Rooftops (m/f)

The best sex happens at the top of a tall building. Not a high floor, the literal rooftop. The kind of places Spider-Man might hang out and eat a hotdog. And it must be at night. Always. The lights of a city spread out below you, dark sky roiling with pre-storm clouds as you fuck your lover with the kind of savage abadon only possible in such a rarified setting.

We first met on the top of just such a building. Some featureless glass and steel prism in the Financial District known only by its street address. She said she had just come up to smoke. I said I was from building maintenance, checking refrigeration condensers. We both knew we were lying, but maintained our (admittedly weak) deceptions until she disappeared silently into the night.

When we met again a week or so later, this time atop a midtown luxury high rise, there was no deception. We recognized ourselves in each other immediately; kindred spirits, shared wants and needs. There were no words, only silent understanding of mutual lust. It was revelatory. From that night on, I knew I never wanted to fuck anywhere except a skyscraper roof.

We spent many more nights together over the next several years, always high above the city. Our conversations were wordless, our bodies bound together, affecting a transmission of ancient truth. She would typically leave immediately after, disappearing in a whirl of dark fabric, black hair and perfume. On the rare nights she wanted to stay, we would lie together and look up at the starless, light-polluted sky, saying nothing, until one of us had enough.

When she told me she was moving West, it was the most I’d heard her speak at once. She asked if I wanted to come with her. I didn’t have any serious connections to New York besides work and I could work anywhere. Family was long gone, friends moved on to different lives. When I thought about it, she was the best thing in my life. We left the next night.

Chicago was first. We found our way to the top of a partially constructed hotel. I was splayed atop a low, unfinished, wall, sheer drop into a concrete canyon to my left, sulfuric orange glow of street lamps below. To my right, an industrial landscape of rooftop machinery giving way to an inky curve of blackness, the great lake. She rode me there, silhouetted in moonlight, her pale skin nearly translucent in the silver glow.

St Louis was next. Then Houston, New Orleans and Denver. We spent several misguided, unfortunate years in Los Angeles before finally heading north to San Francisco. Our lives had become interwoven. Our nights were punctuated with the most fulfilling, meaningful couplings of our, by now, decades long relationship. We experimented, we explored, we broadened horizons to the theoretical limit. But we always returned to the rooftops. Our most private of places, sanctum sanctorum.

We were starting to feel comfortable, like we could stay for a while, when the quake came. The bridge twisted and split into two mangled halves, entire neighborhoods sloughed off into the bay, terror and suffering on a scale so immense as to be unknowable. And our buildings. Our skyscraper rooftops crumbled into the wrack and ruin of a city swallowed whole by the earth. We mourned for an entire year.

San Diego existed briefly, then Portland and Seattle. After San Francisco, it seemed like nothing would ever feel right again. But time heals. And we had time. We left what used to be called the United States a decade after the quake, to the day. Tokyo was a worthy diversion. Their hyper-modern spires, always suspiciously spotlessly clean, served to briefly reawaken the old magic. Shanghai, New Hong Kong, Jakarta, Singapore, Hanoi. An endless reef of neon nights, spreading horizon to horizon.

What a gift it is for sentient life to choose its ending. We saw so many lose so much, love and life ripped away without ceremony or reason. Countless stories ended before they had barely begun. The merciless churn of the natural order, laid bare and empty before our ageless eyes. We stood opposed to that natural order by our very being. As such, it is proper that our final choosing be in direct defiance of the cruel randomness of life.

Lower Manhattan, Financial District. A shattered glass and steel prism once known only by its street address. Purple gloaming gives way to the first hints of pink sunrise. We held each other there, content in the knowing that this happens only because we allow it, willful until the very end.

How many can say they got exactly as much time as they needed? How many were never forced to endure nights of longing, left behind by a partner gone too soon? How many can say they were ready? How many got to choose?

There may have been others, but in this moment, at the end of all things, there is only us.

Thus the sun rises.

(Thanks for reading.)

Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/uihy57/rooftops_mf