Page 31 of Faking the Heat

The silence that follows in the cafe is heavy, charged with the leftover electricity of the encounter. I can feel the eyes of the other patrons on us, but for the first time, I don't care about the audience.

I sink back into my chair, the adrenaline leaving my system and leaving me hollow. Sterling sits down where Derek was, but the space feels entirely different now. It's no longer a courtroom; it's a sanctuary. The scent of sandalwood is gone, replaced by the honest smell of Sterling. He reaches across the table and takes my hand, his fingers interlacing with mine, anchoring me to the present. He doesn't let go.

“You okay, Sparkles?” he asks, and the protective heat is gone from his voice, replaced by a soft, genuine concern that makes my throat tighten. He looks at me like I'm the only person in the room, his thumb rubbing soothing circles over my knuckles.

“I'm fine,” I say, and for the first time today, it isn't a lie. “Thank you for coming. I just... I couldn't get his words out of my head. He has this way of making everything I want feel like a mistake, like I'm living a life I haven't earned. “

Sterling squeezes my hand, his expression darkening for a moment. “He's a ghost, Mandy. And ghosts only have power if you let them haunt you. You're not that girl anymore. The one who needs his permission to exist or his approval on anything that you do. You're the woman who walked out of a burning building with a cat and a laptop and kept going.”

I look at him, at the slight gray at his temples and the scar on his forearm, and the realization hits me with the force of a physical blow. Sterling isn't the fantasy Derek claimed he was. He's the most real thing I've ever touched. He's the man who sees the messy, anxious, obsessive parts of me and doesn't try to stifle them or file them down. He's the one who stayed when everything else burned down.

But his parting words echo in the parts of me I haven't healed yet. Men like him are the ones who build real lives. The logic of my parents, the expectations of my past, the fear of being 'too much' or 'not enough', they all feel like a cold wind blowing through the cracks in my confidence.

I want the fantasy. I want the heat and the kisses and the way Sterling says my name. But I'm terrified that Derek might be right, That eventually, the smoke will clear, the fake dating will end, and I'll be left standing in the ruins of something that was never meant to be more than a fake arrangement.

Chapter fifteen

The Aftermath of a Kiss

Sterling

Mandy is all elbows and tensed posture, her body angled away from where Derek stood, like she’s protecting something fragile from a draft. If she were a cat, her hackles would be up and she’d have shredded the napkin in front of her. As it is, her hands just work the stylus in a nervous loop, tap, twirl, tap, twirl, like she can draw an escape route through friction alone.

Kayla rounds the counter, mug in hand, and drops into the chair across from us. Her gaze is merciless, but not unkind. She lifts her mug, blows on the steam, and says, “I have never in my life seen a more convincing fake kiss.”

She lets it sit, the word “convincing” flexing with all the subtlety of a judge’s gavel. I look at Mandy, whose face goes a full shade redder. She’s lost somewhere between wanting to be swallowed by the faux-velvet chair and setting the entire café on fire to escape. Her chin tucks, she adjusts her glasses, and she inspects her cuticles like there might be a cheat sheet for emotional math written under her nails.

I reach for the cold brew Mandy abandoned, raise it, and sip like it’s the only thing anchoring me to the moment. I meet Kayla’s eyes. She’s already got the pin in the grenade, thumb hovering.

Kayla leans forward, elbows to tabletop, and ticks off points on her fingers. “First, the angle of the jaw. Second, the hand-to-face ratio. Third, the amount of time you both forgot there was an audience.” She looks at me, then at Mandy, then back again. “You two want to run that by me again?”

Mandy’s voice is faint and only barely controlled. “We were… selling the performance. It’s what the situation called for.” She says this with a kind of airy detachment, like she’s reading off a menu at a drive-thru window.

Kayla gives me the look, a wide, flat, piercing thing that makes me wonder how often she had to tune out liars on the other side of a bakery counter before she opened her own place. “Care to expand, Sterling?”

I shrug, letting my shoulders do half the talking. “It was tactical. Derek bought it.” I say this as if it cost me nothing, but the moment is already replaying on loop in my mind. The weight of Mandy’s jaw cupped in my palm, the micro-shiver that ran through her just before our lips met, the way she inhaled like she was coming up for air after a dive.

Kayla holds my gaze, studying it like she’s looking for a seam in a forged painting. The pause stretches long enough for the milk steamer’s hiss to cut through, then the bell over the door signals a new customer who beelines for a table by the window.

Mandy straightens, but doesn’t let go of the stylus. She pushes it flush against the table, then lines it up with the seam in the wood. She’s holding together by sheer force of will, her cheeks blotched, pupils too wide for the level of light.

Kayla leans back, fanning her face with a napkin. “If you two are faking it, you should take that show on the road.” She takes a slow sip of tea, her eyes dancing over the rim of the mug. “The way you grabbed her waist? The way she melted into you? That wasn’t tactical. That was tectonic.”

I clear my throat, fighting the heat climbing my neck. “It sold the story. Mandy needed...”

“...to make him jealous? Please.” Kayla cuts me off, turning to Mandy with a wicked grin. “Honey, you didn’t want to win. You wanted to climb him like a fire escape.”

Mandy’s face flushes deep crimson. She grips her stylus like a lifeline. “I wanted Derek to stop treating me like a problem he could solve with flowers and condescension.”

“Uh-huh,” Kayla says, not buying it for a second. She leans forward, elbows on the table. “And you...” she points her teaspoon at me, “...you looked like you forgot your own name.”

I shift in my seat.

She shakes her head, sighing like a disappointed mechanic looking at a totaled car. “You two keep saying ’for show,’ but your bodies aren’t reading from the same script.”

The new customer’s espresso order interrupts, Kayla excuses herself with a nod, leaving me and Mandy alone at the table. Mandy doesn’t fill the silence. I wonder if she’s rehearsing new ways to evade, or if she’s just exhausted from the emotional airstrike that was Derek in a cardigan and over-caffeinated charm.

Mandy finally looks at me, the stylus going still in her hands for the first time all morning. “Are you going to catch hell for this? Leaving your shift?”