16 stories up to you

 

The September night in Schwabing smelled of warm asphalt and the sweetish smoke of the patio heaters someone had put on the rooftop terrace, even though it wasn't cold. Johanna stepped out of the glass elevator, and for a moment she clung to the railing that separated the platform from the abyss. Eight stories below her, Leopoldstraße lay like an open vein, pulsating in amber and red. Above her, the sky was that shade she had first wanted to mix when she was eight and never quite managed: deep indigo with a trace of day-gold at the edge.

She had tucked her sketchbook under her arm because she would have felt wrongly dressed without it. The black silk dress had been Felix's idea, or rather his text message at four o'clock: *Please, wear something that doesn't look like ink.* She had laughed and done it anyway, and now the fabric was clinging to her back because the elevator had taken too long.

Felix saw her first. He came across the terrace towards her, a champagne glass in each hand, his shirt half unbuttoned, with that laugh he had acquired in the last two years, since he was officially "successful." Investor's laugh, she thought. A laugh that knows who is in the room.

"You came," he said and kissed her on the cheek. His lips were cold from the glass. "I thought you'd cancel."

"I considered it."

"Drink." He pressed the glass into her hand. "And be nice to the people. They pay for my life."

She wanted to retort, but Felix had already half-turned away, his hand raised in a wave, and in the sweep of that gesture, she saw him. Nico stood at the railing on the south side, his back to the skyline, a glass in his hand that he wasn't drinking. He was looking at her. He looked at her the way a man processes information, calmly, factually, without a greeting on his face.

She knew that look. She had last seen it up close when she was sixteen, on a Sunday morning in her parents' kitchen, when he and Felix had eaten toast after a sleepless night and she had stumbled in in sleep shorts. He had scrutinized her the same way then. Briefly. One second. Then he had looked away, as if she were nothing that concerned him, and it had taken her twelve years to understand that this was the most expensive kind of disdain: the calculated unobtrusiveness of a man who has categorized a younger person and deemed them unimportant.

She didn't go to him. She went to the low table where Felix had deposited the folder. She placed the sketches next to it, because she wanted to show him some designs later, and the moment she straightened up, Nico was already there.

He was tall. Taller than in her memory, or perhaps he had just gotten into the habit of standing in a room in such a way that you felt his height. Light blue shirt, the top two buttons open, no jacket. The watch on his wrist was old, not a status symbol, more of an heirloom. That's how you recognized men like him: by the self-evidence with which they wore what they wore.

"Johanna." He said her name as if he hadn't spoken it in a long time and was checking if it still felt familiar on his tongue.

She raised the glass to her lips to avoid having to answer. The champagne was too warm, a thin acidity that clung to her tongue.

"Felix never told me you illustrate." Nico's voice was soft, just enough to be below the hubbub of voices, forcing her to look at him. "He just said his sister does art. It sounded like a disease you politely avoid."

"Felix only has room in his world for numbers you can add up."

A short laugh. It escaped his throat without reaching his smile. She noted that.

"May I?" He nodded towards the folder. She hesitated a second longer than she would have with anyone else, then handed him the cardboard. He opened it without asking which sheet first, and she watched him flip through the sketches, slowly, without a polite smile. He paused at the third sheet. It was an ink study: a man placing a hand on another's chest, half protection, half threat. She hadn't wanted Felix to see that sheet. She had forgotten to take it out.

Nico looked at it for a long time. Then he closed the folder. "Who taught you that?"

"What?"

"The pressure in the wrist. You don't learn that at any academy."

Her neck felt hot. "No one. It just happens."

"It doesn't just happen." He placed the folder back on the table, precisely, parallel to the edge. "But you don't want to hear that now. Understood."

Felix came back, laughing, an arm around a woman in gold trousers, and pushed himself between them. "Ah, you found each other. Nico, be careful, she draws everything she sees."

"I hope so," Nico said.

Johanna emptied her glass.

The next morning, she woke up with a taste in her mouth that wasn't from the champagne.

The Werksviertel looked like an architectural model that someone had given too much money to, in daylight. Concrete, glass, a few birches that stood so geometrically they seemed planted. On the fifth floor, Felix sat in a glass box, on the phone, and Johanna waited at one of those pointless standing tables placed in open-plan offices between the pathways, so you never quite arrive anywhere.

"I'm sorry." Felix came out, his tie already half-open, even though it was ten in the morning. "Hong Kong. You know."

"I know nothing."

"Exactly." He grinned. "Listen, about yesterday. Nico." He scratched his neck, a gesture he had picked up from her father, and she recoiled inwardly. "He's my best friend, sure. But just between us. He's like that."

"Like what?"

"Charming. Calculating. He doesn't do it out of malice, that's his operating system. He wrapped two female investors around his finger exactly like that before he professionally needed them. Both signed afterwards. One cried." Felix said that as if it were a technical detail. "I'm only telling you this because you're my sister. Keep your distance. He's not a man for something that lasts."

She nodded, once. "Thanks."

"Are you mad?"

"Why should I be mad?"

She didn't go up to the fourth floor where Nico's office was, although she actually wanted to hand in two more design sheets. She sent them by email.

