She fumbled with the paper; it was a cold night and she could barely feel her fingers.

Armin wasn't paying attention to her efforts, instead he was staring out at the night. They were sitting on a picnic table on the roof of her building. The rest of the city cast an aura of light on the sky, but if they were looking up or forward, instead of down, they could almost pretend that there was no city beyond — that they were an island in a dark sea. A car alarm went off in the distance startling neither of them. She'd grown accustomed to the sounds of the big city, the rumbling of buses, the whining of cars. This didn’t seem out of the ordinary, much less alarming.

            He didn't really know Saph, he'd come along with her two best friends to surprise her on her birthday. The other two were fast asleep, but they had both found themselves surprisingly awake after a long night. She'd stood at the doorway of her bedroom — he was a step behind — where her two best friends had already taken over the bed. She shrugged and motioned with her head for them to head to living room, the bathroom light as their only guide. He had sheepishly followed her and right before plopping down on the red couch next to her, he asked, "so, you have any weed?" He wasn’t much of a smoker but he'd heard her friends making fun of her. In spite of the long night they had been through, he wasn’t tired yet. They'd had enough to drink between the restaurant and the bar and her friend's surprise bash. His already bloated stomach couldn’t fathom another beer, but he wanted an excuse to be alone with her. Saph had flirted with him all night; she had stolen secret glances at him, had brushed his arm and tucked her hair behind her ear, she had looked at him behind thin, long lashes, but he hadn't had a chance to talk to her for long. She had been the princess that night and everyone had wanted to get and give her attention. But now the setting was perfect — everyone else was asleep and it was bitingly cold but bearable. Plus, the city and the rest of the world seemed out of reach from the roof.

            She knew why Armin had asked that. Her friends made fun of her for it all the time. The truth is that it wasn’t who she was, that role was a remnant from a previous relationship. The weed had been sitting at the bottom of her drawer for months. She didn’t want to throw it out, she was still trying to hold on to an identity that no longer belonged to her, longing for it to become a part of her being once again. Or for it to become completely irrelevant so that she could forget it was even there — more importantly, why it was there — and months later, when she cleaned out her desk she would find a shriveled little shrub, lifeless. She smiled at him and nodded. Quietly, she snuck back into her room without waking the two heavyweights that were now snoring lightly in unison, and fished the baggie from underneath the pile of papers on the bottom left-hand drawer.

            Armin remembered the first time he'd seen Saph, three months before. The way she danced into his apartment, searching. When he first saw her, he didn’t know who she was and how she had ended up at his party, but he couldn't fight the memories that she evoked. Her gaze moved about the room, making eye contact with everyone, but not holding it too long. It's the same look Mia used to get when they were little and they lost each other at their parent's fancy parties. Saph tucked a stray piece of hair into her bun; a bun like Mia's perfectly tight ballerina do. When she finally found her friends, she kissed them each on the cheek tenderly, before being swirled around the dance floor by one of them. No one could ever understand how Mia was a ballerina and Armin had two left feet, but when they danced together, their movements became one. Mia used to say that they were incomplete when apart and that's why she danced best when she danced with her brother. Ever since losing his twin sister to cancer, Armin had felt this un-wholeness Mia used to talk about. Saph walked deeper into the apartment, Armin stood at the kitchen counter with a friend, mesmerized, and finally when his friend turned around to see whom Armin was staring at, he said, "Dude, you should totally go for it."

            They both layered up — layers of abandonment and longing and expectations and hope — and climbed to the top of the building. It was the middle of the night and she knew no one would bother them there, she'd been there with her thoughts often enough to know. The remnants of summer lingered, an empty bottle of lotion, a case of wine coolers and the faint smell of sweat rose from the picnic table they were sitting on. She figured Armin was even less of a smoke connoisseur than she was and assumed the task of rolling the joint. She fumbled with the paper. It was a cold night and she could barely feel her fingers. The numbness didn’t help the fact that she had no idea what she was doing. But finally, she licked the paper and held up her finished product, "Ta-da!" she said excitedly. He smiled at her, his eyes squinting ever so much that they became more almond shape than round. She also noticed Armin's teeth; perfectly aligned and elegantly shaped, giving him the famous "megawatt smile".

