He looked at the binoculars. “They’re rimmed in rubber, and that glass is about three inches thick.” He shook his head. “I doubt they’ll work.” He gathered up the strap, wrapping it around his wrist, and, pretending he was holding a baseball bat, swung.
Thunk.
“Not even a crack. Not even amarkon it,” Teddy said, peering closely at the glass.
Oscar was still considering options. “And there’s not enough room up here to even get a good running start, or even a strong enough kick—”
“No, that’s too dangerous. It’d be so easy to fall right over the rail.”
“I suppose we could try and shout—make some noise. Maybe someone out on the lake will hear us.” But he knew that was a dubious option at best, considering the closest people were miles away.
“Worst-case scenario, if we can’t figure out any other way to get down, we can wait till my cousin shows up.”
“Oh,” Oscar said, his heart lifting a little. “Is he coming over tonight?”
“No, not tonight. Tomorrow morning sometime. To drop off a few books for me to sign for a friend of his.”
“Tomorrow morning.” Oscar tried, and failed, to keep the dismay from his voice.
“Yeah. Around nine, he said.” With a long, sighing sort of groan, she sank to the floor. Leaning against the glass wall behind her, she faced the sunset. Drawing her feet up near her body, she tucked edges of her sundress modestly over her knees. “Well, at least we have a nice view.”
But the sun was going down—more quickly now, for it was halfway below the horizon. Oscar estimated another thirty minutes of light once it was gone, then they’d be stuck up here in the dark—with the temperature dropping. It could get quite cold, up this high and so near the lake. He glanced at Teddy, with her bare arms and the teeny-tiny straps that did nothing to protect her shoulders or upper chest.
Still. The viewwasincredible. The blazing sun had become a ball of orange, shooting out streaks of color as it disappeared.
Oscar walked around the perimeter again, hoping for a tool to magically appear, or an idea to manifest—waiting forsomethingto present itself.
And the whole time, he kept telling himself: there was no way the wind had blown that door closed.
Finally, after rapping as hard as he could on the thick glass panes—and giving them a few solid, awkwardly placed kicks—in a last-ditch effort to find a weak or loose one, he sank down next to Teddy. There was only a sliver of sun left, and shadows had begun to arrange themselves on the ground below. His arm brushed hers, and even through his cotton shirt, he could feel the chill of her skin instead of the warmth he’d expected.
“You’re already cold,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt. “And it’s going to get even chillier. The wind is picking up.”
Oscar shrugged out of his shirt and pushed it at her, feeling the rush of the cool breeze over his bare skin. It felt good—now—but if they didn’t get off here soon, it would soon be uncomfortable. But he was glad for the lowering light to hide the faint flush he felt warming his cheeks when Teddy turned to look at him. Her eyes were wide, and, for once, she seemed speechless.
She took the shirt, still gaping at him like she wasn’t certain how to respond. Finally, she said, “You obviously don’t spend all your time in a lab, Dr. London. Itisdoctor, isn’t it?”
“Uh, yes.”
She pulled the shirt around her shoulders, then stuck her arms in the sleeves. “Yes to doctor, or yes to not spending all your time in the lab?”
“Yes to the actual question, not the implied one,” he replied, a little uncertain how he felt about this—this banter…and the fact that she’d very obviously noticed that he did, in fact, not spend all of his time in a lab and did, in fact, do the occasional push-up and pull-up before his daily five-mile swim. Not that he was Arnold Schwarzenegger or anything like that…but he sure as hell wasn’t flabby.
Teddy nodded, the quirk of a smile on her mouth. It was, Oscar realized suddenly—mainly because it was difficult not to, due to its proximity—a very nice, very kissable mouth. Not that he had any intention or interest in kissing it; he was still in love with Marcie, still mourning the loss of that relationship.
Still hoping for something to happen.
“What was that?” Teddy said. Every time she moved, he caught a fresh whiff of her scent—the fresh, peachy, flowery one he’d noticed this morning.
“What?”
“That sigh. It wasn’t an ‘I’m stuck up here, what am I going to do’ sigh. It was…sad. In a different way than ‘I’m stuck on the top of a lighthouse with a neurotic writer’ sad. Our situation isn’t sad,per se,” she said. “It’s justreallyinconvenient—I mean, at least you have an easy way to pee from up here if necessary. Not so me, so if I have to go, you’re going to need to look the other way. And it’s possibly dangerous being up here, but not really—unless we get a bad thunderstorm. But the situation’s not reallysad.”
It took Oscar a moment to extrapolate what she was saying—did the woman ever string a sentence together with fewer than twenty words and too many clauses?—and then he wasn’t certain how to respond. Had she really mentioned urinating over the side of the railing?
Finally, he ventured: “It was hopeless. Not sad so much as hopeless.”
“Your sigh?”
