"I'll text you a list of my food preferences."
I can't tell if she's joking or not. "I only cook one thing, Petal. It's spaghetti Bolognese or nothing."
"That's on my list of things I eat." She dangles the chain in her fingers. "Are you ready to see what the old Vernalt Social Club looks like now?"
"I'm as ready as I'll ever be." I take a step closer to her as she turns back around and slides the key in the lock.
I worked on this rooftop deck when I was in college. When the owner was around, I was busy bussing tables. The rest of the time, I was behind the bar opening beer bottles, washing glasses and downing a finger of the good bourbon whenever I got the chance.
I brought Brynn up here late one night when the world felt too heavy for her. I'd found her on the curb outside her parents' apartment, her face in her hands, her shoulders swaying with the force of her sobs.
I didn't ask her what was tearing her up inside. Instead, I waved down a cab, got her into the back seat and used the key my boss gave me to sneak her up here for her first sip of beer.
She told me that night that she felt as though she was at the top of the world looking down at a city full of hope. It was months later, after the bar shut down and I was on the cusp of graduating college that I found out what had happened. She'd been passed over for a summer internship at the company she desperately wanted to work for.
It was Bishop and Associates, her father's real estate firm. Fulton Bishop never saw the promise in his daughter that was always there. It still pisses me the hell off.
I left the key in an envelope addressed to her, on the kitchen counter in her parents' apartment the day before I graduated. I had no idea if it still opened the lock to our private rooftop retreat but it didn't matter. It was a token symbol of how the world was hers for the taking.
She didn't need her dad to succeed. I'm glad she sees that now.
"Follow me," she whispers with a crook of her index finger as she pushes open the door. "I think you're going to like what you see."
I already do. I'm staring at the most beautiful woman in the world and I'm seeing flashes of forgiveness in her eyes.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Brynn
I turned immediatelyafter I walked through the doorway so I could see Smith's reaction. I know that he hasn't been up here in years. Hardly anyone has. All the furniture and most of the lighting from the bar were removed eons ago. All that's left is a simple white string of lights strung over a fake tree of some sort that the bar owner's left behind. I added two mismatched chairs that I found on the sidewalk next to a mountain of trash bags last year. Neither of them is in good shape, but they beat sitting on the concrete staring up at the stars.
"What the hell?" he whispers under his breath. "Is this the same place?"
No one would ever know that at one time New Yorkers came up here to unwind. Relationships began and ended on this rooftop over a glass of wine. People met, left together and fucked in the hotel a block over before ending their nights with an awkward goodbye and the understanding that they'd never see each other again.
The same thing happens at every bar on this island.
"It feels even more like it's the top of the world now." I stare out at the expansive views of the city. "I come up here sometimes to think."
He nods silently like he understands exactly what I'm talking about. I know that he does. He's the one who brought me here to begin with. He poured me a quarter of a glass of beer and as he finished off the bottle, he gazed at the Brooklyn Bridge that night.
I let him believe it was my first taste of beer. It wasn't. I'd snuck a bottle that belonged to my dad from the fridge when I was barely fourteen. I took a sip before I washed the rest of the expensive imported beer down the kitchen drain as our housekeepers giggled.
Smith didn't need to know that. When he poured me that beer, he thought he was giving me my first taste of something forbidden. I did want a taste of something off-limits that night; his lips.
"The city hasn't changed that much since I brought you here the first time." He sucks in a deep breath, his chest straining against the T-shirt he's wearing. "You've changed, but the city always stays the same."
He's wrong. The city has changed just as much as I have. It's not only the sky high towers that developers are building to draw the millions that foreign investors are looking to sink into the city. It's much more than that.
People don't stop to talk to their neighbors the way they used to. Familiar faces you could always count on to be there have disappeared and the dream to make a mark on this tarnished, imperfect paradise is getting farther and farther out of reach.
"I grew up, Smith," I point out studying his profile as he gazes toward Brooklyn the way he did the first time we stood up here together. "I'm not the girl you once knew."
He swallows hard, his throat working on the motion. It's sexy for some reason only my body knows. It's reacting. I don't want it to, but I can't help myself. I haven't stopped thinking about what happened back at Easton's Pub.
How can a kiss shared with someone you hate feel so good?
"You don't have to tell me that," he says quietly. "When I saw you at the gym I couldn't believe my eyes."
