A. M.

The vodka bottle shattered against the wall less than a hand’s breadth from my left ear. The crack was sharp, followed by the long, crystalline hiss of broken glass scattering across the peeling linoleum. A splash of the cheap, throat-burning liquor hit my cheek.

I didn’t even flinch.

Over the past year, I’d learned that flinching only made things worse. Sudden movements woke the Beast.

“Two whores!” my father bellowed, his bloodshot eyes swimming as they fought to focus on me. “That’s what you both are! You and your mother! That’s why she left, huh? Because of you! She ran because you’re an even bigger whore than she ever was! Get the hell out of my house!”

I looked at him without saying a word.

My silence enraged him more than any insult ever could, but I had no intention of giving him the satisfaction of a fight. My father was gone—collapsed into a parallel world fueled by failure and the cheapest vodka from the corner kiosk, a place no one could ever come back from.

I turned on my heel, stepped carefully around the shards littering the hallway, and slammed the apartment door behind me hard enough to rattle the frame.

At two in the morning, the stairwell lay buried in absolute darkness, broken only by the faint, sickly glow filtering through the exterior windows. Since we lived on the fourth floor—the top floor of our aging communist apartment block—I only had to walk a few barefoot steps across the cold concrete. Just a few steps from our apartment door to the narrow metal ladder that led up to the roof.

The stairwell smelled of damp plaster, old whitewash, and stale fried onions.

I shoved the heavy iron door open and stepped into hell made of concrete.

It’s June, in the middle of 2004—a summer that seems determined to boil us alive inside our own apartments. If you’ve never lived on the fourth floor of a four-story communist apartment block during a Romanian heatwave, then you’ve never known what real suffering feels like. The concrete roof slab drinks in the sun all day, then spends the entire night bleeding that heat back into the rooms below, turning every apartment into an oven with no escape. Up here, the air isn’t air at all. It’s thick. Heavy. A blistering vapor of tar and sun-baked concrete that scorches your lungs with every breath, suffocating you as if you’d been trapped inside a giant greenhouse.

I walked straight to the edge of the roof.

I rested my hands on the low parapet, still warm from the relentless sun, and stared into the black sky. Through the thick veil of burning tears clouding my eyes, I could barely make out two or three pale stars, washed almost white by the city’s pollution and blurred by my own crying.

The restraint I’d clung to for so long—that impenetrable wall I’d built around myself, brick by brick, day after day—cracked without warning.

A sob tore its way out of my throat. Silent. Dry.

Less a cry than the violent convulsion of every night I’d spent pretending to be stronger than any human being has the right to be.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and forced myself to breathe, drawing the scorching air deep enough to burn my throat.

And then it happened.

Right beside me, from the dense darkness behind the rooftop laundry room, a tiny ember suddenly flickered to life. A cigarette butt was flicked away with a lazy motion, tracing a perfect arc through the blackness before disappearing far below into the parking lot behind the building.

I stopped crying instantly. My heart leapt into my throat. I hurriedly wiped my eyes, frozen in place.

“You’re late,” a man’s voice said.

The voice came straight out of the darkness. It was low, calm, with a deep baritone timbre and not the slightest trace of hesitation. A voice that commanded the space around it without making the smallest effort.

“The spot’s already taken,” he added, and I heard light footsteps crossing the concrete rooftop.

I stepped back in fright, my back pressed against the low parapet, ready to run back through the door.

The man laughed. It was a short, deep, beautiful laugh—a rich masculine laugh that simply wrapped itself around me and cut through the tension in the air. Even though the rooftop was almost completely swallowed by the darkness of two in the morning, I knew, just from the way he walked and from the resonance of that voice, that he was young, strong, and in impeccable physical condition. He had nothing in common with the loud, skinny boys from my neighborhood.

“I was kidding. You can stay as long as you want,” he said, taking a step closer while still keeping a respectful distance. “I just wanted to snap you out of that shitty mood. Nothing in this world is worth a beautiful woman’s tears.”

A woman?!

The word struck my temples like a slap. I froze, staring toward his tall silhouette in the darkness. A woman? Me? I’m seventeen, but for the last three years I’ve been nothing more than a beast of burden. A mule. Back when my mother was still home and working at the factory, I was the one who washed, cooked, cleaned, and made sure the apartment didn’t go up in flames. After she left for Italy—three years ago—promising she’d save us, only to vanish completely a year ago without a single word, I was left alone. Just me and my father. No one had ever called me a woman. No one had ever called me beautiful. To everyone around me, I was just Alma—the sarcastic, sharp-tongued girl from Apartment 4 who scrubbed the stairwell floors and dragged her drunken father home from the street.

“Want one?” he asked simply.

He held out a hand. In his palm was a pack of cigarettes.

Normally, I would’ve hit him with some razor-sharp comeback that would’ve made him regret the day he was born. I would’ve told him to mind his own damn business. But tonight, driven by the reckless demon of my restless youth, by a silent rebellion against my entire miserable existence, I reached out and took a cigarette.

The man pulled a lighter from his pocket. The flint sparked, and a small yellow flame briefly illuminated his long, powerful fingers. I leaned toward him, the cigarette trembling between my lips.

I inhaled the way I’d seen adults do it.

Fatal mistake. The acrid smoke scraped down my throat like sandpaper. I doubled over in a violent coughing fit, nearly collapsing to my knees, one hand pressed against my chest as I desperately tried to force air back into my lungs.

