Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Sullivan’s was squeezed at the back of a paved alley, and from the shuddering windowpane carved deep into the stone facade of the building, I could see that it was teeming with people, red-hued lights glazing over ruddy, drunken faces.
For a while, I only stood there, watching Kai from afar, while the cool night air lapped over me in slow, sensual sweeps.
He was leaning against one of the tall stools that circled the bar, not separate from his company but withdrawn somehow, his gaze unfocused and his hands mindlessly busy with shutting and flipping open his phone.
Then, as though he’d sensed my presence, he turned around and looked directly at me. With the corners of his mouth already smiling, he made his way through the crowd, and when he pushed the door open, an ocean of noise was released into the alley along with a gust of oppressive heat.
His shirt was untucked from his trousers, his black hair messy, his face flushed and a little damp. He looked like a tipsy college boy.
“You’re not drunk, are you?” I teased him, dragging out the syllables, although I could never make words sound as smooth as he did.
He shook his head in a funny, self-deprecating way, rubbing a hand over his nape. “No, I promise. I only had one beer. You want one too?”
Heaving a sigh, I bent back my neck and squinted at the patch of sky showing between the two buildings. “I want quiet. Just not home quiet. Does that make any sense?”
“As much as anything,” he said, nodding for me to follow.
Inside, it was loud and fever-warm, the atmosphere electric, and Kai caught my hand in his so we wouldn’t get separated in the crowd.
It occurred to me that we had never touched before, intentionally or accidentally, and I found myself weirdly invigorated by the foreign strength of his hand around mine.
A crackle of sensation passed over the lengths of my fingers, my span of awareness narrowing to that spot where our bodies connected.
Out of politeness we stopped by his table, although everyone was too drunk to pay any attention to us.
Kai ordered another beer and a glass of wine for me, settled the bill, grabbed his coat from the hook under the bar, and told me to follow him.
Once again we waded through the crowd until we finally reached the narrow staircase leading up to the roof, which was available to the people, although not many knew about it.
The place was perfect. Unlit, wide open, and at the moment, completely unoccupied, with just the right amount of noise from the street below to drown the tide of my thoughts.
Slipping into his elegant overcoat, Kai leaned over the railing and checked the city view. “Is this alright?”
My gaze drifted upward, to the leaden sky and the smattering of stars. I didn’t think I’d ever seen stars so bright before. “Yeah, it’s beautiful up here,” I replied, and even my voice had an unfamiliar quality to it, cool and soft like rain.
“Not too quiet?”
“No.”
“Not too cold?”
It was, in fact, piercingly cold, but I was glad for it since I wouldn’t have to take off my trench coat and reveal that under it, I was wearing a straight black skirt and below-the-knee boots.
That I had put on all of this conscious effort while he looked like he always did. Effortless as a heartbeat.
“It’s a little cold, but I like this kind of weather,” I admitted as I set my glass of wine down on the ledge.
Without warning, Kai shrugged off the coat he’d just put on and came to drape it over my shoulders. “Here,” he said. “That should keep you nice and warm.”
I wanted to protest. I wanted to scowl and grumble that he was going to catch a cold and that I really was fine with my trench coat, but I found myself behaving very strangely tonight, blushing and touching my hair and looking away every time our gazes crossed.
“Thank you,” I murmured, letting the strap of my bag nestle into the crook of my elbow so I could take the lapels of the coat and pull it tighter around me. It felt like him somehow. Warm and refined. “For the coat and the wine,” I added. “You didn’t have to pay for it.”
“Well, I did disturb your beauty sleep. The least I can do now is treat you to some wine,” he drawled, bending to leave his beer bottle next to my glass.
Not knowing what else to say, I repeated stupidly, “Thank you.”
Pure evil was the smile he gave me then. “Someone’s being uncharacteristically polite tonight.”
“I’m always polite,” I claimed.
“Not to me you aren’t,” he argued, leaning closer to take his cigarettes and matches out of the inside pocket of his coat, careful not to touch me in the process. “It’s weird seeing you like this actually. All nervous and docile.”
“I am not docile,” I scoffed.
