A Changing Skyline

The wind was not cooperating. The sun was bright and the air was warm, but that wind was coming from the North and bringing the edge of Canadian cold down with it. She curled deeper into her coat and wished she had something thicker underneath it, something other than that thin T-shirt. The wind never felt like this in Alabama.

“I had no idea it would be this cold,” Savannah muttered.

“Enjoy it while you can,” Adrian told her. “You’ll be wishing you were back in New York when we get home and that southern humidity cranks up.”

They were walking down an avenue that was probably famous. It seemed everything in New York City was famous for one thing or another. He had his hands in his pockets and his head bowed to the wind. She had her arm looped through his and she was watching the world go by. They were ignored with the exception of the occasional stern-faced businessman who sped around them with a look of annoyance. They walked too slowly for this world.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Anywhere you can make me warm?” he chuckled, and she cuddled closer to him.

They turned the corner and there was Rockefeller Plaza. She stood at the corner and stared at the buildings, then looked up until she got dizzy. He watched her as she acclimated herself to a world so much bigger than what she was used to seeing. When she was finished looking around, her eyes met his.

“Do you remember the flight in? How we could see the skyline?”

“Yeah.”

“I saw where the Towers should have been. Did you see it?”

He nodded. People on the street minded their own business. Businessmen in suits and artists in long flowing dresses swerved in and out of each other, everyone in too much of a hurry. Savannah got bumped against Adrian over and over, even though they were standing next to a building. He wrapped his arms around her.

“I saw it,” he said. “Looking at it made me feel a little sick.”

Savannah buried her head against his chest. He rocked her there on the city street. A man walked by and gave them a hurried glance. He appeared worried. A child ran by on her mother’s arm, and her innocent face smiled up at Adrian before she disappeared in the sea of people. Neon lights throbbed, even in the daytime. Music blared from various storefronts. It was loud and rowdy and so full of life, it took Adrian’s breath away.

“Tonight we are going to see a Broadway show,” he whispered. “Then we are going to a comedy club and we’re going to laugh until the sun comes up. Then we’re going to go back to the hotel and you’re going to make love to me until we both ache.”

“Why does it make me so sad?” she whispered.

He remembered that day, when they had watched the towers fall on her television in their safe haven a thousand miles away. They didn’t know anyone on those planes or in those buildings, but they knew the person they were losing at the same time, the child they both wanted so badly. The towers fell and she held the little swell of her belly and cried. In the midst of thousands of lives cut short, how could they properly mourn one who would never be born?

She took his hand and stepped out into the flow of people, pulling him along with her. She was heading toward the hotel, where they were on the fortieth floor and they could see the skyline. Suddenly he didn’t want to be up there.

“Honey, why don’t we go out for lunch? We can try the Palm. Think they will let us in dressed like this?”

She smiled at him and kept on walking. He tried another tact.

“Savannah? Stop for a minute. Let’s go into that little tattoo parlor. I dare you.”

She turned to him with an air of impatience. “I want to get back to the hotel. We can get a tattoo later. And lunch too. I need to get back to the room and I need to...” she sighed. “I need to find some quiet, Adrian.”

Someone bumped him forward. Savannah pulled him. Together they made their way down the street, suddenly moving as fast as those natives who had a place to be and a time to be there.

The hotel room was nice and neat. The room had been expensive enough to make a substantial dent in their bank account, but as soon as they saw it they knew why: the curtains opened to reveal an enormous panoramic view of the city. Savannah walked to the window and looked out while Adrian kicked off his shoes and dropped his jacket on the chair. By the time he came out of the bathroom, Savannah was staring at the break in the skyline. A single tear ran down her face.

“Savannah?”

She whispered something so low and secretive that Adrian couldn’t hear her. He buried his face in the secret space between her neck and her shoulder. She smelled like the city street and the sweet perfumed shampoo she always used.

“I love you,” he said.

Savannah turned in his arms. Her eyes were bright with tears. “Then show me.”

She trembled in his arms. Adrian kissed her lips and touched her forehead with his fingertips. She was almost cold. He remembered that day years ago, when she had been so pale it frightened him. Her skin was cold then, too. Cold and clammy and like she was dying inside even while she was looking right at him with eyes more aware than they had ever been.

“Don’t let this happen to you,” he whispered.

“It’s—being here.” She said. “It’s being here in this city. It brings it all back. Why did we come here? Tell me why, again. Because now I don’t remember.”

“We came for this,” he said, as her jeans slid down her legs and her t-shirt came up over her tear-stained face. He buried his hands in her hair. Her lips were thick and swollen with the tears. Adrian lowered her under him until they were on the bed, the skyline behind them and ahead of them, one hundred and eighty degrees of concrete and steel and memory.

Savannah didn’t arch into his touch. She lay there quietly, looking out the windows, while his hands touched every part of her he could reach. He kissed her lips and then her throat and then even lower, and though she sighed she didn’t participate in what was happening to her body. Adrian knelt between her legs and looked up into her pale eyes.

“Why aren’t you with me?”

She shook her head and one more tear fell. The impatience welled up in Adrian, and he climbed off the bed.

“We are still alive,” he said carefully. “Tragedies happen. Things change. Life ends. Thousands of people died and we’re standing over the place where they did. Our baby died and we grieved for it. We should have. But we didn’t die, even if you wish we had.”

Savannah sat up and stared at him.

