A Stolen Summer. Allegra Huston

arm around her back, cradling her, and with the other hand strokes her inner thigh, caressing it open. She closes her eyes and feels him touching her, finding how they fit together.

      “Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t let go.”

      Her head is full of sparks, all conscious thought disjointed. The vertigo of the empty air behind her, though she can’t see it; the blaze of him etching a path of fire inside her, the granite hard against her tailbone, the lean muscles of his shoulders moving under her grip, his hand cupping her breast, thumb on her nipple. I’m holding on for dear life, she thinks. If I let go, he will fuck me so hard I will fall and die.

      He stops moving, buried deep inside her. “Look, Eve,” he says, “look where we are.”

      She knows it’s there, the sheer drop behind her, but seeing it—the treetops, the cars, the horse-drawn carriages—and feeling Micajah’s arms holding her above the precipice sends a rush of blood to her head so fierce it makes her vision swim. She looks up, to the distant skyscrapers of Midtown gleaming pink against the indigo sky. She wonders if there’s anyone behind those windows watching them—admiring them, envying them.

      He starts moving again, faster, branding the blaze of pleasure deeper into her. Her whole body is concentrated in that furrow, the intensity unbearable, until she cries out and it dissolves into a new delicious heat flooding through her, out to her hips, her legs, up to her heart, her breasts, her throat, the cavities of her face. She shudders in his arms. He runs his finger up her spine.

      Eventually, she opens her eyes, finds his. “What about you?”

      “What about me?” he says lightly.

      “But . . . are you sure?”

      “But what?” he says. He smooths her eyes closed and kisses her eyelids. “Fun, right?”

      What can she say? Yes, it’s fun, it’s beyond fun, it’s not fun at all. It’s crazy serious. Her body tenses up, even while the honey of orgasm flows through her.

      She drops down from the parapet and slips on her sandals. He sees her eyes go to her underwear, lying on the gritty surface of the roof. He shakes it clean and holds it for her.

      “I can’t do this,” she says, stepping into her underwear, allowing him to pull it up into place.

      “I know,” he says.

      And again she sees that look in his eyes that dissolves the space between them.