The embarrassment on his face was real. He laughed at himself and wrapped his hands around the protective bars that keep people from jumping or falling to their deaths.

“I only know that because my seventh-grade history teacher told us the story ten times,” he said. “Swear to God. I think she was trying to convince us that Winston-Salem was as important as New York.”

“Sure,” Scarlett said. “That’s what they all say.”

He turned her around to face him.

“There was another really stupid thing I wanted,” he said. “Are you going to laugh if I ask? Because if you are, I am marching right back down those ten million stairs and going home.”

“I won’t,” Scarlett said, keeping a very straight face.

“You get the scariest look when you lie like that,” he said.

“I’m not lying. What do you want? Did you want to do a pencil rubbing of the plaque in the lobby? Get a snow globe?”

“It’s both scary and sexy,” he said.

Now he’d done it. He’d called her sexy, and not in the joking way that she and Dakota and Tabitha called each other sexy twenty times a day, or in the way that Spencer told her she looked very sexy when she got a comb ensnarled in her curls and she had to keep it there all day until Lola got home and could weave it out. He just dropped it right in there, like a quietly ticking bomb mixed into a clock display.

“What I wanted,” he said, pulling away the curl that had fully impaled itself in her eye, “was to kiss someone once I got to the top.”

He didn’t wait for her inevitably stupid reply. He took her chin in his hands and kissed her—fully, unabashedly, right in the middle of the tourists and for all of New York to see, if they could see on top of huge buildings. And not a quick kiss, either—it went on and on, with at least five pauses for breath, and then, when it looked like it might be over, just started up all over again. He kissed her so long that she had to hold him for support.

The tourists didn’t care. They just milled around like this was just something else they expected to see. Scarlett even got a flash in the corner of her eye as someone took their picture. As it was finally winding down, they switched the lights on overhead, and the spire that towered above them turned a luminescent purple.

“That,” Eric said, looking up at the light, “was pretty much how I imagined it would be.”

Scarlett found it a little hard to stand as they went back through the gift shop, to the series of elevators and escalators to take them back down. The whole “weak in the knees” thing, which she always thought was just some idiotic expression back from the golden age of idiotic expressions, was real. Her knees really were weak. Why, she had no idea. Kissing shouldn’t produce any particular leg strain, at least once it’s over, but there it was. They were all spaghettilike.