"I know this great rooftop nearby."
He said it with the offhand confidence of someone who knew the city by muscle memory, who had once lost entire nights to its pulse, and now carried its secrets with a casual familiarity. Verena didn't answer - didn't need to - and AJ took her hand again. It was a simple gesture, but it held the weight of quiet certainties, of something unspoken but growing bolder with each shared breath.
The city lay before them like an unfinished sentence. San Francisco, with its bruised lavender sky and breath of salt and fog, wrapped itself around them as they walked. The streets were slick from an earlier drizzle, shining like old mirrors, and the air smelled faintly of eucalyptus, exhaust, and something floral carried in on the sea wind. They moved at a pace that wasn't hurried. Time had unspooled a little, turned elastic. With her fingers in his, AJ felt the edges of the world soften, blur.
The rooftop wasn't marked by signs or lit in neon. It was the kind of place that lived between lines on a map, accessible only through the right doorway, up the right set of stairs, through a fire escape disguised as nothing much at all. And then, suddenly, it opened up. Space. Air. An unobstructed sweep of skyline. It was the kind of view that didn't shout, but whispered, coaxed. Lights twinkled below like spilled glass. The hum of the city softened into a lull, and the wind curled lazily around them, warm despite the hour.
AJ led her to a table tucked into the far corner, half-hidden by a wall of ivy that moved like velvet under the ambient string lights. They sat beneath the golden glow of Edison bulbs strung in lazy zigzags overhead, the bulbs swinging gently with the wind. The rooftop was neither crowded nor empty - enough people to feel alive, not enough to feel watched. Jazz hummed softly from speakers nestled into the foliage, the notes thick and honeyed, curling like smoke through the air.
A server appeared, ghostlike in their efficiency, and AJ gestured to the charcuterie menu, ordering without looking. He knew exactly what would come: thin slices of prosciutto folded like ribbon, creamy brie and sharp manchego, dark olives glinting with oil, sun-dried tomatoes marinated in herbs, glistening figs sliced in half to reveal their rich pink hearts. A bottle of red - Syrah, earthy and full-bodied - followed, poured generously into wide glasses that caught the candlelight in their curves.
They sat without urgency, their bodies turned inward, angled into each other. AJ could feel the electricity between them settling into something heavier, denser, like gravity. It wasn't that she was touching him - though she was, barely, the side of her knee against his beneath the table - but that she could, at any moment, and the space between that potential and reality was unbearably erotic. The air between them shimmered with it. Every breath, every glance, every movement of her fingers to her glass carried the intimacy of a promise.
He watched her in profile as she lifted her wine, the stem of the glass delicate in her long fingers. The red caught on her lower lip, staining it like a secret. Her hair caught the breeze and tumbled around her shoulders, and he felt the ache of wanting rise in him again—slow, deliberate, not just hunger, but reverence.
Here, in this small citadel above the world, she was unknowable and wholly his. Not his in any possessive sense, but his in the way a poem might briefly belong to the reader who understands it completely. AJ didn't speak. He didn't need to. The silence between them had become a language of its own, fluent and precise. He shifted slightly in his chair, letting his knee press more fully against hers, and when she didn't move away, didn't blink, didn't change anything at all—he knew.
They lingered over the food, though neither was hungry. It was ceremony, not sustenance. He tore pieces of bread from the warm loaf in the centre of the board, dipping them in oil, in cheese, in nothing at all. The wine darkened his blood, made him slow, thoughtful. The city stretched out around them, luminous and indifferent. But here, in the hush between clinks of glasses and the slow melting of cheese on a warm plate, AJ felt time fold into something intimate, and strange, and a little bit holy.
And for now, that was enough.
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