The apartment was nine floors up and the windows had been painted shut two landlords ago, so on nights like this one the heat just sat there with them, patient, refusing to be reasoned with. She'd stopped trying to sleep an hour before. He'd stopped pretending to an hour after that.
She found the stairwell door at the end of the hall — the one with the taped-over alarm sensor and a sign for a tenant who no longer lived there — and started up without saying where. He came anyway, two steps behind, the way he always did when the destination mattered less than the leaving.
The roof still held the day's heat in the tar underfoot, softer than pavement, warm through the soles of her feet the way a held hand goes on being warm after the hand's let go. A water tank stood black against the sky at one end, and someone's forgotten laundry line hung slack between two vents, three clothespins and nothing left to hold.
Nine floors below, the city had thinned itself down to a grid of low gold windows and one ambulance, a long way off, taking its time about wherever it was going. Up here the noise of it arrived already sanded smooth, and none of it had anything to do with them.
She went to the parapet and put both hands flat on the ledge, testing the height of it the way a person tests water before deciding to mean it. He came up behind her, not touching yet, close enough that she felt the decision in the air before she felt him.
"Nobody can see us up here," she said, to the skyline more than to him.
"That's the part I like," he said, and put his hands at her waist like he'd been asking permission for exactly that sentence.
She turned inside his hands to face him instead of the city, and something in her that four flights of stairs and four walls had always kept carefully folded came open the way it only came open when there was no one below to require otherwise of her. His forehead found hers before his mouth did, patient, the same unhurried patience the heat had kept all night, except now it was working for her instead of against her.
Neither of them said anything else the roof could have overheard. The water tank kept its silence, the laundry line kept its three clothespins, and the city kept its gold windows lit for no one in particular, while nine floors up, barefoot on tar still warm from a day neither of them had wanted, they went on being exactly as unseen as they needed to be.