Up High

By Scott Milder

What Lacey thought, as the wind rushed past her naked body and
the street that a mere three seconds ago had been more than four
hundred feet below rushed up to meet her, was shit.
That’s it. Just the one word. Even in the very last seconds of
her life her mostly prim and mostly proper middle-class brain
could cough up only that one weak bit of profanity, something her
mother might say if she left the roast in the oven a little too
long and it got dry.
Shit.
Lacey felt Malcolm’s heel -- oddly still wearing a scuffed
loafer with tassels -- clip the back of her head and she heard him
scream and wondered what word, if any, was going through his head.
Not that word, she was sure. He was a man, a type-A personality
man, and she surmised that the things men like him thought when
life turned really ugly rarely, if ever, stopped at shit.

Seconds ago, the wind wasn’t rushing past her but was instead
licking at her, tasting the bare skin between her shoulder blades
the way Malcolm was tasting her left nipple. It was a friendly
thing, that little series of licks, and -- coupled with the rough
persistence of Malcolm’s tongue on her breast and the hot fullness
of him inside her -- it sent a wave of lovely shivers through her
body. But in the seconds before she splattered in wet, broken
pieces upon the pavement below she had time to wonder if those
licks had been a ruse, like how her older brother would smile at
her before giving her an Indian burn when they were kids. Or, if
not a ruse, maybe the wind was investigating her the way a bear

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might use its rough tongue to investigate a sleeping camper’s
skull, taking a couple seconds to decide whether or not the salty
thing was edible before sinking its yellow teeth into the soft
flesh under the throat.

Five minutes earlier they had been in an elevator. The building

where she and Malcolm worked -- he as a junior partner at Lorentz,
Cohen & Smith on the thirteenth floor, she as a clerk at the very
same firm -- was deserted. Or so they had thought. It was Friday
night, after all, and after eight. Even the lawyers didn’t stay
this late. But the elevator stopped at the second floor instead of
shooting up to the roof, and the fat guy from Craig and
Associates, Mr. Kavanaugh, got on with his secretary, who Lacey
thought was named Cindy. Or Mindy. Something silly like that.
Lacey and Malcolm had been in each others’ arms seconds before
the elevator stopped. They were kissing, and his hands were
tightly cupped around her ass, pulling her close, and she felt his
hard-on pressing against her belly like a brick. Then the elevator
lurched to a stop, the bell dinged, and Malcolm roughly pushed her
away and ran a smoothing hand down the front of his shirt. She
straightened her skirt as the door opened and caught a glimpse of
Malcolm’s prick straining against the yielding fabric of his suit
pants, and then Kavanaugh and Cindy/Mindy stepped in and
Cindy/Mindy’s eyes drifted to Malcolm’s bulging crotch and then
bounced up to Lacey. Their eyes locked, and Cindy/Mindy smiled a
little, and then Kavanaugh said something like “burning the
midnight oil, O’Brian?” and Malcolm squeezed out a laugh and said
something like “guess you could say that” even though his last
name was Dodd and not O’Brian.
Kavanaugh hit the button for the seventh floor and the doors

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whisked closed. Cindy/Mindy smiled her little smile, and the
elevator was oh so slow, and Lacey could feel the flush burning
its way up from her collar bones to her cheeks. She kept her eyes
on a little brown stain on the floor near the far left corner.
Someone must have spilled some coffee, she thought.
The elevator stopped on four, and her mind screamed no! before
the doors slid open and Paco the janitor pushed his trash cart in
between them. He grinned. “Nice night, huh, folks?” Paco asked in
perfect, unaccented English, and Lacey realized that she didn’t
actually know if his name was really Paco, or if he was even
Mexican. Paco was just what Malcolm called him. She hadn’t
questioned that before, but she took a second to remember that
barest hint of contempt in Malcolm’s voice when he said it --
“just our luck Paco’ll come in with his mop right when I’ve got my
dick in your ass” -- and it was one more reminder to her that
Malcolm was utterly and completely temporary. He might be able to
make her come like no one had since that one girl her freshman
year -- the girl with the frizzy hair and crooked dimples and St.
Christopher’s medal laying flat between her breasts -- but there
was no way she could fall in love with a man who thought like
that. But when he said it she hadn’t thought about it, only
thought the roof and then made her suggestion.
“Sure is,” Kavanaugh said, and made a blustery coughing sound
that she couldn’t quite read. Cindy/Mindy stared at her and smiled
her little smile.
“Yup,” Paco said, and grinned again. His mouth was full of white
dentures. His mottled skin drooped below his chin on both sides
like a bloodhound’s jowls. His eyes, she saw, had a little green
in them. “It’s one of those nights where anything can happen.
Can’t you feel it?” Where came out as wheea, and she thought two

