His eyes followed our hands as I lowered them between us and leaned in to bump my shoulder to his. “Thank you,” I whispered. Our heads were so close I could smell his scent drifting off his shirt, that woodsy mix of shampoo, deodorant, laundry, aftershave: daily life. It was a smell no bottle could contain. It was purely him, a scent that had wafted by me so many times before but only now seemed to permeate the air around me.

Minutes later, we were outside, cups of gelato in hand and a small box of warm pignoli cookies in my bag. “Shall we walk?” he asked, and I nodded in between bites of two scoops of pistachio and chocolate, stacked high. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I think of my first gelato?” I asked, toying with the spoon in my mouth.

“Nah, I’m pretty confident that you love it already,” he said. I pushed my shoulder into his side but said nothing else. He was right, of course. He seemed to always be right. Jerk.

*  *  *

Deep into downtown New York we went, past parks lit up with late-night soccer games and cafés overflowing with couples and groups enjoying the magic of a warm city night. This was my favorite time of day in New York, the hours before midnight, when everyone in the city reemerges after work, and a week’s worth of stress, to celebrate Friday in the darkness. Somehow, the city seemed even brighter and more bustling at night, electric with energy, one giant caffeinated surge of life. Before we knew it, we were standing in front of City Hall.

“This is my favorite building in the entire city.” Hayes’s voice was full of reverence.

“I would have expected something more modern, or minimalistic, from you,” I mused. “Energy-efficient. Solar panels. Should I keep going?”

“No, thank you. You’ve made your point.”

He took a couple steps forward.

“In all seriousness, though,” he said, “in another lifetime, I almost became an architect, and when I was deciding whether or not to ditch my finance career and apply to grad school, I used to come down here and sit in the park and just stare.”

He pointed to the spires of the building; they looked like fingers dipping into the inky blackness of the night sky.

“I love that this building is a relic that seems to last as everything around it changes,” he added. “That dichotomy is New York to me, in a nutshell. Everything changes, and somehow it still stays the same.”