“I don’t know. Something else. And I think I’m finally okay with that.”

He hands her the blue rose, which she hadn’t noticed in the shadows of the roof, and she, perplexed, takes it from his hand delicately. One hand goes up to her mouth when she sees what it is.

“So you are serious . . . How serious? Because—”

He kisses her and feels the great tremulous activity in him mirrored in her. Faces together, unwilling to part, his cheek is touched by the small wet of a tear.

“Just leave?”

“Just leave.”

“Together?”

“Together.”

Afterward they spend a while by themselves on the roof in a night dream. The sky caves off and a timeless zone without modern technology is reached, a completion. The Milky Way is a bridge above. At various points in their laughter, their clutching, their kissing, they break to look down off the roof or to lie on their backs. One time Carmen stands and, laughing wildly, screams off the roof to the empty streets below in excitement, and Kierk, following her lead, does so as well, and they listen to their echoes chase and reverberate. Other moments they spend huddled next to the small ledge together, heads touching. Carmen keeps rubbing his shaved head and chuckling, or kissing it.

It is so real at this moment for them, so obvious of a future, a thing completely decided—can’t you see them even now? You’re crossing the Pont des Arts and you pause in the middle of the bridge to look out over the Seine, the river itself reddened by the setting sun and moving like heart’s blood through the beautiful grandeur of the buildings rising around it; from afar Kierk is that lone form dangling his legs off the point of Île de la Cité that juts out into the Seine, bent and writing in a notebook but occasionally looking up and out at the Seine and toward your direction, the fall verdure of the Square du Vert-Galant an impressionist painting of gold and red behind him, and he has just finished jotting something down when a long-legged form comes up behind him, dipping in for a kiss before procuring a bottle of wine, Carmen settling down next to him, and in a break of a great cycle of history the two are just lovers in Paris talking about all the mundane but beautiful and true things they will do together.