3
things: Boston and black Irish. Maybe with something else mixed
in, a little black or Puerto Rican, to give him that dark
complexion. But no way his name was Paco.
Kavanaugh nodded. The elevator stopped at seven. Kavanaugh and
Cindy/Mindy made their exit, him with his hand lightly pressed to
the small of her back. Lacey realized they were there so late on
Friday night for the same reason she and Malcolm were. She
wondered if Cindy/Mindy let Kavanaugh put it in her ass, the way
Malcolm wanted to and she would never let him, then let the
thought drift away like a balloon on a breeze. She didn’t want to
picture it. Not now. Not ever.
Paco continued grinning his amiable grin, but said nothing more
and kept his eyes on the lighted numbers above the door. When they
got to twelve the doors opened and he pushed his cart out into the
hallway.
“You folks have a nice night, ‘kay?” He said, and tipped
Lacey a wink. She blushed, nodded, thought oh God....
The doors slid closed and she looked over at Malcolm. The last
few moments had done much to ease the heat she had felt with his
hands on her ass and his brick-like penis pressed up against her
belly, and she wondered if maybe she’d rather just go home, put on
her jammies, throw some popcorn in the microwave and watch reruns
of King of the Hill on UPN or Everybody Loves Raymond on the WB.
Then Malcolm’s eyes narrowed mischievously and the corners of his
lips turned up in a wicked little grin, and she felt herself melt
and a second later and she was back in his arms and his lips were
on hers and his tongue roamed across the inside of her cheek. The
brick pressed up against her, only it was throbbing now,
metronoming against her like an old clock. The heat poured through
her like steam and the numbers over the door lit up in sequence--

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thirteen, fourteen, fifteen --- but she never looked and never
once suspected that each floor passed brought her one step closer
to death.

Shit, she thought.

The wind screamed in her ears. Malcolm flailed next to her,
shrieking without words, and his heel caught the top of her head
and she spun in the air and watched, with horrid fascination, as
the trees grew closer and street below opened up wide like some
hungry animal’s maw.

This was the fifth time they’d done it.

The first was after the Christmas party last year. She’d been
seeing someone then, a guy named Scott that she liked but did not
love. Malcolm was married. Is married. Hence the subsequent hotel
rooms, the two times on his desk, this one excursion to the roof.
Looking back on it, the whole thing carried a stench of fetid,
cold, rotten inevitability that she rather didn’t like. Scott was
a serviceable lover, nothing special, and an all around good guy.
Her mother liked him. Malcolm, on the other hand, was what her
little sister would call a douchenozzle. But throughout all last
year they had been looking at each other over cubicle walls, and
every time his eye caught hers she felt the first stirrings of
that heat, and she knew in some recessed part of her that if ever
he took the initiative and made a pass, said pass would be acted
upon.
The only time it had ever been like that before had been with
the girl, whose name was Gretchen and who was a senior when Lacey
was a freshman. Gretchen was also a douchenozzle, if girls can be
said to be douchenozzles, and something of a dullard as well. But