            "That was my first time." She admitted.

            "But… I thought… I've heard your friends making fun of you." You don't have to hide the truth from me, he wanted to say, I don’t judge you.

            "Yeah, well, I don’t have the heart to tell them that their taunts have no grounds in reality. They have too much fun with it." She shrugged and fished a lighter from her pocket. "Want to do the honors?"

            The syrupy sweetness in her voice when she talked about her friends was breathtaking. It was the same melodious love he felt radiating from her three months before. He wished that someone, someday, might talk about him that way again, the same way Mia used to. After he'd finally mustered up the courage to approach her at his party, she'd apologized profusely for crashing and hugged him, thanking him for being so welcoming. But shortly after hearing her name she'd run out screaming into her phone, returning, blood shot eyes and snot all over her face a couple minutes later, only to be ushered out by a friend once again. He thought that was the last he would ever see of her, a fleeting beauty, a fleeting feeling. He shook his head, "I've never really done this before," it was clear Saph had already figured out that he wasn’t a pro and felt no shame in admitting it, "so I think it's best if you take the lead." Saph smiled. Her cheeks became full and the dimples made her look like a porcelain doll, delicate.

            She put the joint to her lips and struggled to light it, her fingers still numb from the cold, but when it finally caught, she inhaled deeply before handing it to Armin. She returned the lighter to her pocket and her hands to their gloves, placing them under her butt for warmth. He was still looking at her, joint in hand. She pulled her hands from under her and rubbed them together, thankful that the blood was beginning to rush back to the tips of her fingers. "I know you don’t have much practice, but unless you inhale, nothing will happen." She taunted him, staring at the night sky, before turning to him. She watched Armin's lips trembling, half from nervousness, half from the cold. He too inhaled deeply, but unlike her, the smoke came out of him in coughs and sputters. She giggled.

            It was the first time he'd heard her laugh, it shook her entire body, an enchanting earthquake. She took a breath and snorted instead; embarrassed she brought her hand up to her face and laughed harder. He laughed too. He loved the melody their laughs created, its ring in his ears. He could feel his heart beating; she was bringing him back to life.

            They passed the joint back and forth a couple of times. She watched Armin in the darkness. The way his dark hair mixed with the night but his complexion stood out. The stubble on his cheeks and jaw made him look like the opposite of the night sky — a white sky with black stars. She knew he knew she was watching, but she couldn’t take her eyes away.

            He liked it.

            He could feel Saph's gaze on his face. She seemed to be studying him, his every movement and shape. He had watched her intently all night, had memorized her every movement — the way she wiggled her nose right before she was about to sneeze, and then proceeded to sneeze five times in a row, the constant tying and untying of her hair, letting it fall to one side first and then the other. He knew that in spite of the layers, she had a small frame and long fragile fingers. But she was strong. He remembered the way they had choked the life out of her cell phone, her knuckles becoming white, as she held the phone to her ear the last time he'd seen her. A grasp he recognized, as his sister had held on to his hand that way not long before, when she was too afraid of what letting go could mean.

            She wanted Armin to say something, to talk to her. She longed to hear his voice but was too paralyzed by the thought of love to speak herself. It's not that she loved him, she barely knew him and it was still too soon to fall in love again. But it was the first time in a long while that she was alone with another guy. That's what made her nervous. That the possibility of love existed elsewhere and not only in the arms that she missed so much. She shivered, trying to shake the image of Mason walking away from her mind.

            He saw Saph shiver and almost without thinking, took his scarf off and placed it around her shoulders. He wanted to stay there with her until they were both too exhausted to move and wrapped themselves around each other as an excuse to sleep where they were. He didn’t want anything to change, wanted to remain suspended in time and space. He didn’t want to lose anyone else and he didn’t have an answer as to how, except freezing time and reliving the moments that made him feel whole over and over again. A gust of wind blew and it hit his bare neck, he clenched his jaw.

