She gasps — hand flying to her chest, lips parting in a way that pulls something painful and familiar out of me — and steps forward, blinking as though her eyes are adjusting not to the view, but to a memory she never lived.
I don’t look at the skyline.
I don’t need to.
I’ve already found the only view I want to memorise.
“This is…” She turns slowly, taking it in — the broken brick ledge, the rusted antennae, the graffiti fading into the roof’s concrete bones. “Where are we?”
“Somewhere I used to sleep when I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” I say, my voice rougher than I intend, like the place is tugging pieces of my seventeen-year-old self back to the surface.
She turns toward me fully this time, slower than before, like she’s afraid to step too hard on something that still holds my ghosts. “You brought me to your past?”
“I don’t know how to do flowers and dinner, Cassandra.”
The honesty lands in the space between us like something heavier than truth.
She steps closer — close enough I feel her warmth in the cold air.
“You brought me to your hurt.”
We sit on an old army blanket I shoved into my duffel, the kind that smells faintly of dust and history, and the coffee’s gone cold between us, pastries untouched inside their bag like they were never the point anyway.
She shivers when a gust of wind sweeps across the rooftop, and without thinking, I pull the blanket around her shoulders, tucking it close as though the fabric could protect her from every version of me she doesn’t know yet.
Then I lie back, eyes on the stars — the ones that look different here than they ever did overseas, the ones that never answered when I asked why I kept surviving things I didn’t want to.
“You ever wonder how many people are looking at the same sky?” I ask, voice low.
“Sometimes,” she murmurs.
I tilt my head. She’s lying beside me now, closer than she was a moment ago, her shoulder brushing mine in small, barely-there touches that feel louder than gunfire.
“But right now,” she whispers, “I don’t care who else sees it. Because you brought me here.”
“Yeah,” I murmur, “I did.”
She turns her head toward me, hair brushing the blanket. “Why?”
My heart stalls. Hits something sharp.
Because I couldn’t stay away.
Because you wrecked me the second you kissed me back.
Because I’ve survived death and blood and fire, and nothing has ever made me feel like your laugh does.
Instead, I say, “Because I thought if you saw the place that made me, you’d understand why I’m so fucked up.”
She goes quiet, eyes softening in a way that hurts worse than anything I faced in uniform.
“I’m glad I saw it,” she whispers.
The silence shifts — no longer empty. Not heavy. Just thick enough to feel like it’s holding its breath.
Her hand brushes mine.
A barely there touch.
