Page 77 of Faking the Heat

“Derek, there’s a fire.”

“There’s a laundry room with a problem and about six hundred people standing in the street being told to stay off their phones,” he says. “It’s over. You just haven’t been told yet.” And he’s right, which is the thing about Derek. He is so often right about the small stuff, and he has spent years using that as collateral on the large stuff.

Behind him, a fifth engine comes up Michigan with its air horn going, and neither of us says anything until it’s past.

“Say it, then,” I tell him. “Whatever it is you wanted to say inside. You’ve come across four lanes for it.”

“All right.” He shifts his coat to the other arm. “I want you to come and work for us.”

That is not what I was braced for.

“Not for me,” he says quickly, reading my face, because he has always been able to read my face. “Not with me. Bellamy Kwon, on twelve. They’re rebuilding the entire brand from the studs and they have been looking for six months for someone who can do what you do, and I gave them your name last week and they came back inside a day. It’s a real offer, Mandy. Senior. Their own floor. Better than the New York number, and you’d sleep in your own bed.”

The wind comes off the lake and up the avenue and goes straight through the blanket.

“Why,” I say.

“Because you’re good and they’re stupid not to have you.”

“Derek.”

“And because I would like to be in a position where you occasionally have to be in the same building as me,” he says, “and I am aware of how that sounds, and I have decided to say it anyway.”

And there it is, and I have to hand it to him, because it’s the best offer he has ever made me. It’s not the town car and it’s not the ring and it’s not a lecture about stability. It’s a good job I would be genuinely excellent at, handed over by a man who is being, for possibly the first time in three years, honest about what he wants out of it.

Two months ago I would have taken it. Not the man. The job. I’d have taken the job and told myself the man was incidental, and eighteen months later I’d have been sitting in a restaurant on Randolph explaining to somebody that it was complicated.

“No,” I say.

He doesn’t flinch. He tilts his head slightly, waiting for the rest of the sentence, because in Derek’s experience no has always been the opening position.

“That’s it,” I say. “That’s the whole answer. No.”

“Mandy, you haven’t even,”

“For two years I mistook your certainty for security.” My voice comes out steadier than I expect. “I thought that because you always knew exactly what I should want, you must be the only person who could give it to me. And I spent two years feeling like I was failing at a life I never actually picked, and thinking the fact that it made me miserable was ingratitude. Because you’d built it. And it was a very good life. And who was I to be unhappy in it.”

“That’s not,”

“I’m not finished.” I don’t raise my voice. I don’t need to. “What you call stability is control. You didn’t want a partner. You wanted something you could polish and put on a shelf, something that fitted into your life without making any noise. You love the performance of love. You are extremely good at it. You have never once actually looked at me.”

Something moves behind his eyes. For a second there’s a person in there.

“And the job is the same offer,” I say. “It’s just wearing a suit. It’s you deciding what I should want and then arranging it for me before I’ve been asked. You’ve never in your life said, what do you think, Mandy. Not once. You say, I’ve spoken to somebody, I’ve had a word, I’ve put your name in. And then you wait for me to be grateful.”

“I was trying to help you.”

“I know. That’s the sad part. I don’t think you know the difference.”

The horn on the ladder truck goes and a crew moves past us at a jog, and Derek steps back to let them through, automatically, politely, and I watch him do it and feel absolutely nothing.

“He’s a firefighter,” Derek says at last, and it comes out smaller than he meant it to.

“He’s a paramedic and a firefighter and he’s sixty feet away and he hasn’t looked over here once, because there are people in that stairwell,” I say. “Do you want to know the difference between you and him? He’d have hated hearing what I just said. He would have argued with me about it for an hour. He’d have asked me what I thought.”

Derek looks at the far side of the street for a moment. He is a proud man and I have just taken something off him in public, and I brace for the last swipe, because there is always a last swipe.

It doesn’t come.