            She watched all the muscles on Armin' neck contract and then relax. She felt bad, maybe she should return the scarf, but she adored the look of his bare skin and the way the night air had become entrenched in his cologne. He took a long drag from the joint. Again, she watched the muscles on his neck move. This time the exhale didn’t come out in a sputter. Without realizing, she shifted her body so that she was no longer sitting next to him but was facing him instead. She was leaning in with her whole body, her face inches away from his shoulder.

            He turned to find Saph completely facing him, so he did the same. He locked eyes with her for the first time in the night. Her eyes told stories and he wanted her to voice them, "So tell me, why do your friends think you're such a stoner?"

            She took a breath, glad he had finally said something and quickly moved her gaze to a bump on the table. She was beginning to think her thoughts were going to consume her all night, when all she wanted Armin to consume them and make them disappear. Her gloved index finger began to scratch at the surface of the bump, "It all goes back to Mason." She didn’t really know him, he'd come along with her two best friends to surprise her on her birthday. But she wanted to tell him everything. She wanted him to release her of her burdens and finally to collapse into his warm embrace.

            "Who's Mason?" He knew who Mason was, not because he'd been told, but because of the way she breathed his name — like it was the sweetest and most nauseating smell in the world. He regretted the question as soon as it left his lips.

            "Mason… Mason is my ex-boyfriend." She said turning her body forward again so that now he was facing her shoulder.

            He realized he'd lost all tact in the last couple of months. She faced the city, but he could swear her eyes were watering.

            With a quivering hand, she brought the joint to her lips and dragged on what was now less than half of the joint, "He was the real stoner." As she said this, she turned back to face him fleetingly, blowing the smoke on his face. For a brief second, he looked into her eyes again, he wanted to breathe all of her in. "I was around him a lot and it became part of my life even if I wasn’t always smoking with him." He thought she was done, "He called me today. For my birthday. It's the first time we talked in months. He'd been my best friend and all of a sudden we could barely look at each other. We decided to stop talking after we broke up; it was hard but necessary, for both of us. And today he called me and I didn’t know what to do, I had gotten so used to the idea of not having him that it felt like I'd heard a ghost."

            She looked down at her hands. She mentally kicked herself. Why was she talking about her ex-boyfriend with Armin? She didn’t want Mason impeding possibilities anymore.

            Saph had been playing with the remainder of the joint and he stretched his arm out and took it from her. He understood Saph, but he definitely had not gotten used to life without Mia yet, not entirely. He felt invincible and fragile at the same time, all the time, but the weed was making him feel a little more invincible and a little less fragile. He made a mental note to smoke more often and shifted his body to face the city once again. With no joint in hand, Saph was now cracking her knuckles, one by one, bending her fingers in every which way, snapping them. He had two choices: he could either change the subject to pretend Mason wasn't sitting in her mind, the way he could only guess he was, or he could press on. His mom had once told him that the best way to get rid of a thought was to let it walk freely, because once it was out in the world, it could no longer hide solely in your mind.

            "Why did you break up?"

            "Oh you know," she gestured wildly to no one in particular, "life got in the way. We made different choices and then all of a sudden we no longer fit into each others' lives."

            He nodded, "Hm, sounds reasonable." The real unreasonable thing was when you didn’t get to choose whether someone stayed in your life or not.

            She scoffed, reason was something that had been lacking from her life for a while now. Reason told her to move on, but her heart wouldn’t let her. "Yeah, but I was willing to try. I was willing to find a way for him to still make sense in my life, but," Armin saw her shoulders elevate to hide her ears, "his mind was set, he was done" they dropped forcefully, "there really was nothing I could do."

            He scratched his head, "Do you love him?" The question fell from his lips like a weight and he imagined it making a hole on the table between them, separating them so that they were no longer on the same island.

