Page 80 of Faking the Heat

Crossroads

Mandy

The smell of fresh latex paint and industrial carpet cleaner ought to feel like a victory. It ought to smell like the end of a long, smoking nightmare. Instead, standing in the middle of this living room at nine in the morning with my hair still smelling of somebody else’s fire, it just smells like someone else’s life.

I got in at two. I did not sleep. At some point around four I stopped pretending to and sat on the floor with my back against the sofa and my laptop open on my knees, and I read the offer from the studio in New York for the twelfth time, and then I started writing.

Not a reply. A list.

It is on the back of an envelope from the insurance company, because that was what was within reach, and it is four lines long, and I have crossed out and rewritten every one of them at least twice. It has been sitting on the counter ever since, face up, where I have to look at it every time I go past.

Bowie sits by the door, his brown and orange tail twitching with rhythmic suspicion. He doesn’t recognize the floorboards. He’s spent the last few weeks pacing the wide drafty expanses of Sterling’s loft, conquering the heights of industrial bookshelves and annexing the territory of a firefighter’s heart. Now he looks around this cramped one-bedroom and produces a vocalization that is unmistakably a review. He’s looking for the specific drafty corner of the warehouse. Or maybe he’s just waiting for a man in a department hoodie to come through the door with a handful of expensive treats and a joke I don’t deserve.

The offer has been sitting in my inbox for two weeks like a ticking clock, and the clock runs out today. A prestigious firm, the kind of place where people say synergy and disruption without irony. Six figures. A corner office in a city where the air doesn’t taste like the man I’ve spent six years trying not to love.

It’s the clean start my parents have always pushed for. It’s the independence I told myself was the only goal that mattered when I was trying to outrun the shadow of Derek’s control. So why does it look like a floor plan for a very expensive, very lonely cage?

I take it to Kayla at eleven, because I am not brave enough to do this without at least one person having seen it first.

The Inked Teacup is in the lull between the morning rush and lunch, and she is restocking the loose-leaf jars behind the counter with the grim efficiency of a woman who has been on her feet since five. She takes one look at me, puts down the scoop, and pours two cups without asking.

“You look like you slept in a hedge.”

“There was a fire at the Hilton.”

“I heard about the fire at the Hilton. It was on the news at seven, and you were not in any of the footage, which I checked, twice, like a normal person.” She sits down. “Talk.”

I put the envelope on the table between the mugs and slide it across.

She reads it. It takes her about nine seconds, because it is four lines.

Then she reads it again, more slowly, and when she looks up her eyes have gone bright and she is doing a very poor job of pretending otherwise.

“Mands.”

“Is it insane?”

“It’s completely insane,” she says. “They’re a hundred and forty people on Lafayette Street with a waiting list. You’re one designer in a rental with a cat. You have absolutely no leverage whatsoever.” She taps line three with her fingernail. “This one especially. This one is genuinely outrageous.”

“So I should take it out.”

“Don’t you dare take it out.” She pushes the envelope back across the table at me. “Do you know how long I sat on the idea of this place before I did it? Eleven months. I had the money in an account and a lease I could have signed and I sat on it for eleven months, because as long as it was an idea it couldn’t fail.” She wraps both hands around her mug. “Ask for the outrageous thing, Mandy. The worst that happens is they say no and you’re exactly where you are now, which, no offence, is in a rental with a cat.”

***

I drive out to Blanchard afterwards, which I have not done once since the morning of the fire.

I park across the street and just look at it. The building is a blackened shell, cordoned off with yellow tape flickering in the rising wind. I look up at the second floor. The window frames are charred skeletons, open to the weather. That’s where it happened. That’s where the person I used to be, the one who lived for perfect alignment and parental approval and the quiet suffocating stability of men like Derek, went up in smoke.

The gas leak didn’t just take my furniture. It took out the lie I’d been telling myself about what I needed and who I had to be to deserve it. I’ve spent weeks trying to rebuild that woman, hunting for her in paint swatches and New York job offers, and she is ash. She’s been gone since the moment Sterling Hayes picked me up off a curb and called me Sparkles.

Rain starts tapping the windshield, a slow rhythm matching the heavy pulse in my throat. I reach for the battered sketchbook on the passenger seat. My hands aren’t steady as I go through the pages. The whole evolution of me is there in graphite. Hurried sketches of the firehouse. Detailed studies of the way Sterling’s brow goes when he’s reading a maintenance log. The way his hands look, strong and scarred and infinitely careful, while he’s making coffee.

I find a blank page near the back and draw two paths.

On the left I sketch the New York skyline. I draw it the way I see it now, all sharp aggressive angles and cold glass, a silhouette of success that looks beautiful from thirty thousand feet and offers nowhere to sit down. It’s clean. It’s certain. It’s a life where I’ll never have to think about a twenty-four-hour shift or the smell of smoke, and where I’ll also never have to risk being actually seen.

On the right I draw a single heavy door. The door to Sterling’s warehouse. It isn’t perfect. I draw the scuffs at the bottom where the boots hit it. I draw the handle that’s a little loose, the one he keeps meaning to tighten and never does. It’s the door I recognize as home. Not because of the building, but because of the man on the other side of it, the man who makes better coffee than my mother and who treats my ambition as a strength rather than a symptom to be managed.