand there, Colt holding onto the door and catching his breath again. Why the fuck did I bring him here?
He said he wanted to catch up, and I thought of this place, a cool spot to show him, the quietest place I knew in the neighborhood.
It seemed like a good idea in the moment, showing him something familiar from our past but a million times better, like everything in New York is better than fucking Arkansas.
We can talk up here without having to yell in a noisy, crowded restaurant.
If we went to a quiet one, we’d still have servers interrupting us and then wanting us to leave so they can seat their next guests. That’s if things go well. If they don’t, and we decide this is all a huge mistake, we’re not locked in for a meal.
That was the real draw, I have to admit. We can stay as long, or as short, as we want. There’s no closing time up here.
But now that we’re here, I wish there were. That there was something to stop me if I can’t handle this, if I start to make a mistake. That someone would interrupt, and I could choose that as a good time to stand up and leave, even if the meal isn’t done.
“Can I close this?” Colt asks, gesturing at the door. “Or will we get locked up here and have to choose between slowly freezing to death or jumping?”
“You can close it,” I say. “It won’t lock.”
He lets it close, but he tests it anyway, as if to make sure I’m not lying when it’s too late to do anything about it if I am. I’m not sure I’d trust him that far, and he’s never really done anything to make me think I can’t. I’m the one who hurt him all those times.
At least physically, I did all the damage.
“God, I need a cigarette now,” he says, chuckling to himself at the irony. He goes to the edge and looks out over the city below.
I join him at the low railing around the top of the building. It’s nowhere near the highest building in the city, but it doesn’t need to be. The view is spectacular, from the street lit up with cars below to the sprawling urban cityscape twinkling like a hundred million Christmas lights.
“Pretty cool, huh?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says, shifting his weight in my direction. “Really fucking cool.”
We stand there for a minute, just looking out on the view under the clear, cold night sky.
“I didn’t know you could see stars in the city,” he says, tilting his head up. “I always heard you couldn’t.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Sometimes more than others. Want to sit?”
I go and get the waterproof picnic blanket I stash up here and lay it out. It’s not thick enough for warmth or padding, but it’s better than nothing. I lay it at the edge, and Colt sits down on it, resting his shoulder against the railing.
“You quit?” he asks, pulling out his cigarettes. “Will it bother you if I smoke?”
“No,” I say. “I only quit a couple years ago. In fact, give me one.”
“You sure?” he asks, his brows rising.
“Yeah,” I say. “For old time’s sake.”
“For old time’s sake,” he echoes, then slides a cigarette from the pack. He tucks it between his lips and pulls out a pack of matches to light. I watch the flame flare and die in the wind, then another, then another.
Finally, I scoot close and cup my hands around the flame for him. Some dumb part of me wonders if he did that on purpose, but then I remind myself that he was the one who always rejected me. Just because he followed me up here doesn’t mean anything. Last I heard, he was still with Gloria.
“What happened to the old Zippo?” I ask when he finally gets his cigarette lit and leans back.
“Apparently matches are cool again.”
“Who told you that?”
“My job,” he says, smiling. “I work for a distribution company. Lame, I know. You can laugh.”
“Not everyone gets to have a glamorous job in the city,” I say, holding out a hand.
He hands me the smoke, pinching it between thumb and finger. My skin brushes his, and fuck, it’s still there. That tingling, shivery ripple that rolls over my entire body at the slightest contact.
I guess some things haven’t changed.
“That’s why I’m up here,” he says. “Work. Boring shit. What about you? What do you do?”
“I book gigs and events for nightclubs.”
“That… Does not sound like a job for a sober person.”
I shrug and hand back the smoke. “It has its perks.”
“I bet,” he says. “Sounds exciting.”
“It can be,” I say, but what I’m thinking is, this is fucking exciting.
I’m doing better than him, and he can finally see it. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t dreamed of this moment a thousand times, if it hadn’t motivated me every single time. Thinking about him eating his words, the things he used to say to me, calling me a failure or a fuckup.
Look at me now, asshole.
I have a great job, I have my own place in the most exciting city in the world, I’m healthy.
The only thing missing is—no.
I won’t think like that, look for the bad. There’s too much good to spend time looking for what’s lacking.
“I take it this isn’t your first time here?” Colt asks, the corner of his mouth twitching into an ironic smile as he nods down at the blanket. He passes me the cigarette again.
This time, I’m careful not to touch him. “Not quite.”
“I don’t blame you,” he says. “Look at that view. Damn.”
I take a drag, letting the familiar smoke fill my lungs with comfort.
“Do you bring all your dates up here?” he asks.
I blow out a thin stream of smoke into the icy air. “Is this a date?”
“I just meant, it would be a good place to bring a date,” he says. “Not that this is a date.”
“Sure,” I say, handing the cigarette back. “And to answer your question, no. I’ve never brought a date here. I’ve never actually brought anyone here.”
His eyes meet mine, and his fingers close over mine, more than an accidental brush.
He cups the side of my hand for a beat, then slowly extracts the cigarette.
His eyes stay on mine as he places it between his lips and sucks, that stud beneath sparkling like a star.
He keeps on looking while he smiles and lets the smoke drift from the corners of his mouth.
Holy shit. Is Colt Darling flirting with me?
“Well, now you went and made me feel special,” he says, passing again.
“As if you ever needed me to tell you that.”
“Wouldn’t hurt,” he says, lifting one shoulder in the barest shrug. “You did spend four years of high school telling me I was a piece of shit.”
“And you never believed it for a second.”
“No,” he says, crossing his arms and hunching against the slight wind. “But I might have believed you thought it.”
“I didn’t,” I say quietly. “I never meant any of it.”
The same guilt I used to feel around him returns, and I remember why this was a mistake, and why it’s a danger to be around him.
The feeling that I couldn’t live with myself was one of the reasons I started using.
It wasn’t his fault, or the fault of any of the others who made me feel that way, but it’s still the reason.
“You might have said that before,” Colt admits. “But you were wasted.”
“Doesn’t make it any less true,” I say. And then I steel myself and sit up straight. “And I’m sorry. I don’t know if I said that before, but I’ve never said it soberly. But I am. I’m sorry for everything I did to you.”
“Yeah, me too,” he says, flexing his hand with the missing middle finger, his hand that doesn’t quite straighten fully anymore. “And I’m sorry for what I did to you too.”
I didn’t expect that. In all the years I imagined getting to apologize to him, I never pictured him apologizing back.
I never knew I needed him to.
Before I can answer, a section behind him goes from twinkling bright and cheery to ominously dark. My breath catches, and my heart stops. Another section of the city follows, blinking out like a switch was flipped, then another, disappearing from existence.
“What?” Colt asks, twisting around to see what I’m staring at.
And then it hits out block like a shadow falling over us, and the whole city plunges into darkness.