When it became a vital necessity to breathe again, Nellie wound her arms around Sawyer’s waist and held her close. She was nowhere near ready to stand any distance between them. It was then that she made the mistake of opening her eyes again and was reminded of how close she stood to those monstrous windows.
“Yeesh! How,” Nellie whined, turning her face into Sawyer’s neck, “do you live like this?”
She felt more than heard the low sound of Sawyer’s laugh. “Like what?”
“This.” Nellie gestured vaguely at the glass without lifting her head to look at it. “You exist up here, all the way up in the sky, all the time. I don’t understand how you haven’t developed a perfectly rational fear of heights.”
Sawyer pulled back slightly to look at her. There was something openly delighted about her expression, a rarity that still made Nellie feel like she’d won something significant every time it appeared. “You can’t even see it from over here.”
“I canfeelit.” Nellie grimaced. “The absence of ground.”
Sawyer laughed and took Nellie by the hand and turned toward the windows. “Come on.”
“Absolutely not.”
“It’s a view, Nellie.”
“It is aprecipice.”
She was already being walked toward it because Sawyer’s grip was uncompromising and Nellie’s wobbly legs were, apparently, prepared to follow whatever direction they were led in after a good make out session with this woman. She stopped about three feet short and drew the line there.
“You just have to get used to it,” Sawyer insisted. She was standing right at the glass, entirely unbothered. Of course she was. The city glittered behind her, a backdrop that should have been in a movie. She looked, Nellie thought, completely at home suspended above the earth. The world ethereal had always felt appropriate when it came to Sawyer Alburn.
“Easy for you to say.” Nellie pouted. She was looking at Sawyer and not at the view for obvious reasons. “You’ve been up here so long you’ve lost your perspective.”
“Then come lose yours.” Sawyer offered her hand.
Nellie looked at the hand. At Sawyer’s face. At the windows—briefly, against her better judgment—and immediately registered the soft, lurching wrongness of dozens of floors of nothing below her and made a small involuntary noise. Sawyer’s mouth twitched.
“You chained yourself to a tree and peed in a bucket,” she said. “You can take three more steps.”
“Those are completely different situations, and you know it.” But Nellie was already walking forward because apparently the version of herself that lived in the grip of her feelings was immune to self-preservation instincts. She reached the glass, pressed both palms flat against it and squeezed her eyes shut.
The glass was cool against her hands. She could feel the faint vibration of the building, the almost imperceptible senseof something alive in the structure, holding itself up against the ordinary insistence of gravity.
“Open your eyes,” Sawyer whispered, directly behind her.
“I can’t,” Nellie whined. She could feel Sawyer step closer, press against her back.
“You can.” Sawyer’s mouth brushed the side of her neck, just below her ear, and Nellie’s breath caught in a way that had nothing to do with vertigo. “Open your eyes, and I’ll make it worth it.”
“That is—” Nellie’s voice had gone slightly unsteady. “That is not a fair negotiating tactic.”
“Perhaps,” Sawyer agreed, against her skin. Her hands settled at Nellie’s hips, teasing the waistline of her pants. “Open your eyes for me, baby.”
Nellie cracked them open.
The valley floor was a grid of orange and white, streets and headlights and the occasional cluster of something denser, and it went and went and went, out to where the dark line of the mountains cut it off at the horizon. The sky above that was the deep, saturated blue of seven o’clock in a city that never went entirely dark.
Sawyer’s mouth found the curve where Nellie’s neck met her shoulder, and Nellie let go of the notion of trying to breathe normally.
“Feel better?” Sawyer murmured.
“Not even a little bit!” Nellie squeaked.
“Let me help with that.”
Nellie did not have time to formulate a response to this before Sawyer’s fingers found the button of her pants.
