Eric was waiting on his building steps when she arrived. He had changed his clothes with astonishing speed, and was now dressed in a light blue dress shirt. He was still wearing shorts, and he wore sunglasses to keep out the late summer evening glare. The effect was ridiculously actor-modely, enough to make Scarlett’s heart make an alarming glurg in her chest.
He had never looked so good. No one had ever looked that good. There was no way that he was actually waiting for her, Scarlett Martin. He was clearly waiting for a trio of models to spirit him off into a montage for a vodka commercial.
“Hey,” he said warmly. “You came! This is probably going to sound ridiculous to you, but I want to go up to the top of the Empire State Building. I don’t want to go by myself.”
Scarlett had been up the Empire State Building before with her third-grade class, but again, this was one of those places you just didn’t go if you were native.
“I didn’t want to embarrass you by asking you in public,” he said, as if reading her mind.
There are probably places in the world where being asked to go on a walk implies that you are going off to do something private and intimate. Maybe it means that in most places. But not in New York. The advantage of walking in New York is that there’s lots to see and do—but even on the most private ramble you’re bound to trip over at least three Chihuahuas, walk behind people who spit a lot, and maybe set off a car alarm.
Still, Eric had a way of making Scarlett feel like she was the only person on the sidewalk he noticed. He had at least a half-dozen stories about shows he had done in high school—tragically missed cues, actors disappearing before they were supposed to be on stage, malfunctioning lights, collapsing set pieces. It was all very entertaining, but it was difficult for Scarlett to get any meaning from it all.
One thing Scarlett had either not noticed or forgotten—once you actually make it through the lobby of the Empire State Building, you end up in a vicious trap of endlessly weaving lines, multiple escalators that don’t seem to go anywhere but across, and hordes of people. Finally, though, they were loaded into the elevator that shoots right to the top, and Eric reached over and took her hand. He kept hold of it as they escaped from the people trying to sell them photos and the crush in the gift shop that led to the observation platform. It really was adorable how excited he was.
It was just getting dark, and the sky over the city was apricot-colored. They worked their way forward to a spot near the edge. (Not that you could ever get near the edge, really.) Eric wanted to see the view in each direction, including the one that faced the Hopewell. It wasn’t even remotely visible, but they could see the park and the avenues. They were looking at it, whether they could see it or not.
“This building is based on a building in Winston-Salem,” he said. “True story. The Reynolds Building. The people who built that were hired to make this, and they were in a hurry and pulled out a set of the early plans. So, this is the early, rejected version of something near my hometown.”
The embarrassment on his face was real. He laughed at himself and wrapped his hands around the protective bars that keep people from jumping or falling to their deaths.
“I only know that because my seventh-grade history teacher told us the story ten times,” he said. “Swear to God. I think she was trying to convince us that Winston-Salem was as important as New York.”
“Sure,” Scarlett said. “That’s what they all say.”
He turned her around to face him.
“There was another really stupid thing I wanted,” he said. “Are you going to laugh if I ask? Because if you are, I am marching right back down those ten million stairs and going home.”
“I won’t,” Scarlett said, keeping a very straight face.
“You get the scariest look when you lie like that,” he said.
“I’m not lying. What do you want? Did you want to do a pencil rubbing of the plaque in the lobby? Get a snow globe?”
“It’s both scary and sexy,” he said.
Now he’d done it. He’d called her sexy, and not in the joking way that she and Dakota and Tabitha called each other sexy twenty times a day, or in the way that Spencer told her she looked very sexy when she got a comb ensnarled in her curls and she had to keep it there all day until Lola got home and could weave it out. He just dropped it right in there, like a quietly ticking bomb mixed into a clock display.
“What I wanted,” he said, pulling away the curl that had fully impaled itself in her eye, “was to kiss someone once I got to the top.”