BEAUTIFUL RUIN
Chapter Three: The Roof
He came up at nine thirty on a Saturday in October.
The route was the same one it had always been, through the attic, past the boxes Cassie's mother had stored since her father left three years before, out onto the flat section of roof that ran along the back of the house, bordered by a low parapet that was decorative rather than structural but solid enough to trust.
Cassie was already up there, knees pulled to her chest, when he came through the window, slightly awkward with the height at first, then finding his footing and standing. He looked at the reservoir, and for a long moment he simply looked, and Cassie watched him look, feeling her pulse quicken at the sight of his face caught open and unguarded for once.
"Cassie," he said.
"Yes?"
"This is, " he said, and did not finish.
"I know," she said.
He sat on the parapet, which she had told him was safe. She sat beside him, close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off his arm through two layers of flannel, and the October air did nothing to cool the heat that particular closeness put into her skin.
The Cresthaven reservoir at night: the water dark and still, the far shore a line of black trees, the sky above Connecticut in October with the specific clarity that happens when the nearest city light is forty miles away and the stars are, for once, actually visible, uncountable and close.
"You've been coming here since you were fifteen," he said.
"Fifteen. When my father left. It was the first place I came."
"To be outside the house."
"To be outside everything," she said. "And look at something that didn't need me."
He was quiet, watching the water. "Boston harbour was like that. Being out on it. You could go very small and the water didn't care."
"Yes."
"I miss it," he said. "I should write that version. The unedited one."
"You should."
"The teacher will see it."
"She asked for it."
He looked at the reservoir a while longer, and Cassie let the silence sit, aware of how close his hand was to hers on the cold stone, aware of every half inch of distance between them as though her skin had started keeping its own private measurements.
"Cassie."
"Yes?"
"Why did you let me come up here?"
She turned to look at him properly. "Because you noticed the window. On moving day."
"That's the reason?"
"No one else has ever noticed it. In three years. My friends don't notice things they're not already looking for. You weren't looking for anything, and you noticed it anyway."
He was quiet a moment. "I notice things."
"I know," she said. "I've been watching you notice things since September."
He turned his head, and his eyes on her face felt like a physical pressure, warm and startling. "What do you notice about me?"
She was quiet, letting herself actually consider the question instead of reaching for the easy answer. "You're the smartest person in AP Literature," she said finally.
"That's not, "
"I'm not finished." She held up a hand, found herself smiling despite the nerves gathering low in her stomach. "You're the smartest person in AP Literature, and you answer questions with the second best version of your actual answer. Not a bad answer. A careful one. You save the real one."
He studied her, something unguarded moving across his face. "The Gatsby discussion," he said. "In October. You said the green light was about the impossibility of recovering the past. Which is the correct literary reading. But you were going to say something else first."
"What was I going to say?"
"I don't know. I only know you stopped yourself."
She looked at the reservoir, feeling the particular vertigo of being read that accurately by someone she had known for six weeks. "I was going to say that the green light is about the specific way hope can become a trap. That by the end, Gatsby's green light had stopped being about Daisy. It was about needing something to hope for."
"That's better," he said, quiet, certain.
"It's more personal."
"Yes."
"The teacher doesn't need my personal."
"She said don't edit it out."
"In the essay. Not in class."
"Cassie."
"Yes?"
"You edit yourself all the time."
"Yes."
"And you want to stop."
"Yes."
"Then here," he said, and something in his voice had gone low and steady, the voice of someone offering a gift and meaning it. "On the roof. Say the real version."
She looked at him, her heart beating harder than the question warranted. "The real version of what?"
"Anything. Whatever you edited today."
She told him about the girl in her AP Calc class who had gotten into early admission at Yale, about the two feelings that rose in her every time she heard it, real happiness and a small ugly satisfaction that she herself worked harder and no one would ever know it. "It's petty," she finished, feeling her face heat.
"It's honest," he said. "Both are true."
"Yes."
He was looking at the reservoir, but his shoulder had drifted closer to hers, close enough now that the fabric of their sleeves pressed together, and Cassie was aware of the warmth of him along her whole left side, a steady, distracting heat.
"Reid."
"Yes?"
"What do you edit?"
He was quiet for a long time, long enough that she thought he might not answer at all. "Anger," he said finally. "About the move. About my father and mother making a decision that made sense for them and moving me at eighteen, in senior year, in the year that was supposed to be the last one before everything changes."
"You're angry."
"Yes."
"And you edit it."
"Because it's not useful."
"It's real," she said.
"It's real and not useful. My father is still in Boston. My mother is happier here than she was. The circumstances are what they are."
"And you're eighteen and in Cresthaven instead of Boston."
"Yes."
"And that's, bad."
"It's fine." He stopped. His jaw tightened. "No. It's not fine. It's genuinely not fine, and I've been telling myself it is."
The reservoir held its black, patient stillness below them.
"Reid," she said.
"Yes?"
"That was the unedited version."
He looked at her, something raw and relieved in his face. "Yes."
"How does it feel?"
"Better," he admitted. "Which is annoying."
"The truth is annoying when you've been avoiding it," she said, and he almost laughed, a short exhale that moved his shoulder against hers.
They sat together on the narrow parapet, the October night settling around them, and Cassie was aware, in a way that had nothing to do with the cold, of exactly how little distance separated them, of the particular charge that moves through the air between two people who have just told each other something true.
