Brooklyn
Ten Months Ago
It takes me three months of begging to get him to meet me on purpose.
The garden didn’t count, he said. After, when I’d walked home buzzing and he’d gone wherever not-stalkers go, he texted me that the garden was an accident, a thing my own recklessness dragged out of him.
He spent a week afterward texting me variations of that can never happen again while I texted back variations of make me.
I’m a fighter. I don’t lose wars of attrition. And eventually, a couple of weeks before my nineteenth birthday, a fact I throw at him like a grenade in a text message.
ME
I’m going to be nineteen in two weeks and I am done waiting, you coward.
He sends me an address and a time and three words that make my whole stupid heart turn over.
CREEP
Roof. Midnight. Alone.
So now it’s midnight in November, and I’m on the roof of a building in Brooklyn shaking, and it’s not from the cold.
He comes up the fire stairs without a sound.
I’ve imagined this a thousand ways and none of them are right.
He’s tall, taller than I let myself remember from the darkness of the garden, dressed in black, hooded, gloved, and over the lower half of his face there’s a matte black mask that leaves nothing but his eyes, and even those are in shadow.
He stops six feet away, not coming any closer, and not saying a word.
He never says a word to me. That’s the deal, the one unbreakable rule of whatever this is.
I have never heard his voice. He texts me from across a rooftop rather than speak, and I used to think it was paranoia and now I think it’s something sadder, something about a man who has decided that the smallest piece of himself is too dangerous to give me.
As if I’d use it. As if I could.
My phone lights in my hand.
CREEP
You’re freezing. Why didn’t you wear a coat?
“Because I wanted you to see the dress.” I made myself wear it. The red one. The one he told me to buy last year, the one I’ve never had the nerve to put on until tonight, for him, for this. “You picked it. Figured you should get to look at it.”
The pause stretches. When the next text comes it takes him a long time to type, like the words cost him.
CREEP
I look at you all the time. You have no idea how much.
“So stop looking.” My voice cracks. I take a step toward him.
He doesn’t retreat, which is its own small miracle.
“Stop looking from across rooms and rooftops and the inside of my phone. I’m right here.
I’m not scared of you and I’m so tired of being wanted by a man who won’t be in the same square foot as me. Touch me. Please.”
For a moment he’s a statue. Then he closes the six feet between us, slow, like a man walking toward a cliff he’s decided to step off, and he pulls me into him.
It’s the most intimate hour of my entire life and we never take off a single piece of clothing.
He holds me on a freezing rooftop and I press my face to his chest and feel his heart going like a war drum that doesn’t match his stillness. His arms come around me careful and absolute, like I’m something that might shatter and something that might detonate, both at once.
I learn the shape of him through wool and leather.
I learn that he smells like cedar and cold and something darker underneath.
I learn that when I slide my hands up his chest he lets me, but when I reach for the edge of his mask his gloved hand catches my wrist, gentle, immovable, every time, and guides it back down.
Not that. Never that. I learn that he won’t let me touch his face and won’t let me see his hands bare and won’t, when I press myself against him and feel exactly how much he wants me, do anything about it.
“Why not,” I whisper into his collar. “I know you want to. I felt it in the garden, I can feel it right now. Why won’t you—”
His phone, one-handed, against my back where I can feel him typing.
CREEP
Because you’re still eighteen, and you’ve had your face in the dark with a man you can’t see or name, and if I take what I want from you tonight you’ll wake up tomorrow and it’ll be the worst decision of your life instead of a choice you actually got to make.
I’m not going to be your mistake, doll.
I’m going to be the thing you choose with your eyes open. Even if I have to wait years for it.
I read it three times in the cold, and something in me that has spent my whole life armored against every person who ever wanted me for the wrong reasons just—gives.
Cracks clean down the middle and lets him in.
Because no one has ever, ever put my choosing above their wanting.
No one. And a faceless stranger in a mask just did it without me even asking.
That’s the moment. If anyone ever asks me when I fell, and no one will, because I’ll never tell a living soul this story, it was right there, on a rooftop, reading a text from a man I’ve never seen, while my breath ghosted white between us.
I tip my head back and look up at the shadow where his eyes are, and I say the truest thing I have ever said to anyone, and I say it out loud so he can’t pretend it was just pixels on a screen.
“Then you should know I already decided. Whenever you’re ready.
However long you need.” I find his gloved hand and press it flat over my own heart so he can feel what it’s doing.
“When you’re ready, it’s yours. All of me.
I’m not giving my firsts to some boy to get them over with.
I’m giving them to you. So don’t take too long, ghost. I’m not the most patient person you’ve ever met. ”
He goes completely, perfectly still.
And then he does the only thing he’s allowed himself all night that wasn’t careful: he cups the back of my head in one gloved hand and presses his forehead to mine, mask to my mouth, and we stand like that in the freezing dark for a long, long time, two people breathing the same small cloud of air, and even though I can’t see his face I would swear on my whole family that the man behind that mask is coming apart as quietly and completely as I am.
He walks me down to a car he called for me. He doesn’t get in it. The last thing I see is him standing on the empty sidewalk in his mask, watching my taillights, one gloved hand half-raised like he forgot how to wave.
My phone buzzes one last time before I lose signal in the tunnel.
CREEP
Be patient with me. I’m closer to ready than you think.
I read it in the dark of the tunnel, and I smile at the screen like the lovesick idiot I’ve become, and I let myself believe, for one more night, that I have all the time in the world.