In The Dead of the Night

16 | fire escape

The fire escape creaked with age and rust below our feet as we ran up the building. Chilly winds, carrying the salty breeze, ruffled my hair and made my heart pick up just a bit more when they made the fire escape sway back and forth.

"Should I carry you the rest of the way up the stairs or are you going to move yourself?" the warm, familiar voice teased from behind me. I smiled softly at his antics and began running up the stairs again, though they still swayed.

"Carrying me wouldn't be a horrible idea, you know?" I replied, stopping at the penultimate step and waiting for his hands to land on my waist. As always, they did, and his lips leaned in and kissed the scar on my right cheekbone. I remember the terror I felt the day I realized that the scar was never going away, as well as the warmth I felt when he kissed it until I changed my mind.

"That would be a stupid thing to do; there are only two more steps left," Shawn said, but his arms were already hooking around my waist.

"Only two more steps to carry me up," I instead offered, and felt him lift my feet off the rusting metal. Things like these were simple banter between us, but I didn't need to speak for him to know the safety I felt when his arms were around me, when his hands caressed my skin.

"I can't believe you're making me do this on my birthday." He sat on the edge of the rooftop, facing the still-dark sky, my body still in his arms. He would drop me off the 13-story building if he dared to even slightly flinch, but I trusted that he wouldn't.

"Happy birthday," I said for the thousandth time that morning. "Twenty is something to celebrate."

"Twenty years without dying?"

I laughed. "Something like that."

Placing a hand on the side of my face, he pulled me in to kiss his lips softly. I pulled away after one, but he pulled me back to kiss me harder, more passionately, with everything that he could give. If his eyes could write novels with a single glance, I didn't know what to call the words he left on my lips. Maybe it wasn't words. Maybe it was beauty or starlight or love.

When he let his lips fall from mine, I had slipped off his lap and had my feet dangling off the roof like his. He had smiled many times for me, but my heart still stopped a little every time I saw the soft, sweet way the corners of his mouth ticked upwards and his gaze softened.

"If I were to kiss you then go to hell, I would. So then I can brag with the devils I saw heaven without ever entering it," he said without falter.

"I fall in love with you just a bit more every time you quote Shakespeare."

"Then I won't ever stop, my love," he replied and kissed me again. I relished in the fact that a hundred, or a thousand, or a million other people could kiss my lips and none would make me feel nearly the same way that Shawn did. I relished in the fact that, even though I intended for him to never be in love with another person except for me ever again, none of them would have a love quite the same as ours.

His words, his stare, his sweetness, his silence. My smiles, my touches, my selflessness, my tears. No one else would ever feel the same way that we did.

"What's it like, being here, turning twenty?"

"You ask that question as if you won't know in only less than a year." He took my hand in his and turned it over in his palm. "I don't know. If anything, I feel... free. I feel free from my father. I think... I think I'm finally realizing that I will never be like him, and that makes me so happy."

"Do you feel different? Braver, more ready, anything-"

"More scared than ever." His arm slipped over my shoulders and pulled my body into his. "I'm still scared of love, still scared of being in love and still scared of ever falling out of it, but it's all worth it. And you know what? Despite all that, I'm not as scared of the future as I was before. I'm okay. Do you feel different?"

I shook my head. "Not much has changed for me since you asked me that question last night. Just want to kiss you a little bit more."

We both laughed and fought the smiles off our lips as we kissed again. There was something so intimate and joyous about feeling his smile against my lips, and knowing I was the main reason he smiled these days. Clouds slowly slipped from the sky as light spread across the blank canvas.

"The sun's finally rising," he remarked after the sky had turned a subtle mixture of golds and pinks. The buildings set out before us began to look like their red-brick selves again. He turned my face to stare right at him. "You know I love you, right?"

I nodded, his golden gaze glowing the same color as the sun. "I know. I love you too, so much."

"C-can you say it again?"

A soft smile formed on my lips. "I love you so much, Shawn."

And that moment was the moment that I knew everything was real, because we had a sky full of color and he was still staring at me. I wrapped myself in his arms and leaned my head against his chest, his heartbeat steady in my soul. Not only was I completely safe in his warm hold, but we both were, safe from anything that could ever hurt us. I had seen too many sunrises to recall, but, the final piece of sun peeking over the horizon, I thought this might have been the most beautiful one I would ever see.

I could swear we were floating that day. Our hearts beat steadily as we rose into the painted sky, intertwined fingertips brushing the first golden rays of sun. We were amongst the clouds, the rooftop seeming so low at the moment and the ground even lower. That early dawn, drenched in love and warm sunlight, I felt weightless.

The End.