The man laughed again. A deep, warm laugh, completely free of mockery.

“Easy, easy,” he said. “Don’t drag it straight into your lungs. Draw a little into your mouth first, then take in a bit of air with it, and only then breathe it into your lungs. Here, try again. More gently this time.”

I recovered, wiping away a tear brought on by the coughing, and followed his instructions with ridiculous determination. This time, I didn’t cough. I exhaled the smoke through my nose, feeling ridiculous... yet somehow proud. We stayed there together in the darkness, gazing over the edge of the building at the scattered lights of the sleeping city. The smoke drifted lazily upward into the hot, motionless night air.

“So... what’s a beautiful woman like you doing alone on the edge of a rooftop at this hour?” he asked after a while, finally breaking the silence.

And that word again... Woman.

It sent shivers through me.

“If you’re planning to jump,” he continued conversationally, “this building’s a little too short. I think you’ve got decent odds of breaking a few bones, but I wouldn’t bet on a hundred percent chance of dying. So... not the best location.”

I said nothing, completely thrown by the casual way he delivered something so horrifying. Then, before I could stop myself, laughter burst out of me. Real laughter. The kind that comes from somewhere deep in your stomach and washes every last ounce of tension out of your body. I laughed until tears filled my eyes again—only this time, for an entirely different reason.

“You thought I came up here to kill myself?” I said, wiping my eyes. “No, relax. Nothing like that. I’m not that dramatic. I live in this building. Actually, right here...” I pointed beneath our feet. “Directly below us.”

“So, am I right in assuming that was your apartment I heard all the shouting from earlier?” he asked, glancing at me from the corner of his eye.

I could feel his gaze in the darkness.

“Yeah. My father...” I whispered, lowering my eyes to the cigarette slowly burning between my fingers.

“Yeah...” he said quietly. “It’s always the father...” There was something heavy in his voice, as though he understood far more than he was willing to let on.

He took a long, deep drag, and for a fraction of a second, the glowing ember illuminated the sharp line of his jaw. Then he fell silent. We stood there together in a silence that felt strangely comfortable, broken only by the crickets in the park across the street and the distant hum of the occasional car drifting along the boulevard.

“So, you’re not jumping?” he finally asked, breaking the silence.

“No.” I shook my head. “You?”

“No. Knowing my luck, I’d be the kind of idiot who survives the fall, ends up paralyzed for life, and still doesn’t manage to die.”

I smiled into the darkness.

“Are you actually trying to convince me you’re unluckier than I am?” I asked, my sarcasm finally slipping back into place like an old suit of armor. “Slim chance. You don’t stand a chance of beating me in that category. So why are you on my rooftop at this hour?”

“I knew you’d need a cigarette,” he answered without hesitation. “But don’t try smoking again. It’s not for you. You look vulgar with a cigarette in your hand, and a face like yours deserves better.”

I let out a snort, looking toward his shadow.

“For your information, I’ve smoked before and I’ll smoke again,” I lied shamelessly, lifting my chin.

“You don’t know how to lie,” he said simply, almost amused. “Don’t do that again either.”

He flicked away the cigarette butt and crushed it beneath the sole of his shoe. Then he stepped out of the darkness, moving toward the rooftop exit until he stopped beneath the small lamp that was still glowing above the laundry room.

My heart stopped.

I just stood there, mouth slightly open, forgetting to take another drag from my cigarette.

This man was simply... breathtaking.

His face was cold, aristocratic, with features so perfectly sculpted they looked as though they’d been carved from stone. His eyes were dark, and his expression was a strange blend of absolute beauty and unwavering hardness. He looked like a man born to command—a man who had seen things the rest of us, ordinary people trapped in our communist apartment block, couldn’t even begin to imagine.

He had nothing in common with the boys from my neighborhood.

He was... something else.

He paused, looking down at me.

“How old are you?” he asked abruptly.

My brain short-circuited. If I told him I was seventeen, he’d leave. He’d look at me like I was a child. Like some high school girl hiding on a rooftop, crying because of her father.

“Twenty,” I answered without thinking, my voice as steady as I could possibly make it.

I said it because it was the first thing that came to mind. Mostly because I wanted him to stay. And maybe, maybe because I wanted to prove I could lie, despite what he’d said a minute earlier.

The man stopped. He looked at me for a long moment, his gaze so penetrating it felt as though he could read every last thought in my head. One corner of his mouth lifted into the faintest hint of a smile—a smile that was pure enigma.

“Same time tomorrow?” he asked simply, already taking a step toward the rooftop door.

“What’s your name?” I called after him, suddenly panicked that he was leaving so quickly.

He turned only halfway, one hand resting on the iron handle.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said over his shoulder. “Let’s leave a little room for mystery to do its job.”

He let the heavy door slam shut behind him. The metallic bang echoed across the rooftop, leaving behind a silence that suddenly felt enormous.

I lowered myself onto the still-warm concrete, unable to take my eyes off the closed door. I’d never seen a man like him before. Because even if I clearly wasn’t a woman yet, he was, without question, one hundred percent a man.

My legs were trembling uncontrollably, and I didn’t even know why. I looked down at the cigarette slowly burning out between my fingers, then lifted my eyes once more to the two a.m. sky.

I’ll see him again tomorrow night...