            She repeated the question in her mind over and over again. She felt suffocated all of a sudden, opened her jacket, and lay back on the table. The night sky didn’t feel as oppressive as the hazy aura of the city skyline. She took a deep breath and watched it escape from her parted lips. "I don’t, not anymore." She lied. Someone once told her she had to fake it 'til she made it. She thought this was a good attempt. Why couldn’t he have asked an easier question? If he had asked "did you love him?" the answer would have been simple. Yes, she did. But "DO you love him?" She wasn’t sure if she still loved him, if she still wanted to love him, that was the problem. She wished she'd never brought Mason up in the first place.

            His heart sighed, a sigh of relief. He thought maybe his tactic had worked and now that Saph had unloaded her burden, things would be clearer. He hoped this meant that she was also searching for something new and comforting, that she needed him as much as he'd grown to need her in the last couple of hours. He couldn’t believe his feelings, for the first time in months he didn’t feel so alone, he didn’t feel like he was only half there, a faint image of what he could be. This was the longest conversation he'd had with her, ever, and yet it all seemed to make sense. She seemed to fit perfectly in his mind. The way she moved, the way she spoke, the way she was — Mia had been the only other person who'd made so much sense with him and even then he hadn't had much of a choice, it had come with the territory of being twins.

            "That's good…" he took one last tiny drag from the joint and handed it back to her, "you seem to be on the right track."

            She took the roach from him, her fingers brushing his, and inspected it before throwing it to the ground. She didn’t know if it was good or bad, but it was what it was. Maybe if she said it enough she would start believing it herself — that she didn’t love Mason anymore and that she could be with Armin. She closed her eyes, let the darkness envelop her. She let her mind float about. She felt like she was swimming in air. Her brain had dropped and curled in the corner of her skull and everything else was empty. She felt Armin stir and without opening her eyes knew that he was lying next to her.

            He felt the body heat springing from her. He wanted to close Saph's jacket to make sure no one else could feel that warmth that he wanted to lose himself in. He couldn’t close his eyes, his entire body was aware of her presence, he could feel her heart beating, pumping blood to every part of her body. He imagined running his fingers up and down her arms, up and down her legs and through her hair. He stretched his fingers out hoping he could graze her soft skin.

            She was surprised to feel Armin's fingers brush her hand. She was even more surprised at her reaction to entwine her fingers in his. In spite of this, Mason's face was still floating in her mind. She screamed at him, told him to GET THE HELL OUT. But he didn’t move. It was her choice to keep him there. She knew that he would only disappear when she really willed him to do so.

            His heart rate quickened. She said, "I used to think that the representation of love in movies was so stupid. No one really knows when they meet someone special, love at first sight type thing. Special takes time." Saph took the words straight from his lips, "Yeah…"

            "Yet, sometimes thinking and time only ruin the beauty of first encounters. So maybe we shouldn’t think so much anymore." She breathed in the cold air. It stung her nose and throat as it moved through her lungs. Armin was special; she didn’t need time to know that. Her friends had been trying to set her up with him since the break up and they had been raving about Armin, about how kind and cool he was. They'd told her how losing his sister had crushed him, and he had been feeling an uncomfortable void. "Maybe two broken people can fix each other," they'd said, "maybe your two halves can create a new whole," but she wasn’t sure she was ready to lose herself in love with someone else again. It wasn't fair with Armin but she needed to pretend because it was the only thing left to do. She didn’t really know him, but she needed to be with someone who wasn’t Mason.

            He couldn’t believe she had just said that. Everything he had been feeling but too afraid to admit until that point echoed in her. So what if it was too soon, so what if maybe he was filling in the sisterly void with amour, he didn’t want to wait anymore. He didn’t really know her, but he needed to be with her, to feel complete again. He felt it on every inch of his flesh, the way his body ached to have her. He looked between her calm face and the sky a couple of times to remember this was really happening, the first encounter that requires no thought, only heart. Saph looked so peaceful with her eyes closed. He watched her chest expand with every intake and quake with every exhale.

