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“I thought you said we weren’t eating on the balcony,” he told me.
I pressed the button for the fifth floor. “We’re not.”
Donovan frowned. “There’s nothing up there but hotel rooms. Are we breaking into the penthouse or something?”
“Nope!” I repeated cheerfully.
“Then what are we doing?”
“You’ll see!”
We got off on the fifth floor and went into the stairwell. There was a ladder leading up to a hatch in the ceiling, with a sign that said: ROOF ACCESS.
I handed Donovan my plate and climbed the ladder. It took eight guesses before I found the key that unlocked the padlock. I pushed open on the hatch. It was heavy, and the rusty hinges screamed like they hadn’t been opened in months. The hatch made a loudCLANGas it finished opening, revealing the dark sky above.
I climbed through the hatch and then reached down to take each plate, then the bottle of wine. After Donovan followed me up the ladder, he picked up his plate and gazed around.
“Wow,” he breathed.
The roof was flat and covered with industrial air conditioners, but there were red brick crenelations around the outer edge. The border was a meter wide, so we could sit on the edge without fear of falling over the side to the plaza below.
“Good call, babe,” Donovan said.
“Why thank you, dear,” I replied, as if we were two people playing house rather than prisoners in a hotel.
Donovan chewed on his food while gazing around. “We’re only thirty feet higher than our balcony, but the view is so much better.” He pointed. “That’s the dome on Saint Peter’s Basilica.”
“And we can see a lot more of the Colosseum,” I said.
We ate in happy silence for awhile, taking turns drinking straight from the bottle of wine. The wind ruffled Donovan’s dark hair, and he squinted out at the city.
“I have a question,” he said. “You just inherited your mom’s boutique last year, right?”
“Uh huh,” I said with my mouth full.
“What did you do before that?”
I paused to swallow the chicken. “It’s boring.”
“Before I inherited the boutique, I was a logistics analyst for a lumber company.”
Donovan blinked. “Okay, I was wrong. That’s so boring I don’t even know what it means.”
I laughed and took a pull from the bottle of wine, savoring the puckering dryness as it ran down my throat. “The company transported lumber around the Midwest. I helped facilitate the transportation on an order-by-order basis. Making sure shipments happened on time, finding ways to improve efficiency by combining certain shipments, moving stock around to our different distribution centers so none ever ran out of a certain type of lumber. That sort of thing.”
Donovan tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and started snoring loudly. I tossed a piece of chicken at his face, which bounced off his nose and left a red smear of sauce.
“I told you it’s boring,” I said with a laugh. “But it was a paycheck. I guess I didn’thateit, but I didn’t enjoy going into the office every morning. That made it easy to quit my job when my parents died, and then start managing the boutique.”
“What did you want to be?” he asked. “Growing up, I mean. Fireman? Astronaut?”
“That’s the problem: I never really knew what I wanted to be. I got a degree in business and assumed I would figure out my passion along the way, but it never fell into place.”
“What about your siblings?” He paused. “I guess I should first ask: do youhaveany siblings?”
“For someone who came all over my fingers the other night, you don’t know much about me.”
He gestured with his fork. “Hence the question.”