He gave me a permissive, knowing look, threading the cigarette between the lush line of his mouth. “In general, no.”
“Fine,” I relented. “Do you want me to be mean to you then?”
His eyes lowered a fragment, his voice dropping to a near whisper, “No, Anya. I don’t want you to be mean. In fact, I want you to be very, very nice to me.”
Caught glancing between his eyes and mouth, I asked just as privately, “And why is that?”
“Because maybe then I can stop feeling so pathetic,” he said.
I didn’t ask him why he was feeling so pathetic. I knew. He wanted me to know, and Kai always got what he wanted.
Flustered, with my heart beating a most hazardous rhythm, I watched him light the cigarette with a match, the tiny orange flame bobbing in the wind.
“Oh, I have a lighter,” I offered, patting around my bag only to realize that I’d left both my lighter and cigarettes back home.
“It’s okay,” he said, releasing a thin cloud of smoke. “This is going to sound so pretentious, but I actually like the smell of them.”
“Of the matches?”
Another quick inhale, another white film of breath. “Yeah, don’t they give off a kind of bonfire smell? Especially when the weather is like this? It’s very nostalgic to me. It reminds me of going camping with my dad.”
The word was a clean, sharp blow in the center of my chest. Nostalgic.
At once, a dark, fainting feeling stole over me, and I heard myself gasp, “You know that word.”
“Lots of people know that word.”
“I didn’t,” I muttered under my breath, veering so we were both standing shoulder to shoulder and gazing out below.
From this distance the city looked liquid, the web of roads river-like, and the people minuscule, their existence as fragile and meandering as the smoldering end of Kai’s cigarette.
“That’s alright,” he said in a surprisingly gentle tone. “I’ve only recently discovered the word dystopia. I read it in a book from the Outside.”
“Dystopia,” I whispered to myself, tasting the bitter unfamiliarity of it on my tongue. “Sounds like utopia.”
“I know, right? But it turns out it means the opposite.”
The opposite.
I tried to imagine a world opposite to ours, the daily horrors and adversities it would entail, but I found it impossible, the mere concept slipping away from me every time I got close to comprehending it.
“Do you think the Outside is the opposite of here?” I asked Kai very quietly, having the irrational and uncomfortable sense that we were talking about something forbidden, something no one had ever talked about before.
Kai pinched the cigarette between two fingers, his handsome face darkening with contemplation. “I’m not sure if it’s the exact opposite. I just know that it’s worse.”
I felt myself pressing closer, my pulse quickening from a restless, sonorous feeling. “Why do you say that?”
“Well, look at this place.” For a moment, we both paused to take in the full-moon night, the flurries of leaves lifting in the misted air, and the mountains, dark and sloping in the indistinct horizon.
Then the city below, all activity and light, billboards and signs floating up as though on their own.
A phantasmagoria of endless possibility.
“I mean,” Kai continued in a firm but evocative manner, “just from reading about it, we know their technology is much more advanced than ours, perhaps a lot more exciting too. But can you imagine living in a world where you have to connect to the internet to feel connected at all? Where society has become so disfigured that people have grown more intimate with algorithms than with each other? Where you have to work as efficiently as a highly intelligent machine or absorb information faster than your brain’s ability to process it just to obtain the tiniest sense of relevance?
And for what? Toward what end? Death? Is this really progress?
Is this the end goal of human development?
What is the point of being born on a planet with so much beauty and diversity only to end up as a homogenized lump of muscles that does nothing but stare at screens all day?
It’s dehumanizing. Having to substitute living with screen time.
But here?” He smiled a little, his face daydreaming.
“Here you can just… live. The sheer elasticity with which we navigate our day-to-day lives has to render our way of existing the superior one. Yes, we are limited, information-wise. But sometimes, I wonder, is it really a limit, or is it a safety net? Because, here, at least, we are allowed to be human. There’s no pressure to constantly achieve more, learn more, earn more.
Ambition is our choice, not the measure by which we value each other.
” He glanced at me from the corner of his eye, a self-conscious ribbon of redness wrapping around his cheekbones.
“Sorry. I’m being a little sentimental, aren’t I? ”