            After some time she said, "Regardless of what happens life has a strange way of working itself out. It doesn’t matter where or when or with whom. No matter what, I will be happy." He squeezed her hand.

            She was going deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole and soon there would be no exiting. It was ok because she wasn’t sure if she wanted a way out. Armin seemed like a much more secure person than Mason had ever been. He emanated stability. She needed stability. Mason had been a whirlwind and she had been the boat caught at sea. It was exciting and the adrenaline rushed through her veins like blood. But when the storm passed, she was left with a broken boat and nothing to take her back to shore.

            "I'm glad I came," whispered Armin, his voice mixing with the fierce wind that had begun blowing, creating a whistling sound as it made its way between the buildings. Saph's hair was blowing everywhere, caressing his face in response.

            She felt her heart tug. She fought the tears that were battling their way out. In spite of the anger and the relief she'd felt at the time they had broken up, all she really wanted right now was Mason. No matter how hard she tried to fight it, how much she thought she could be happy with Armin, Mason was still the answer. She was too afraid to admit this to anyone, let alone herself, and quickly pushed the thought away. She swallowed hard and hoped Armin didn’t notice her forceful movements. She wanted to stay like this forever, pretend that there was no world beyond her body.

            He let go of her hand, hoping this wouldn’t send Saph the wrong idea, and turned his body. He rested his head on his hand and with the other hand began tracing patters on her face: down the bridge of her nose and around her lips. She shivered, "No matter what?" he asked tentatively.

            She didn’t open her eyes or her mouth at the question, she knew both would give her away, so she just nodded.

            He could feel Saph's breath as he came closer and he saw her eyelids open.

            When she finally opened her eyes, she found herself lost in the blueness of his. She couldn’t look away from their clarity.

            His eyes searched and searched for answers in her cloudy eyes, their grayness hiding reality.

            She could feel his hot breath on her face and knew that he was breathing in her air as well.

            His fingers continued tracing patters on her face and down to her neck, gently feeling the curves of her jaw and collar.

            Both of their faces had become pink with the cold, they couldn’t feel their noses or their ears or their lips. They both desperately wanted life back in their faces. He wanted the warmth that her lips would deliver; she wanted the warmth that his soul had shown.

            She wanted to stay in that moment forever, lost in his calm sea.

            He came closer.

            He was now so close that he couldn’t focus his vision, it became a jumble of colors even in the night.

            They were so close together a cloud of warmth rose above them. To an outsider it would have looked like steam was coming off their bodies. They knew better.

            She parted her lips and when she breathed, it came out as a gasp. She smiled at the ridiculousness of the situation.

            He licked his lips.

            She took a deep breath and closed the gap.

            Her lips caused the emptiness in his being to disappear. His closed eyes had passed on their mission to his lips. He was still searching, but now he was asking her to respond. He needed an answer. She completed him and he wondered if he completed her.

            She stretched her arms up and entwined her fingers through his hair. She stopped for air but he didn’t give her much.

            Their breaths had finally become one. It was unclear where one inhaled and the other exhaled.

            He didn’t want this moment to end because in spite of the tangle they'd become, of their physical connection, he knew. Saph had given him an answer at last. He knew she would never be his; those lips that had brought his own back to life would never act this way again. The words that had flowed from her soul to her tongue and had struck him at his core would never be for him. She grasped his hair like someone who is afraid to fall, someone holding on to dear life, not someone in love. While he wanted to come closer and closer, to have every limb and inch of skin touching, she kept him at a distance, not wanting to bridge the small, but meaningful gap between them. His kisses were soft and tender; hers were charged and desperate. And so he kept going, knowing that the moment he broke the physical hold, she would drift back to the tumultuous sea. It didn’t matter that Mason had broken her heart, a heart he so desperately wanted to make whole and hold forever. Even though she had the power to repair him, he couldn’t heal her because she didn’t want to be healed. Her hungry lips weren't searching for answers in him, they were running away — running away from the past and the present, running to a future in which he wasn’t sure he belonged.