A noise from behind stole my attention and I turned, finding her standing there. A quick glance at my watch showed she was twenty minutes earlier than I had been expecting.
In her hands was a bottle of bourbon and two glasses.
She paused in her step when she was no more than five feet away from me. I waited, wondering what she would do next.
Would she be brave and come up to me, showing off that alluring feminine beauty that had captivated me at first sight? Or would she stutter out an excuse, leaving me here alone?
I didn’t know which I hoped for more, but then she walked over to me. The hesitancy in her step, the way her eyes shifted from left to right, revealed her youth. Finally, she stood fully in front of me. My hand twitched with the urge to touch her. I didn’t—afraid once I did, I wouldn’t be able to let her go.
“Hey,” she said.
I didn’t smile, though I wanted to. What a causal thing to say, coming from a girl brimming with nervous energy.
“Hey,” I repeated, grabbing the glasses in her hands and placing them on the concrete railing in front of us.
“What are we doing?” she asked.
“You tell me.” I poured two fingers of the bourbon in each glass and handed one to her. She grabbed it, taking care not to let our fingers touch. I tried not to let my amusement show.
She shrugged. “You’re the one who invited me here.”
That was true. I had been the one to ask her up here, with every intention of spending as much time with her as possible before I had to go back to New York, back to my responsibility, to my mother’s nagging, to the weight bearing down on me that came with being the heir to the Pierce multibillion-dollar empire.
Something I wished I could escape from.
If only it was that easy.
I used to thrive in the role. I wondered when I lost the spark for it. Perhaps it was around the time I realized I was nothing more than a pawn in my grandpa’s game. That I would always be nothing more than that in his eyes.
Sometimes, I wished I could escape, not from my family’s legacy but from his grasp. And how tightly he had me in his grasp.
I looked back into her green eyes, and right now, I didn’t want to touch her. I didn’t want to taint her with my hands. I wanted to keep her like this. Always this young, this beautiful, so full of life and optimism, something that only happened when you were twentysomething and life hadn’t gotten you down.
“Just stay here with me for a while?” I asked. It was a small request, simple and easy. A weird one. But if she thought so, she didn’t say.
Instead, she looked me over, as if trying to figure me out. I fought against the need to fidget underneath her eyes, feeling naked all the sudden.
Then her eyes softened, her shoulders relaxing, and she offered me a small smile. “Okay,” she said.
She brought the drink up to her ruby-red lips. I tried not to react to such an innocent move and took a sip of my own drink.
We didn’t say any more. We stood near the edge of the rooftop of the bar she worked at—the concrete railing was the only thing keeping us from plunging into our death—looking out at the city. From the dark, cloudy night, too polluted with city life and light for us to see the stars, to the ground below, full of people mingling despite the late hour.
We didn’t stay there long. If it had been possible, I would have stood next to her all night. It felt like I was able to breathe after holding my head under water for so long. She made everything bearable.
A mere stranger.
And I had selfishly wanted to take her back to New York with me.
But then her phone dinged, intruding on what little peace I had been able to find. She looked down at the text message before frowning a bit. When she looked back at me, I knew what she was going to say before she said it.
“You have to go,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, as regret filled those bottomless eyes of hers. “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for,” I told her, even if I wished she didn’t have to go. She was the highlight of my entire trip.
She smiled a little bit at me, placing the glasses back on the rail before pulling away. I place my glass back down next to hers. Mine was empty, while hers still had about a half of what I had poured for her.