Black Maxi Dress on a Chicago Rooftop at Night

The lit grid of Michigan Avenue stretched below her like something that had been waiting — the amber lines of traffic signals, the white verticals of the towers, all of it holding perfectly still while the wind up here did not. She had stayed after the bar closed because leaving had not occurred to her as a real option. The rooftop was hers now. The city was hers. She knew what she had come up here to do, and she had known it since the elevator, and she had not looked away from that knowledge once.

She sat on the concrete ledge with her back to the railing and then changed her mind, turned, faced out. That was the correct position. Facing out was the whole point.

The dress moved without asking her. Light jersey, warm from an hour of her body heat, and the lake wind found the hem immediately — lifted it against the backs of her calves, pressed it flat against her thighs when she sat. She felt the concrete through the fabric, the specific roughness of it, and then the warmth of her own skin radiating back up. She pressed her knees together. Held them there for a moment. Registered what that pressure felt like before she did anything else.

The city below her did not blink. Forty floors of glass across the avenue held their light at a fixed angle. She understood, in the way she always understood this, that the windows were dark — that no one was watching. She understood it and she held it at a distance and she let the other thing be true instead, the thing her body already believed: that the towers were oriented toward her, that the grid was a grid of attention, that twelve floors of altitude had made her the highest point of interest in the frame.

Her right hand found the railing behind her. Cold steel, the paint worn smooth where the bar staff leaned. She gripped it and felt the cold move up her wrist.

The bullet was in her left hand. Had been since the elevator. She had not turned it on yet. She was not ready to turn it on yet, and the not-yet was its own specific pleasure — the weight of the thing in her palm, the small cylinder of it, the knowledge of what it would do pressed against the knowledge that she had not done it. The wind lifted the hem again. She felt it against the inside of her left knee, the thin fabric dragging slow across skin that was already warm, already waiting.

She exhaled. The sound came out longer than she meant to give it, unfolding over the railing into the dark air above Michigan Avenue.

Her knees were still together.

She looked at the towers. The towers held their light.

She let her left knee shift, just slightly, just enough to feel the fabric go slack between her thighs — and stopped there, at the edge of that, the dress pooling loose across her lap, the bullet still in her hand, the city watching everything she had not yet done.