Page 49 of Faking the Heat

She is laughing into the pillow again, but there is something underneath it now that has water in it, and I lie there and let her get to the end of it.

“They’re going to be so disappointed,” she says finally, very quietly. “When this ends. They’re going to be so disappointed in me and it’s going to be about me, it’s always about me, and you’re going to have to stand there while it happens.”

I move my hand.

I don’t make a thing of it. I reach across the ruin of the wall, past the cat, and find her hand where it’s resting on the sheet, and I don’t grab it. I just put mine against it and leave the decision with her, the way I have left every decision with her for six years, which I am beginning to understand was never actually generosity.

Her fingers turn over and slide between mine.

“You keep giving me the out,” she says.

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d rather have you than be right,” I say. “I told you that on the kitchen floor and it wasn’t a line.”

Her hand tightens. I feel her thumb move once across my knuckle, and then she goes still, and the loft is very quiet apart from the diesel engine down the hall and the cat.

“Don’t let go,” she says.

“Wasn’t going to.”

Her breathing evens out four or five minutes later, the way it always does, the way it has done on my couch through half the movies we have ever started. I know the exact second she goes.

I lie there for a long time after.

Safe. That’s the word she used the night of the fire, standing on the curb in a borrowed jacket with her whole apartment going up behind her. You always felt safe. It’s a beautiful word and it sits on my chest like a turnout coat full of water, because safe is what you say about a seatbelt. Safe is a sturdy roof and a good smoke detector and a man who shows up when the alarm goes off and leaves when it’s over.

I have spent six years being the place she lands when things go wrong. I would like, at some point before I die, to be the reason she stays.

Somewhere in her inbox there is a job in New York with a deadline on it. Somewhere in the guest room there is a woman who has already called three caterers. In six hours I am on a twenty-four starting at 0800 and this whole loft will resume being a stage set.

I look at our hands on the gray sheet, dark and tangled and absolutely not part of any rehearsal.

I am trained to know when a structure is failing. I can read a ceiling. I can tell you, standing in a hallway with zero visibility, how much time a room has left.

I have no read on this one at all, and I find that I do not care, and that is the single most alarming piece of information I have gathered all day.

I get up at five-forty to start the coffee, because Carol putters at six and because Mandy will sleep another two hours if the loft smells like a morning she doesn’t have to perform in.

The cat follows me out. He does not respect borders, but he does respect a person walking toward a kitchen.

Chapter twenty-two

Morning Revelations

Mandy

The loft smells like domesticity and impending absence. It's a specific blend: the sharp, acidic tang of dark roast coffee, the buttery richness of eggs hitting a hot skillet, and the faint, lingering scent of Sterling's cedar-wood shampoo. I lie in the middle of his bed, my arm draped over the hollow space where he was sleeping twenty minutes ago. The sheets are still warm, a fading ghost of his body heat that makes the morning feel quieter than it should. Outside the massive industrial windows, Chicago is beginning to wake up, a hazy gray light filtering through the clouds and casting long, skeletal shadows of the fire escape onto the floor.

I listen to the rhythm of the kitchen. There's the low, mechanical hum of the espresso machine, the rhythmic thwack of a spatula against the pan, and the creak of the cabinet door that always sticks. I know these sounds now. I've catalogued them like a designer fussing over leading, adjusting the space between one line and the next until the whole block breathes, fitting them into a new mental map of what home sounds like. It's a dangerous kind of knowledge, the sort that builds roots before you realize you've even planted them.

I pull his gray sweatshirt over my head, the oversized hem falling to mid-thigh. It's heavy and smells like laundry detergent and him, a combination that is rapidly becoming my favorite sensory experience. I've stopped looking for my own clothes in the suitcase living in the corner of his room. It stopped feeling like I was borrowing his things days ago; now, it just feels like belonging, which is a much scarier word than 'temporary.' I pad out to the kitchen, my bare feet silent on the hardwood, and find him already in his department jacket, his dark hair still damp from the shower.

He doesn't turn around when I enter, but he reaches for the second mug on the counter. “Morning, Sparkles.”

“How did you know I was awake?” I hook my heels on the rung of the stool and watch the way his shoulders fill out the navy blue fabric of the 'Saint Sterling' jacket. He's already in work mode, the focused, steady energy of a man prepping for a twenty-four-hour shift. The jacket looks official, intimidating even, but there's a smudge of flour on his cuff that reminds me he was just making pancakes for my parents yesterday.