We slip out to the roof and the open sky, where the only pressure is the air, syrup-thick; skin sticks to skin, our clothes to our backs, one damp bit of hair to the corner of your mouth. We breathe through our teeth so it doesn’t get into us, flood us, drown us, suffocate us immobile like wasps in honey.
Your eyes, hazel gone mechanical orange, throw streetlight sodium back at me: a parody of sunlight, a profanity shouted to the stricken dark; unsubtle, artificial, glorious. You laugh as the city murmurs wordless around us, quick and vibrant in exhaustion, a barefoot beacon in these liminal hours. You are the summer night: your hot skin, the streets; the breeze, your cool mouth.
You whisper the city to me—pub-crawl laughter, keening sirens, the soft rush of traffic, a helicopter’s steady pulse—and I reach through ink-blue black for your voice, all my empty spaces crying out to you, begging to be filled.