Page 37 of Faking the Heat

Her whole body registers it before her face does. “Talk about what.”

“Don’t.” It comes out gentler than I mean it to. “Four days. You’ve been getting up at six. You hate six.”

“I’ve had a lot to do.”

“I know.” I let that sit. “I’m not asking you to explain it. I’m asking whether we’re going to keep pretending the power didn’t go out.”

She wraps her arms around her middle, holding her own ribs together. She is staring at the indigo like it owes her something.

“Have you ever thought about it?” I ask. I say it so quietly the words nearly go under the air conditioning. “Not the performance. Not the notebook or the rules or the safe words. Just, us. Could we ever be more than a thing we’re doing?”

The air goes out of the corner.

I watch her, waiting for a sign. I think about the way she stood on that curb in the firelight, the only solid thing in a world of ash. For one heartbeat I think she is going to say yes. I see the hesitation, the softening at her mouth.

Then the wall goes back up. I can see the exact moment, the fear crossing her face before she buries it under Peterson logic and a broken heart. I’m just the guy standing in the blast zone.

“Sterling.” Her voice belongs to a stranger three rooms away. She will not look at me. “The agreement was about my parents. It was about survival. Real things can break. They always do. We’re better as a lie that works than a truth that destroys us.”

The silence after it is absolute.

And then something in my chest closes, the way a door closes at the end of a shift, and I let it. I do not have room for this. I have room for the mission.

I let out a short, sharp laugh, the hollow one I use at the station when a call goes bad and the crew still has to get back in the rig. I push off the wall and straighten my jacket with a jerky motion that feels like it belongs to somebody else, then focus on my cuffs, adjusting buttons that do not need adjusting.

“Right.” My voice comes back dry, an octave low. “The performance. Sorry, Sparkles. Method-acting a little hard. Got to stay in character if we’re winning the Oscar.”

I offer her a smile but it’s just equipment. For the first time in six years there is something jagged in me that will not tuck away, and I see a flicker in her eyes, regret, maybe, or just more fear, and I do not let it in.

“I’m going to find the bar,” I say. “Acting is thirsty work. Stay here. Enjoy the void. I’ll be back before your mother notices the leading man is missing.”

I walk away and I don’t look back.

The bar is at the far end of the gallery, a slab of white marble with a kid in a black vest working it. I ask for bourbon, neat, and he pours something that costs more than my boots. The first one goes down like it has somewhere to be. I order a second and hold it and look at nothing.

“Sterling.”

Robert Peterson sits down two stools over with the deliberateness of a man who has decided to be casual about something. He sets his own glass on the marble and turns it a quarter turn, lining the base up with a seam in the stone.

“Sir.”

“Robert. Please.” He watches the room for a while. Out on the floor Carol is holding court, and somewhere behind her, in a dim corner in front of a blue painting, his daughter is standing alone. “She always did disappear at these things. Even as a girl. Twenty minutes in and you’d find her behind a coat rack with a book.”

“She’s not hiding,” I say. “She’s working.”

He looks at me.

“Look at the room,” I say. I do not particularly plan to say any of this. The bourbon has loosened the bolts and the shift in my chest has done the rest. “The logo on the program. The type on the wall placards, the way it steps down from the artist’s name to the medium so your eye goes in the right order and you never notice you were told what to do. The sign that got you from the lobby to the coat check without you having to ask anybody. Somebody made all of that. Somebody sat with it for weeks and moved things a millimeter at a time until the room worked.”

“I’m sure that’s true.”

“It’s true here.” I set the glass down. “It’s true at Station 99. We’ve got exit signage in that building that a woman I’ve never met chose the color of, and I have crawled under smoke on my elbows and found a door because of it. That’s not decoration, Robert. That’s someone deciding, in advance, in a quiet office, that a stranger is going to get out of a building.”

Robert Peterson does not say anything. He turns his glass another quarter turn.

“You said aesthetic choices,” I say. “Earlier. Like it’s what she does instead of something serious.”

“I didn’t mean, ”