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The reception venue’s rooftop isn’t easily accessible in Dani’s current state, champagne-tipsy in a dress and heels. Somehow Jamie found a maintenance hatch that opens up to it from a stairwell. She clambered through it easily enough, but it takes Dani a few tries, the unceremonious removal of her shoes, and some help from Jamie to finally pull herself up.
“Jesus,” she says, smoothing down her dress and stumbling a little as she stands.
“You alright?”
“Yeah, just need to catch my breath.”
Jamie nods. “View’s worth it, though. Don’t you think?”
The wedding reception itself—Owen and Hannah’s—has begun winding down. But Dani and Jamie, both impelled by some ill-advised magnetism, had awkwardly toed around the idea of having to leave until Jamie suggested exploring the venue, which is how they’ve found themselves up on this (very dangerously unenclosed, in Dani’s opinion) roof. The view is beautiful, though. The moon hangs high and full against the night’s darkness, a pale, gleaming audience to their spontaneous rendezvous. To the east, Dani can see the mountains’ stark silhouette; westward, the city lights.
“You wanna sit?” Jamie nods toward the edge of the roof.
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
Jamie shrugs. “Just, uh. Don’t jump off?”
They sit, Jamie letting her feet hang off the edge, Dani perched further back, a safe distance away from a potential plummet to her death. When Dani first caught sight of Jamie early that day, across the church at the wedding itself, she’d assumed that she was alone in the distinct ache that tugged at her, revived after years as if the intervening time had never happened. Then Jamie had caught her eye, too. She’d betrayed nothing on her face except an eyebrow raise and a one-sided smile, and Dani had wanted to laugh at how, even after years without seeing each other, Jamie was still looking at her like that.
Then the reception, the awkward reintroductions. Jamie leaning against the bar with a toothpick in her mouth, acknowledging Dani’s nervous staring with a nod; Dani picking her way through the crowd, greeting Jamie with a rushed fancy seeing you here that she hoped sounded collected and not as exhilarated as she felt; the two of them falling so easily back into the way it used to be. It’s strange, knowing that the version of Jamie in front of her had lived a whole seven years of life without Dani. It feels like looking at a parallel timeline of her own life, a glimpse into some alien future of the way things could have, or should have, been. The rest of the night is already a giddy, wonderful blur in her memory.
On the roof, now, Jamie reaches into her bag and pulls out two small bottles, handing one of them to Dani. She squints at the label. Prosecco.
“Nicked them from the bar,” Jamie says. She uncorks her own bottle and then Dani’s.
Out of the corner of her eye, Dani catalogues the familiar shape of Jamie’s nose, her mouth. Her hair, the curls slightly looser than they used to be. So little has changed. She’s still just as beautiful. “This is...kind of weird, isn’t it?”
Jamie laughs quietly. “Is it?” Even the tone of her voice is the way Dani remembers it, the rough mirth she takes on when she’s deflecting.
“Jamie.”
In lieu of a response, Jamie skims her fingers absently over the concrete they sit on, inching dangerously close to the bare skin of Dani’s leg. She wonders if Jamie can feel how badly Dani wants her to touch her in that moment, even if it’s under the guise of an accident, just the faintest brush of knuckles or wrist of something. It would be enough, she could convince herself that it would be enough; even as she recognizes this as self-delusion, she still hopes for it.
“Has there been anyone else? Since—me?” Dani says, unbidden. She hasn’t thought about it all night until this very moment. It’s an absurd question, one that she isn’t owed an answer to. “Sorry, don’t—don’t answer that, it’s dumb. Never mind.”
But Jamie just shakes her head. “You?”
“No.”
All evening, they’ve both avoided discussing the details of their relationship and break-up. There’s no reason to. The things that drew them apart were nobody’s fault, and if they can be fixed, it certainly isn’t going to be over the course of a single champagne-soaked night. The small part of Dani that hasn’t accepted that will probably always be a smarting open wound, whetted by something as small as a glimpse of Jamie across a church, but it’s okay; she’s okay. Tomorrow she’ll go back to the full, warm life she’s built, the life she lives in the absence of Jamie and, in some ways, because of her.
Jamie’s hand, resting on the concrete between them, looks pale and delicate in the moonlight. Dani takes a sip of her prosecco and carefully shifts over, the motions almost slight enough to be accidental, until her shoulder presses against Jamie’s. The rest of it happens as if in a dream, fissured from reality: Dani letting her cheek rest on Jamie’s shoulder, Jamie finally circling an arm around her, both of them exhaling almost in unison at the contact.
“Got an early flight to catch,” Jamie mutters. “S’late.”
“We should probably get going.”
“Yeah,” Jamie says. Neither of them make any attempt to move.
“You could stay a little longer, though,” Dani ventures, and she feels Jamie nod against her.
It isn’t real. Dani knows that. It isn’t her life, it’s something dredged up from the past and spun from glass, delicate in its very nature. They’re here on borrowed time. But it also feels good, so she lets herself sink into the feeling, for now. For another hour, and then another, and another, until the moon sinks below the horizon and the sun takes its place and the light of day casts its clarity over them once again.