“And if you don’t start living with me, then you can die without me, Savannah. We weren’t just coming here to make a baby. We were coming here to save us. If you aren’t going to help me do that, then tell me and I will pack my bags right now.”

“You didn’t grieve. How can a man grieve if he never cries?”

Adrian turned to look at her. “You know better than that,” he said harshly, and she blushed a brilliant shade of red. He looked at her, so pale and so small, her skin the porcelain white of a woman who hasn’t been out in the sun in far too long. She sniffled a bit and his heart softened. He came to her, knelt between her knees. He rested his head on her chest, between her breasts, and listened to hear heartbeat.

Savannah’s crying sped up. Soon she was sobbing, in the grips of a crying jag that left her breathless and whimpering. Adrian didn’t tell her to stop, and he didn’t try to soothe her. He simply leaned against her and let her cry. When she started to pummel him with her small fists, he captured her arms and held them down.

“You wanted me to feel something else,” she hissed. “Now I do. I think I fucking hate you.”

Adrian looked at her in surprise. She fought him like a wildcat, and he struggled to keep her arms under control, lest her blows landed on him again. The anger in him grew until it rivaled hers.

Who did she think she was? Did she think she went through it alone? Where the fuck was he during that time, if not right beside her?

“You’re so fucking strong,” she railed. “Untouchable. You should have fallen apart! You should have broken down and lost all sense of yourself and instead look at you! You’re the one who doesn’t feel a goddamn thing!”

“Somebody had to be strong!” he hollered into her face, stunning her into silence. “Somebody had to keep going while you bailed on me!”

Savannah blinked. New tears shimmered on her eyelashes.

“You hate me,” she said.

“Hate and love are so closely linked, they might as well be the same thing,” he said.

“Does that make you feel better?” she asked bitterly.

“Is it supposed to?”

She looked away from him, and he fought the inane urge to yell at her again.

“Look at me.”

She did, meeting his eyes. She was angry, so very angry.

“You want me to leave?”

“No.”

“What do you want?”

She whispered something, just a small motion of her lips, something he couldn’t quite catch.

“What?”

“Fuck me,” she said loudly. “Fuck all this rage out of me.”

“You hate me and now you want to fuck me?”

“No. I want you to fuck me.”

Adrian stared at her. Savannah arched her hips into his. He noticed with a small jolt of shock that her nipples were rock hard. He pressed his hips against her and when he felt how wet she was, his cock went to full attention.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because you’re the only one who can,” she said.

Adrian slipped his cock against her thigh. She kicked at him. He muscled her leg down with an elbow to her thigh, and her eyes gleamed with something that definitely wasn’t tears. She growled low in her throat as he moved against her.

“I don’t want it easy,” she demanded. “Fuck me.”

Adrian paused. She bucked up from the bed, hard enough to make him grunt with the effort of holding her still. “You aren’t man enough to do it, are you? Just like you aren’t man enough to cry. What a shit you are, you bastard—”

Adrian slammed home with one hard thrust. Savannah squealed with surprise. She writhed under him while he held her down, driving into her with all the power he had in him. He was probably hurting her, and he realized with growing dread that he didn’t particularly care. It felt good; it satisfied something deep in his soul. Maybe he even wanted to hurt her. Maybe he wanted to be the bastard she said he was. Maybe he wanted to take all his hurt and anger and disappointment out on her. Maybe he wanted to place blame by punishing her with his body.

Savannah was saying things to him, and he hardly heard her. She wasn’t crying out or asking him to stop, that much he knew. She was bucking into him with almost as much vigor as he was using to pummel her, giving as good as she got. He let go of one of her hands and grabbed her hair. He felt her nails dig into his back. It made him go at her harder.

“Don’t you dare hurt me,” he warned her, and she scraped those nails down his back, as hard as she could. Surely she brought the blood. Surely—

Adrian slammed her. She came around him while she clawed at his back and fought to wrap her legs around his pistoning hips. Adrian roared against her throat as he came. He pumped into her, realizing dimly that they were there to make a child, and that she had been ready for that, but if she had changed her mind it was far too late. Adrian pushed as deep as he could go while he emptied himself into her.

All thought ceased. There was nothing left inside him, physically or emotionally. He was drained. His whole body hurt, and it was more than a physical sensation. Savannah held him as tight as she could as he began to cry for the first time since that terrible day years before. He said things, incoherent things, and she didn’t tell him to hush. She didn’t tell him it would be all right.

When his tears were all spent they lay together, his head on her shoulder, her cradling him like a child. They watched from the bed as the skyline darkened, as lights came on in the towers all over the city. The sunset wasn’t as glorious as it could have been, but for them it was worth watching.

“What happened?” he asked her, when he trusted himself to speak.

“It wasn’t me that was dying,” Savannah said simply. “It was you.”

“It was me,” he said, contemplating the truth in that.

“You have to grieve, Adrian. You can’t shut it down. It was shutting you down.”

He thought about how wrong he had been. He considered apologizing, but he felt as though somehow that was the last thing she wanted.

“Do you think we made a baby?” he asked instead.

“I hope so. New life out of so much death. Don’t you think that would be fitting?”

“What will we name him?”

“Who says it will be a boy?”

“A kid who comes from a grudge fuck like that? It’s a boy,” he chuckled.

“Nope. A tomboy. A girl with spirit and fire.”

Long hours of tears and finally laughter, then the night came and a carpet of glittering light spread out at their feet, a city skyline coming to life in the darkness, surrounding two people who held each other close.

The End.