Sixty Seconds

I didn't want to come to this party.

Three weeks in Barcelona and I'd already mapped the city's loneliness onto my own: the empty apartment in Eixample with its too-high ceilings, the cafe where I drank cortados alone, the rooftop terrace I never used because sitting still felt like practice for dying. My friend Dana had texted me the address, said "live a little," and I'd come because doing something was better than counting the tiles above my bed for another night.

The rooftop was beautiful. I'll give it that.

Fairy lights crisscrossed overhead like a drunk constellation, and Barcelona poured out beneath us in every direction, amber and alive. The Sagrada Familia glowed to the northwest, half-finished and still reaching. I knew the feeling. To the south, the Gothic Quarter's spires jabbed at the sky like arguments. Someone had strung speakers from the DJ booth, built from shipping pallets that smelled like the sea, and the bass climbed through the concrete into the soles of my sandals.

I stood by the railing with a glass of champagne I wasn't drinking and watched everyone else prepare for midnight.

Couples clung to each other. A woman in red laughed so hard champagne came out of her nose. Two men slow-danced near the bar despite the DJ playing something with a brutal kick drum. The air smelled like gunpowder and night jasmine and the last few hours of a year I was glad to be rid of.

Then I saw him.

Not saw. Registered. The way you register a change in temperature before you feel it.

He was standing by the bar, white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled, watching the crowd with the quiet focus of someone who builds things and can't stop assessing load-bearing walls. Tall. Broad-shouldered in a way that said he'd done physical labor before he started whatever he did now. Brown skin. Hair pushed back and a little too long, like he'd forgotten about it. A leather watch on his wrist that had been there for years.

He looked up. His attention landed on me across forty people and a rooftop full of noise.

I looked away. Then back.

"Diez!" the crowd screamed.

The countdown. I hadn't noticed it starting.

"Nueve!"

He was still looking.

"Ocho!"

I abandoned my champagne on the railing. My body was already moving.

"Siete! Seis!"

I cut through the crowd like I had somewhere to be. I did. I just didn't know it yet.

"Cinco! Cuatro!"

He straightened when he saw me coming. Didn't step back. Didn't look confused. Just... waited.

"Tres!"

I reached him. The year had given me nothing. Taken plenty. This, at least, would be mine.

"Dos!"

I grabbed the front of his shirt.

"Uno!"

I kissed him.

The fireworks screamed into the sky behind us and his mouth opened under mine and I tasted champagne and surprise and something warm underneath, something that had been waiting. His hands landed at my hips, not grabbing, steadying, and I pressed into him and the whole rooftop disappeared.

Five seconds. Ten.

The fireworks cracked the sky apart in gold and red and white, and his thumb traced my hip through the silk of my dress, and I thought: this. This is what I came to Barcelona for. Not the apartment. Not the solitude. This stranger's mouth and the sound he made when I bit his lower lip.

Then the world stuttered.

The fireworks froze. Not burned out. Froze. Hung in the sky like someone had pressed pause. The sound cut. The bass died. For one perfect, terrible second, everything was silent.

Then it reversed.

The fireworks sucked back into the sky. The champagne rose in glasses. The woman in red un-laughed. The slow-dancing men stepped apart and backward. The DJ's music wound down in a descending howl. And I felt his mouth leave mine, not because he pulled away but because time pulled us apart, rewinding us like tape.

I was at the railing again. Glass in my hand. The champagne was full.

The fairy lights blazed. The crowd chattered. The bass climbed back up through my sandals.

I could still taste him.

I spun around. Found him at the bar. Same shirt. Same watch. Same spot. But his hand was touching his mouth, and his eyes, across forty people and a rooftop full of noise, were on mine, wide, certain, the expression of someone who remembered.

"Diez!" the crowd screamed.

No.

"Nueve!"

No, that wasn't...

"Ocho!"

The clock above the DJ booth read 11:59.

The champagne in my glass was cold against my palm, and the night jasmine was blooming, and the year was ending again, right now, for the second time, and across the rooftop a stranger I'd just kissed was staring at me like the world had come undone.

Because it had.

The countdown hit zero. The fireworks launched. The clock struck midnight.

And he was already walking toward me.