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Lydia tipped her head back, squinting into the sun as her insides did a somersault. Jack had a sketchbook under his arm and a stubby pencil behind his ear. She tried to appear unaffected. “Did you realize that this is where all the cool architects come to draw?”
“Obviously.” He sat down across from her, and their knees bumped together as he got comfortable. “Everyone else is in the gym. Their ideas are going to start to run together and everything’s going to end up being a variation of the same design. Clearly, we’re the geniuses of the group.”
Lydia probably should have blushed at the compliment, or at least laughed it off as a joke, but with him sitting there, the sun behind him, his face cast in shadow, he reminded her of a charcoal sketch and she couldn’t get over how handsome he was. Jack reached back to sweep the dangling hairs from his forehead and pluck the pencil from behind his ear in one smooth motion.
She blinked at him foolishly, only breaking from her trance when he leaned over to inspect her page. “What are you working on?”
“Oh!” she said, clearing her throat. She looked down to see the mess of scribbles. Jack’s lips twisted as if he’d just had the same thought. “There’s an idea here, I swear.”
Jack picked up her sketchbook, held it out at arm’s length, and squinted. Lydia tried to snatch it back. “Wait a second,” Jack urged. “It’s coming to me. I’m starting to see something.”
Lydia giggled, taking hold of Jack’s arm. The moment she realized she was touching him, her palm against his forearm, she flushed. She’d been crushing on him for so long that this unexpected attention felt strange.
“I’m only joking,” Jack said, still wearing a grin as he handed her sketchbook back. “I can see you’ve got a lot of really good ideas.” His finger dropped to the roof of Lydia’s hastily sketched building. “But why not a rooftop terrace?”
“What?”
His finger drifted across her page. He double-tapped on the spot where she’d scribbledrooftop garden. “That way it would be prettyandfunctional. You could have seating areas up there. Maybe a gazebo...”
“Ah,” Lydia said. “I was thinking less about it being functional and more about the heat island effect.” She glanced up for his opinion. Jack was part of the leadership team. If there was anyone that could give her a few pointers, it was him. “A massive rooftop garden could insulate the building from the heat.”
He nodded slowly.
Lydia laughed. “Silence. Is that your way of telling me it’s a bad idea?”
“It’s interesting.”
Interesting? Lydia looked down at the design. Was it too much? Was she overcomplicating things?
“That kind of green infrastructure can be expensive, which might work against you.”
Maybe it was a little complicated, but just this morning running three miles had sounded overwhelmingly complicated. Now she felt pretty great about it. Heck, if she could run three miles without puking her guts out, then she could figure out how to turn this space into an environmentally conscious, kid-friendly oasis. “I’m pretty certain I can pull it off.”
A grin split Jack’s face. “I do find it refreshing that your design ideas take into account the community, not just the building. And I like your confidence.” He got to his feet. “I’m excited to see what the finished product looks like.”
“You mean it?” Lydia said, looking up at him.
As Jack laid his hand on her shoulder, Lydia committed the warmth to memory. “In a sea of concrete,” he said, “I think we could use moreinteresting.”
Four
Luke
Luke had always been a morning person, not by choice but by circumstance. When he was eight his father had passed away from an undiagnosed aortic aneurysm. It had been quick, and though Luke hardly retained any memories from the event, the one thing he did remember was how his family had coped in the aftermath. He remembered being carted out of the house with his siblings before the sun had even crested the horizon. He remembered shivering in the dawn chill as they hurried to before-school programs at the youth center so his mother could pull double-shifts in the hospital kitchen. Mostly he remembered how everything smelled when he first walked through those doors each morning: pinewood polish, rubber basketballs and old books. Even now as a volunteer at the center all these years later, he appreciated that these little things hadn’t changed. Not the smell of the center first thing in the morning. And not the cadence of the streets before six on a weekend.
If Luke stretched his hand out, flattening his palm in line with the street, it was like he could physically feel the stirrings of the city about to awake. As a kid, he’d thought it was his superpower.
A cab driver honked as he darted across the almost-empty road. He lifted his hand in apology, then ducked down a set of narrow stairs and into the damp subway tunnel to catch his train. He was scheduled to meet Lydia this morning for their first of many weekend long runs. Technically, it was only six miles, but considering they were building Lydia’s training program from the ground up, she would likely find this run difficult. He imagined her wrinkling her nose in that way that made all the freckles on her cheeks converge. The thought made him smile as the subway doors opened and closed, people moving around him like river water around a rock.
It only took about twenty minutes for Luke to get from Hell’s Kitchen to the Flatiron District. Throwing open the door to the gym, he was greeted by a cool blast of air-conditioning. The lights were dimmed everywhere but over the equipment floor. Luke wasn’t the first one to arrive, but it was far too early for classes, which meant it was mostly his colleagues or very early risers that were using the facility. Luke walked past the front desk—quiet without Dara, who would be in later—and down the darkened hall of offices. The lights flickered to life, triggered by his presence, and the bright fluorescents painted him like a sunbeam. Luke popped his head into his office, finding it covered in drywall dust. He sighed grumpily—this was going to take forever to clean. He backpedaled to Jules’s office to update Lydia’s training plan. He’d just finished inputting her three-mile numbers from the other day when Jules herself appeared in the doorway, a pair of headphones strung around her neck, a sheen of sweat across her brow.
“You’ve got a client waiting. You want me to have her take a seat?”
Luke glanced at the time on the computer screen. Lydia was a few minutes early, which could only be a good sign. “That’s okay, I’m heading out there now.”
“Kinda early for training on a weekend,” Jules commented.
“Marathon prep,” Luke explained. “We’re making the most of the time we have.”