"Cassie."
"Yes?"
"Thank you for this," he said. "The roof."
"You can come up anytime."
He turned his head. "Anytime?"
"When the inside is too much," she said, and her voice came out quieter than she intended, almost a confession in itself.
He was quiet. "Cassie."
"Yes?"
He looked at her, the October dark around them, the reservoir below, the particular weight of two eighteen year olds standing at the edge of the last year before everything changed, and something in his face shifted, decided.
He kissed her.
It was brief. Careful. The eighteen year old version of a kiss, not practiced, entirely honest, his mouth soft and uncertain against hers for exactly as long as it took her whole body to light up in answer, a warmth that started at her mouth and spread, astonishingly fast, down through her chest and lower, pooling low in her stomach in a way she had read about and never, until this exact moment, believed in.
She kissed him back.
"Reid."
"Yes?"
"That was, "
"The unedited version," he said, his voice rough at the edges.
"Yes."
"I'm sorry if, "
"Don't apologise." She said it fiercely, surprising herself.
He looked at her, something hopeful breaking across his face. "Okay."
"Reid."
"Yes?"
"Come back next Saturday," she said.
He looked at the reservoir, then back at her. "The roof version."
"Yes."
"I'll be here," he said.
* * *
He came back the next Saturday, as promised, and the thin membrane of carefulness that had governed the first kiss did not survive the second.
They were on the parapet again, closer this time, no pretence of distance between them, and when he reached for her hand in the dark she let him take it, let her fingers lace through his, feeling the small, electric shock of his skin against hers travel all the way up her arm.
"Cassie," he said, low.
"Yes?"
"I've been thinking about last Saturday all week."
"Me too," she admitted, her voice barely above a whisper.
He turned toward her, his free hand coming up to cup her jaw with a tenderness that made her breath catch, and when he kissed her this time there was nothing careful about it at all. His mouth moved against hers with a certainty that had not been there before, and Cassie's hands found the front of his jacket, fisting in the fabric, pulling him closer as though the narrow stretch of roof between them had suddenly become unbearable.
This is what unedited feels like, she thought, dimly, somewhere beneath the roar of her own pulse. This is what I promised myself on this roof a year ago.
He pulled back only far enough to look at her, his eyes dark, his breath unsteady. "Is this, " he started.
"Yes," she said, before he could finish the question, because she already knew what he was asking, the same question she had been asking herself all week. "Yes, I want this. I want you. I need you to know that's true before anything else happens."
"I want this too," he said, his thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone. "I have wanted this since the driveway. Since the moving truck."
"We should, " She glanced at the attic window, then back at him, her heart hammering. "We should go inside. My mother's asleep. It's late."
He nodded, searching her face. "Only if you're certain."
"I am," she said, and found that she meant it entirely, without a single edited word underneath it.
They climbed down through the attic together, quiet on the stairs, and in the small warm dark of her bedroom he stopped just inside the door, his hands finding her waist, his forehead dropping to rest against hers.
"Tell me if anything isn't right," he murmured. "Any of it. I mean that."
"I will," she said. "I promise. You too."
"I will," he echoed, and then he kissed her again, slower now, deliberate, and Cassie felt herself unravelling under the attention of it, every edited, careful part of her falling away.
His hands were patient at the buttons of her shirt, pausing once to ask, quietly, if this was still what she wanted, and each time she answered yes, breathless, certain, feeling something in her chest loosen further with every honest word. When her shirt finally slid from her shoulders he went still for a moment, just looking at her in the low lamplight, and the frank warmth in his expression made her shiver more than the cool air did.
"You're beautiful," he said, simply, without performance, and Cassie felt the words land somewhere deep, undefended.
She reached for the hem of his shirt in turn, and he helped her pull it over his head, and then they were skin to skin for the first time, her palms flat against his chest, feeling his heart hammering as hard as hers. He laid her back against the pillows with a care that made her throat tight, kissing a slow path from her jaw to her collarbone, murmuring her name against her skin like it was something he was learning the shape of.
"Reid," she breathed, arching into his touch as his hand traced the curve of her waist, her hip, lower. "Please."
"Tell me what you want," he said, his voice unsteady now too, his mouth at her ear.
"You," she said. "All of it. The unedited version."
He kissed her once more, deep and certain, and then he was careful and thorough and asked her, twice more, in words and in the quiet attention of his hands, whether she was still sure, and both times she said yes, and meant it more completely each time. When they finally came together it was slow at first, both of them adjusting, both of them watching the other's face for any flicker of doubt and finding none, only heat and nerves and a tenderness neither of them had words for yet. Cassie gasped his name into the dark of her own bedroom, her fingers digging into his shoulders, her whole body alive in a way she had never let herself imagine on the roof above them, and he answered her with his own unsteady breath, his forehead pressed to hers, murmuring that she was perfect, that this was real, that he was not going anywhere.
Afterward they lay tangled together under her blanket, her head on his chest, his fingers tracing slow circles on her bare shoulder, both of them quiet in the particular way of people who have just told each other something true with their entire bodies.
The unedited version, she thought, feeling his heartbeat slow beneath her ear.
This is what it feels like.
Eighteen and real.
Yes.
* * *