SWEAT by Deborah Bladon

Author:Deborah Bladon [Bladon, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deborah Bladon
Published: 2017-08-22T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Brynn

I turned immediately after I walked through the doorway so I could see Smith's reaction. I know that he hasn't been up here in years. Hardly anyone has. All the furniture and most of the lighting from the bar were removed eons ago. All that's left is a simple white string of lights strung over a fake tree of some sort that the bar owner's left behind. I added two mismatched chairs that I found on the sidewalk next to a mountain of trash bags last year. Neither of them is in good shape, but they beat sitting on the concrete staring up at the stars.

"What the hell?" he whispers under his breath. "Is this the same place?"

No one would ever know that at one time New Yorkers came up here to unwind. Relationships began and ended on this rooftop over a glass of wine. People met, left together and fucked in the hotel a block over before ending their nights with an awkward goodbye and the understanding that they'd never see each other again.

The same thing happens at every bar on this island.

"It feels even more like it's the top of the world now." I stare out at the expansive views of the city. "I come up here sometimes to think."

He nods silently like he understands exactly what I'm talking about. I know that he does. He's the one who brought me here to begin with. He poured me a quarter of a glass of beer and as he finished off the bottle, he gazed at the Brooklyn Bridge that night.

I let him believe it was my first taste of beer. It wasn't. I'd snuck a bottle that belonged to my dad from the fridge when I was barely fourteen. I took a sip before I washed the rest of the expensive imported beer down the kitchen drain as our housekeepers giggled.

Smith didn't need to know that. When he poured me that beer, he thought he was giving me my first taste of something forbidden. I did want a taste of something off-limits that night; his lips.

"The city hasn't changed that much since I brought you here the first time." He sucks in a deep breath, his chest straining against the T-shirt he's wearing. "You've changed, but the city always stays the same."

He's wrong. The city has changed just as much as I have. It's not only the sky high towers that developers are building to draw the millions that foreign investors are looking to sink into the city. It's much more than that.

People don't stop to talk to their neighbors the way they used to. Familiar faces you could always count on to be there have disappeared and the dream to make a mark on this tarnished, imperfect paradise is getting farther and farther out of reach.

"I grew up, Smith," I point out studying his profile as he gazes toward Brooklyn the way he did the first time we stood up here together. "I'm not the girl you once knew.

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