Three months of an empty rooftop. Then someone shows up with a camera instead of a cigarette, and the ugly concrete has never looked like this before.
The rooftop smells the same.
That shouldn’t matter. It’s concrete and cigarette butts and rust stains that nobody’s cleaned since the building was built, and the ventilation unit in the corner still rattles like it’s considering retirement. Fourteen floors up, the wind cuts in from the east and carries exhaust fumes and somebody’s takeout and the general hum of a city that doesn’t know you’re here.
You light your cigarette. Marlboro Red. Same brand as three months ago, same rooftop, same spot against the railing where the concrete is worn smooth from your elbows.
Six-oh-three.
You’re not waiting for anyone. You’re just here, the way you’re here every evening after the last email clears your outbox and the office empties out and there’s nothing left to audit. It’s a habit. Habits don’t owe anyone an explanation.
The city does its thing below. Traffic. Crosswalks. People in suits moving with the kind of purposeful speed that suggests they have somewhere to be. You don’t. You have a cigarette and forty-five minutes before the convenience store near your apartment closes, and that’s the full extent of your evening plans.
Inhale. Hold. Exhale.
Three months since the last time that door opened and it meant something.
Not that it meant something. It was a pattern. Patterns don’t mean things — they just repeat until they don’t, and then your body keeps showing up out of habit because nobody told your legs the schedule changed.
Her father got sick — the kind of sick that money can delay but not fix, the kind that moves a family across an ocean to a hospital in Houston because the director of a company like hers doesn’t wait. They left in a week. The wedding happened before the plane tickets were booked — fast, practical, a consolidation wrapped in a ceremony. She married the fiancé because that’s what dutiful daughters do when the world is falling apart and the only thing left to hold onto is the structure your family built for you.
She didn’t text. Didn’t say goodbye. The rooftop just went quiet one day, the way a frequency goes dead — no static, no final signal, just absence where a pattern used to be.
You heard about it the way you hear most things: passively, from a colleague who mentioned something about the director’s daughter relocating stateside, and you nodded and said “huh” and went back to your spreadsheets.
That was three months ago. You stopped thinking about it around the three-week mark. Which is faster than you expected, honestly. But then again, you were never the one with something to lose.
You take another drag. The cigarette’s burning unevenly — the filter’s slightly damp from the mist that rolled in around five — and the smoke tastes harsher than usual. Everything up here tastes harsh. That was always the point.
The door opens.
You don’t turn around.
It’s reflex. Same reflex from before, the one that trained itself over weeks of heels on concrete at six o'clock. You already know who it isn’t, and you don’t care who it is. Probably maintenance. Probably HR. Probably someone who took a wrong turn and will apologize and leave.
Sneakers on concrete.
That’s wrong. Heels click. These are soft. Maintenance? No — maintenance wears boots and swears under their breath. HR? HR would’ve knocked first. Intern who got lost? Maybe. The step is too confident for someone lost, though. Whoever this is moves through spaces without announcing themselves, and that’s unusual enough to make you look.
You glance over your shoulder.
She’s carrying a camera bag. Big one — the kind that’s too heavy for her frame but she’s managing it without complaint, strap digging into her shoulder like it lives there. She’s tall. Not model-tall in the performative way, but athlete-tall — long legs in jeans, sneakers, a cropped windbreaker over a plain t-shirt. Hair pulled back. No makeup, or whatever version of no makeup actually means no makeup, because you’ve learned the difference and she looks like she genuinely just washed her face and walked out the door.
She’s looking at the rooftop like it’s a gallery.
Not at you. At the rooftop. The ugly concrete, the rusted railing, the way the six o'clock light is catching the ventilation unit and turning the metal from gray to copper. She’s scanning the space with a specific kind of attention — not the idle curiosity of someone who wandered into the wrong place, but the focused sweep of someone assessing angles.
She pulls the camera out of the bag. It’s a Nikon FM2 — you can tell by the retro-looking body, the physical dials on top, the kind of camera that people who care about cameras use and respect. She doesn’t notice you yet, or she does and doesn’t care, because she’s already lifting it to her eye and framing the skyline.
“Oh, this light is insane,” she says, to no one. To the air. To whatever part of her brain runs on aperture settings and golden ratios.
Then she lowers the camera and sees you.
“Oh.” A blink. Not startled — more like she’s recalibrating the composition now that there’s a person in it. “Hi. Is this the terrace?”
“Does this look like a terrace?”
She looks around. Takes it in. A grin spreads across her face, slow and genuine and entirely too comfortable for someone standing on the ugliest surface in the building.
“No,” she says. “But the light up here is way better than whatever terrace they were talking about.” She turns back to the skyline and keeps shooting.
You watch her for a moment. You shouldn’t — watching people is what you do professionally, and doing it off the clock feels like unpaid overtime. But she’s odd. Not in a bad way. In the way that a data point that doesn’t fit the trend line is odd. She doesn’t belong here, but she doesn’t seem lost either. She seems like she found exactly what she was looking for, even though she was looking for something else.
The camera strap pulls the windbreaker tight across her shoulder when she lifts the viewfinder. The hem rides up an inch at her waist — a strip of skin, the suggestion of a toned midriff, gone again when she lowers the camera.
You go back to your cigarette.
For a few minutes, neither of you speaks. She moves around the rooftop, framing things you’ve never noticed — the shadow the railing casts on the concrete, the way the city lights start to flicker on in the distance as the sun drops, the peeling paint on the utility door. Click. Click. Click. The shutter sound is softer than you expected. Deliberate.
Then she turns the camera toward you.
Not sneakily. Openly. Like it’s the most natural thing in the world to point a lens at a stranger.
“No.”
“You look good in this light, though.”
“No.”
She laughs. It’s short, bright, and completely unbothered by your refusal. She lowers the camera without argument.
“Fair enough.” She sets the camera bag down and sits on the concrete ledge near you, close but not too close, like she’s been sitting on strangers’ rooftops her whole life. She reaches into the bag and pulls out a canned drink. Cracks it open.
The wind shifts. Your smoke drifts her direction and something crosses her face — fast, barely there, gone before it fully forms. Not disgust. Something older. She takes a sip of the drink and the expression is already replaced by the easy warmth she walked in with.
“Those smell terrible, by the way,” she says, nodding at your cigarette.
“Yeah.”
“Like, genuinely awful.”
“I’ve been told.”
“And you just… keep going?”
“Seems that way.”
She considers this. Takes another sip. The can sweats in the warm evening air.
“Respect, honestly,” she says.
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