Page 89 of The Towering Sky
She knew she shouldn’t be thinking this way. She was with Max now—shelovedMax. It was just that Atlas had been her first love, and when he was near her like this, all their secret history seemed to cloud over her head and suck the very air from the ballroom.
“No more interviews. I get you to myself from now on.” Max reached eagerly for Avery’s hand. The warmth of his skin on hers felt reassuring.
For a while she managed it. She moved through the room with Max, kept up a stream of small talk, chatting about all thethings they were going to do in Oxford. When the band struck up a slow song, she let him spin her effortlessly over the dance floor, her feet moving through the steps with no input from her brain. She accepted a flute of champagne, but it tasted like nothing at all.
Avery felt his gaze like a brush against her lower back, as if someone across the room had whispered her name and it echoed all the way to her. She lifted her eyes and looked directly into Atlas’s.
“I’m sorry.” She broke away, tearing her hand from Max’s. “I just—I need some air.”
“I’ll come with you,” Max offered, but Avery shook her head frantically.
“I only need a minute,” she insisted, more forcibly than she’d meant. And before Max could protest, she grabbed the skirts of her gown with both hands and fled toward the archway that led to city hall’s single elevator. The New York princess, running away from it all.
The elevator door was tucked to one side, facing a row of offices that were currently empty of people. Avery knew that it had been crowded over here earlier: Groups of bored partygoers had stumbled up to look out at the observation deck, wandered around drunkenly, then come back down. But by now everyone had worked their way through another cocktail or two, and the dance floor was picking up speed; and besides, these people all saw the same view from their living rooms anyway, and from a much better altitude.
Now it was just Avery, standing alone, tapping viciously at the button to summon the single gray elevator.
When she emerged onto the observation deck, she let out a great rasping breath, as if she’d been swimming and had finally surfaced for air. The half-moon of the deck curved before her.She took a step closer, reaching her fingers toward the flexiglass. The deepening winter twilight hovered outside the windows. She saw the ghost of her own reflection there, transposed eerily over the view.
Avery leaned her head against the flexiglass and closed her eyes, willing her heart to slow down. She knew she wanted to leave New York. But why wasn’t she more excited about moving to Oxford with Max?
For so much of her life, Avery had let her desires be dictated by other people, without really questioning them. She knew how lucky she was to be living a life so many people would give anything for, and yet it hadn’t beenhers. She hadn’t chosen it for herself. Her parents had literally custom-designed her to be the exact person they wanted. Avery had absorbed their beliefs every day until they became her own, until she didn’t even know what she wanted anymore because it was all wrapped up in what they wantedforher.
She had thought that going abroad, studying art history, would be her way out of all that. Except Avery was starting to feel as if she had traded one set of expectations for another. She would be moving from the thousandth floor, and all the strings that came with it, to the life that Max wanted.
But was it the lifeshewanted?
She could see the years unfolding before her in sharp cinematic detail: filling that apartment with an eclectic collection of furniture. Staying there while Max got his PhD and became a professor and settled into a tenure-track position. A steady, thoughtful life filled with friends and scholarship and laughter and Max.
She loved Oxford, with its quaint charm, its cobblestones soaked with history. But it was hardly the only place she loved. Why should she limit herself to that single set of expectations when there was a whole wide world just begging to be explored?
Avery wanted to laugh too loudly. Drink too much beer. Smile so wide that her face hurt. Sing karaoke off-key. She wanted bright colors and raucous music and exhilaration and, yes, even heartbreak, if it came alongside love. Gazing out at the vast dark stretches of the city, Avery felt suddenly that New York—that Oxford—wasn’t big enough to contain the sum total of all she wanted to live and experience andbe. That it couldn’t hold the volume of her unbridled, uncertain desire.
When she heard the elevator doors open behind her, Avery didn’t turn around. It was probably Max.
“You okay?”
Of course, she thought woodenly. She had told Max to give her space, and so he had.
Atlas was the one who never did what she wanted him to.
“Why did you come up here, Atlas?”
“I was looking for you.” His face in the moonlight was dark on one side and silvered on the other, turning his eyes to caramel.
“Congratulations,” she said heavily. “You’ve found me. Now what?”
“Don’t be like this, Aves.”
She tried to sweep past him, but to her anguished surprise, he followed her into the elevator. She pushed the button to return to the main level of city hall.
“What do you want me to be like?” she demanded. Her voice was taut with tension. Couldn’t Atlas hear it?
“Never mind.”
She looked away from him, keeping her gaze stubbornly on the chrome doors of the elevator.
They were halfway down when the elevator jolted to a sudden, unexpected stop and the power cut out.
