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Steve’s leaning into you on the fire escape, one arm wrapped loosely around your body, head tucked into your shoulder, his soft, too-long hair tickling your neck as he lazily smokes a cigarette, the end dangling from his quirked lips. He’s dozing, just a little bit, although he’d deny it if you ever asked; you elbow him, sharp but not hard, and he startles slightly, relaxing once again into you when he realizes where he is, who you are. It’s August, and the heat of the city is almost too much; you relish in the sensation of your undershirt caked to your back with sweat, the sticky feeling of Steve’s skin where it meets yours. It’s August, and you are in love, and Steve does not know.
The two of you are silent, having no need for words; the city fills in the noise around you, the buzz and bustle of the people outside: cars honking, children laughing, women gossiping; and the muffled, tinny sounds of the radio in your shared apartment, the one you finally managed to cajole Steve into moving into after a particularly nasty winter. He nearly died, and that year you practically lived in his old place what with all the fussing over him you did; it was the insulation in your apartment, along with the guilt he felt that you were paying for a room you were hardly spending time in, that pushed him over the edge. He’s alive, and the city is alive, and the radio plays distantly, and you can feel him breathing against the underside of your jaw with his customary rasping hitch, and you are so in love with him.
Idly, you notice that he has finished his cigarette. He coughs, twice, wheezing slightly, then lets his eyes drift closed again, pressing his whole side into you. This time, you let him drift off into sleep; the sun bakes down on your heads, glowing golden-brown against his silky hair, and you resist the impulse to press a kiss on his crown. Instead, you wrap your arm around him in return, tugging him further into your side, as close as you can get away with on a hot summer day, with the city below as oblivious to your true feelings as the man at your side.
(It won’t last forever. The day will melt into evening and then into night, and you and Steve will stand up, legs creaking from disuse, and slip back into your apartment to eat dinner together and sleep separately, and tomorrow will come, then the next day and the next and before you know it a lifetime will have slipped by, and you will be old and then dead, and at the end maybe you’ll remember this day on the fire escape with Steve sleeping next to you, but you probably won’t be able to pick it out of a thousand other days like it, and that’s just how it is.)
(Later, they will take this day from you. They will take it a thousand times over and you will feel the heat of the electricity in your skull like you felt the heat of the sun on your skin. Even later, you will take it back from them, and you will spend the day that you remember it weeping for the boys you both were, wishing you could live in that moment in time forever, a fly trapped in glorious August amber. In Wakanda, you will curl into Steve’s side and make yourself small, the way he used to fit against you, and it will come out, in halting whispers, how you feel, how you’ve always felt; he will look at you for a long moment, and then, without saying a word, he will press his lips to yours, and they will taste like the way the radio used to sound, reaching deep into your heart and pulling until it flipped inside-out and all your blood ran hot through your veins, hotter than the city’s summer sun, hotter than the electricity in your skull. You will do this, and you will do more, but that is later. For now, you will tip your head against his as you sit on the fire escape, and you will close your eyes, and you will dream.)