For three days, she worked like someone running from something faster than herself. She locked herself in the studio, a basement in Tumblingerstraße, which smelled of linseed oil, cold coffee, and the damp stone of the outer wall. She drew until her wrist hurt. She drew Felix, she drew the gold-trousered woman from the terrace, she drew the champagne waiter. She drew everything that wasn't Nico Hartner, and on every sheet, his hand had moved along, the pressure in the wrist that he had known no one else saw.

On the fourth evening, shortly after ten, the doorbell rang at the studio door.

She knew immediately who it was. No one else rang without an announcement. Felix had a key and never used it. Her mother called beforehand. Delivery services stayed upstairs at the glass door and typed numbers.

She opened the door in her father's rolled-up shirt, with ink on her right thumb and a hair tie around her wrist because her hair had gotten in the way at some point. Nico stood on the bottom step, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the folder she had forgotten on the terrace. He wasn't wearing a coat, although the night had cooled down. He looked like someone who hadn't considered whether he would come, but only how long he would stay.

"Felix doesn't know I'm here," he said, without greeting.

"I assumed that."

"I'm giving you the folder back."

"You could have given that to Felix."

"Yes." He took a step into the doorway. "I could have."

She let him in because the opposite would have been a lie. In the studio, only the work lamp above the table was on, a cone of light on a sheet she hadn't continued for an hour. The rest of the room lay in that warm twilight where furniture becomes shadows and the walls seem closer than they are.

He put down the folder. He looked around without commenting, and that was the most polite thing he could have done. She had prepared a sentence to throw him out if he uttered a word about the mess.

"Felix told you what kind of man I am," he said instead. A statement.

"He told me you were calculating. That two female investors cried."

"One. And not because of me. But that doesn't matter now." He turned to her. "He's right about what matters. I calculate. I don't stop calculating. Not even now."

"And what are you calculating right now?"

"How much it costs me to stand here."

She felt the air in the room thin. She had seen that in movies and never believed it. Now she stood two meters from a man, and the distance was a substance pulsating between them, denser than air.

"Go," she said. It came out quietly, and she heard herself that it wasn't an instruction.

"Say it again."

She didn't say it.

He came to her, slowly, as if giving her the chance to retreat with every step. She didn't. When he stood in front of her, he was so close that she smelled the clean, slightly tart aftershave, something with cedarwood, and underneath it, skin that had had a long day. He raised a hand and placed it on her jaw, his thumb gently on her cheek, as if she were something to hold, but never to hold onto.

She raised her hand and placed it on his forearm. Through the shirt fabric, she felt the tendon moving as he slightly spread his fingers on her jaw, a tiny adjustment that went through her entire body.

"If you do this now," she said, "don't do it halfway."

"I don't do anything halfway."

He kissed her. It was a confirmation of something that had been waiting since the terrace. His mouth tasted of the espresso he had drunk at nine, and of something salty, perhaps from walking here. She opened herself to him, because anything else would have been a lie, and his tongue found hers, slowly, precisely, with the same concentration with which he had opened the folder.

She pulled him by the shirt to the workbench. Sketches slid, a glass of brush water tipped and spilled in dark streaks over a sheet that she stopped caring about the moment she saw him see it and say nothing. He lifted her onto the edge. She was no longer wearing the silk dress, only her father's men's shirt, and he unbuttoned it individually, from top to bottom, without taking his eyes off her face.

"Tell me if I should stop."

"Don't stop."

He leaned forward and took a nipple into his mouth. Heat shot to her neck, and she heard herself make a sound she had never made before. His hand wandered between her thighs, found her already wet, and the pressure of his thumb on her clitoris was the same pressure he had recognized in the ink study, precise, measured, without haste. She unbuttoned his pants with fingers that knew what they were doing and took his cock in her hand. It was hard and warm, and the tiny tremor that went through him when she encompassed it was the first time that evening she didn't see him calculating.

"Johanna."

"Come."

He slid into her, slowly, a single long movement, and she saw him close his eyes for a moment, as if he had to sort something that couldn't be sorted. Then he opened them again, and his gaze stayed on hers as he began to thrust. Deep, without haste. The edge of the table pressed into her thighs, and she pulled him closer, her legs around his hips, until no gap remained.

It came in waves. A first one that surprised her because she hadn't expected it to happen so quickly, a shudder that made him pause. He waited until she breathed. Then he started again, differently, harder, and she arched her back and let him see what she hadn't shown for twelve years.

When he came, he said her name only once, softly, at her neck.

Afterwards, they lay on the wooden floor, because the bed had been too far away, and he pulled her shirt over both of them.

"Felix," she said eventually.

"I'll talk to him tomorrow." Nico turned his head to her. "Not because I have to. Because I want him to hear it from me."

Johanna looked up at the work lamp, on whose shade a small ink stain clung that she had always wanted to wipe off. She left it there now. She placed her hand on Nico's chest, where in her sketch the other hand had been, half protection, half threat, and realized that she had finally drawn it correctly, because now she knew how that spot felt under her fingers.