The power had gone out at eleven, and by midnight the apartment was holding the heat like something it refused to put down.
She found him already on the fire escape, shirt open at the collar, a glass of ice water sweating a ring onto the iron grate between his feet.
There was no room out there for two people who weren't touching. That was the whole design of a fire escape — four feet of iron built for one person's hurry, not two people's patience.
She sat anyway. Her knee found his before she'd decided to let it.
Out past the water tanks the sky flared — a long, silent burst of white behind the clouds, gone before it fully registered as light. No thunder came after it. It never did, on nights like this. Heat lightning didn't bother finishing its own sentence.
"There's another one," he said, not looking at her, looking at the sky the way a person looks at anything when they don't trust themselves to look at what's actually in front of them.
She passed him the glass without being asked. Their fingers didn't quite avoid each other doing it.
The city below had gone the particular dark of a blackout — not off, exactly, just unlit, a held note. Two blocks over a generator coughed to life and someone cheered for it. Neither of them moved to go find out whose.
Another flash lit the underside of the clouds, and for that half-second she watched everything about his face he usually kept turned three degrees away from her — his mouth, his jaw, the place his attention actually landed when he thought no one was checking.
Then it was dark again, ordinary dark, and his hand was closer to hers on the iron grate than it had been the flash before.
Neither of them said whose idea the fire escape had been. It didn't matter anymore. There was nowhere else, that night, either of them wanted to be.
The next flash came, white and wordless, and this time neither of them looked at the sky.