5
when she leaned in close -- to take a drink from the coffee table,
for instance, or to pass a joint -- there was a smell about her,
and something in that flash of teeth and those dimples and that
wavy mane of reddish hair stabbed at a spot deep within Lacey’s
core. When the pass was made -- after a mid-October frat party, of
all things -- it was accepted. Gretchen was mean-spirited, fairly
stupid, not much of a conversationalist, but she was a surgeon
with her tongue and Lacey found herself wishing in the years
after, through each successive well-meaning but unexciting
boyfriend, that she could have been able to look past everything
else -- the hatefulness, the vanity, the arrogance -- and simply
fall in love with that tongue. The same way she sort of wished she
could look past the contempt in Malcolm’s voice when he called the
janitor Paco.
If only.
Tonight he had suggested the Lamplighter again, but she thought
about the stiff sheets, the cockroaches, the blaring TV through
the paper-thin walls, and vetoed it out of hand. Malcolm rocked
her world in ways she couldn’t begin to explain, but there was
only so much Lamplighter she could take before the bloom was
solidly off the rose. She tried to think of somewhere new,
somewhere romantic and exciting, but her mind drew a blank. It was
as if her brain recognized that what was going on here was just no
good for her and refused to help perpetuate the charade. He
suggested the office and the heavy oak desk, where they had gone
the last two times. Better than the Lamplighter, maybe, dirtier
and more exciting. But, by now, pretty familiar. She didn’t want
to let things with Malcolm get too familiar. Not yet.
Then he made his comment about putting it in her ass and Paco
coming in and she thought the roof and smiled.

6
 Now that they were here, he seemed to be having second thoughts.
“Someone’ll see us,” he said, as if this was not part of the
point.
She smiled, grabbed his hands, pulled him toward the ledge.
“No one’ll see us,” she said. “Except maybe for Jesus.”
She thought that would make him smile, but it didn’t. She’d
forgotten that he went to Catholic school as a kid.
But if Jesus was on his mind, he didn’t say. He just pointed to
the Bancorp Building across the street. It was half-again as tall
as theirs, and its dark windows looked out over the roof.
“There could be someone over there,” he said.
“So what if there is?”
“It ... I don’t know.”
She unbuttoned her blouse, let it drop, then unhooked her bra.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s do something dangerous.”
He looked at her breasts, now free and unashamed in the cool
night, and the twinkle came back into his eye. He touched a
nipple, and it went immediately hard.
Moments later they were on the ledge of the building, naked and
sweaty, with her legs around him and his mouth on her breast.
There were stars up above, and the full round eye of the moon, and
she wondered if maybe Jesus really did see them, and what he
thought of what he was seeing.
And then: light.
Light, all around them, throwing their long and writhing shadows
across the gravel roof like spilled crude. It was the Bancorp
Building. The lights came on automatically at eight-thirty p.m.
every night, something that Lacey and Malcolm knew but had
forgotten.
Malcolm jerked up, and his eyes went wide, and she never knew

7
what he saw: in the lighted window across the way, another janitor
-- this one young and white, with wispy blond hair over his
pimpled brow -- was pressed against the window, watching them and
rubbing himself. When the lights came on his eyes went wide and he
reeled backward. It was his movement that had startled Malcolm and
thereby sealed their fate.
He jerked up, eyes wide, and then a sudden gust of wind that led
to a half-second struggle for balance that Lacey ultimately lost.
But not before grabbing Malcolm’s shoulders in panic and pulling
him after.
Shit, she thought.

Malcolm was screaming, and the ground was rushing toward them,
and Lacey ruminated on the sick inevitability of it all. If she’d
only been able to fall in love with Scott, to look past his
moderate deficiencies in bed and focus on the good man beneath,
this would never have happened. Hell, if she’d been able to fall
in love with Gretchen’s tongue this would never have happened.
She thought about the headlines that would be in the Daily
Caller the next day. It would be the type of story that people
would snicker over and post above water coolers, or forward to
their friends in an email. Maybe someday some half-wit “writer”
would try to capture it in a short story that would go forever
unpublished.
She thought of what her Mom would say. Shit, maybe. Or maybe
something else. Or maybe nothing at all.
She thought about the wide eye of the moon and how she had
thought that maybe God really was watching, and she wondered if
the wind she’d felt upon her shoulder blades was really the hand
of God and that this sad end was maybe his punishment. She hadn’t

8
gone to Catholic school like Malcolm, but she had been raised
Methodist and so had enough guilt in her to at least entertain the
possibility.
Fuck that, she thought. Don’t be stupid-
And then the ground met them and she thought nothing at all.

Kavanaugh’s prick was buried deep in Mindy’s ass when something

fell past the window, screaming.
He stopped, looked up.
“What?” Mindy breathed. She was face down on the desk and hadn’t
heard it.
Maybe he hadn’t either.
“Nothing,” he said, and kept going.

© 2007 by Scott Milder