Page 97 of Faking the Heat

She lets out a shaky, wet laugh, her shoulders coming down as the tension finally starts to drain out of her. The fear in her eyes is being replaced by something warm and building. “You called Robert? You voluntarily initiated a phone call with my father? The man who grilled you for three hours about your pension?”

“I did. We had a long conversation about architectural drafting and his preferred brand of scotch. He’s not a bad guy when he isn’t trying to orchestrate your entire destiny. He just loves you, Mandy. He didn’t know how to show it without building you a cage. I think he’s finally worked out that I’m not the cage. I’m the open door.”

I hold the box a little closer to her and my hands are shaking now, a fine tremor I don’t usually let anybody see. It’s the most honest thing I have ever shown her, that the steady, stoic firefighter is currently terrified of a four-letter word. I’m not Saint Sterling right now. I’m not the hero in turnout gear. I’m a man who loves a woman so much that a life without her feels like going into a black room with no line to follow back out. The silence stretches between us, thick with six years of friendship narrowing down to a single point on a rug in the middle of a storm.

“So?” I say, barely over the wind. “What’s the answer, Peterson? It’s a dare. And I happen to know for a fact you have never once backed down from a dare in your life. Not even the one with the llama socks and the public sidewalk.”

“Yes.” It comes out fast, breathless, and certain. It isn’t a performance. It isn’t a calculation. “Yes, you idiot. Of course yes.”

She doesn’t wait for me to move. She launches forward with enough momentum to nearly put me on my back, and I catch her, my arms going around her waist as she buries her face in the crook of my neck. She’s crying for real now, big racking sobs of relief that go through my chest and find every hollow space I’ve kept guarded. I hold on tight and put my face in her hair and breathe her in, cedar, vanilla, the faint ink that always clings to her from long hours at the drawing table. I can feel her tears against my neck, and I know that the ghost of Derek and the pressure of her parents and the fear of her own success have all just been burned off by a much brighter fire.

I pull back enough to slide the ring onto her finger. It fits. She looks at it with her hand resting flat on my chest, the diamond taking the light off the tree, the colored bulbs throwing a small rainbow across her skin. She spreads her fingers and looks at it, not as a weight, but as a promise.

“You’re so dramatic.” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, but her smile could light the block. “A New Year’s Eve blizzard proposal? On the kitchen floor? Very on-brand for a man who makes his living responding to emergencies. You just couldn’t resist the high-stakes environment, could you.”

“I figured we needed a proper bookend.” I lean in until our foreheads touch. We’re cocooned in the warmth of the loft, the world outside frozen and inaccessible, a white void that only makes our island of light feel more permanent. “The first storm brought us together by accident. This one’s on purpose. The first one was a disaster. This one is just us. No smoke, no sirens. You and me.”

She reaches up and traces the line of my jaw, her touch light and grounding. “I used to think safe meant being alone, where nothing could break. You taught me safe is having somebody who knows exactly how you’re broken and stays anyway.”

I lean into her hand and close my eyes for a second while the weight of the last several months settles into something I can actually carry. We survived the fake dating, the meddling parents, the return of the toxic ex, and the private wars we each ran against our own hearts.

The grandfather clock starts to chime, heavy brass strokes marking midnight. One, two, three. The sound goes up into the high ceilings, announcing a new year and a new life. Outside the blizzard keeps howling, shaking the glass and rattling the frames, and in here the quiet is absolute. We don’t move off the rug. We stay right there on the kitchen floor, right where the Roommate Rules were drafted, where we shared breakfast sandwiches and quiet truths, and where I first understood that my life didn’t really start until she came through my door.

I kiss her, and it tastes like salt and sparkling wine and the end of a very long, very crooked road. It’s a quiet kiss, slow and deliberate, the kind you give somebody when the performance is over and the real thing has finally started. There’s nobody to impress, no parents to appease, no ex-boyfriends to spite. There’s just the weight of her in my arms, the smell of the pine, and the fact of her.

“Best dare I’ve ever taken,” I tell her, low against her mouth.

The last chime fades out into the night. She pulls me closer, her hands knotting in the front of my hoodie, and neither of us says anything for a long time. She isn’t afraid of the ending anymore. I can feel it in the way she’s holding on. This isn’t a thing that’s going to burn out. It’s the one that’s just started to catch.

Epilogue II

Unexpected Timing - Mandy

The plastic stick is small, white, and currently the most terrifying piece of graphic design I've ever held. I'm sitting on the edge of the bathtub in the loft, the porcelain cold through my leggings, staring at the parallel pink lines. Two lines. Not one. Not a mistake. A very permanent, very tangible revision to the layout of my entire life.

It's 7:00 a.m. on a Tuesday in the first week of June, nine days after the wedding. The Chicago sun is just beginning to cut through the blinds, casting long, geometric shadows across the hexagonal tiles Sterling and I picked out four months ago. The loft was quiet except for the distant hum of the city waking up, the groan of an early-morning bus, the rhythmic click-clack of the 'L' train a few blocks over, but in here, the air felt thick enough to choke on. My legs feel like they've been replaced by wet sketches, wobbly and unreliable. My heart isn't hammering, it's doing a slow, heavy roll, like the swell of the lake before a storm.

I'm a designer. I'm supposed to be able to visualize things before they happen. I can kern a logo to the micrometer, balance a color palette for a brand launch, and predict exactly how a client will react to a Serif font. But this? This is a variable I didn't account for in the style guide. I look down at my hand, noticing the way my thumb rests just below the control window. My nails are painted a soft, muted sage, a color Sterling said reminded him of a forest after rain. Everything about my life has been filtered through his perspective lately. I like who I am when he's looking at me.

I hear the low hum of the burr grinder in the kitchen. The sound is steady, familiar. It's the sound of Sterling Hayes, a man who once looked at my one-slipper-and-cat-carrier situation on a burning sidewalk and decided I was worth the trouble. It's the sound of the life we've built out of ash and high-stakes lies. It's the sound of a man who takes care of the small things so I have the space to create the big things.

I stand up, my knees locking into place through sheer force of will. I wrap the test in a wad of toilet paper, then change my mind and shove it into the pocket of my cardigan. I need to see him. I need the person who has become my north star to tell me that the map just got a lot bigger. I catch my reflection in the mirror, pale, wide-eyed, a stray lock of dark hair falling over my forehead. I look different, though I know it's just my brain playing tricks. Six months ago, I was a woman whose biggest fear was my mother's disapproval. Now, I'm a woman who is about to build a human being with my best friend.

I pad out into the main living space, my bare feet silent on the hardwood. The loft smells like dark roast and woodsmoke, a scent that still catches me sideways, the worst morning of my life and the safest one folded into the same breath. The exposed brick walls are lined with my framed prints now, interspersed with his vintage firefighter memorabilia. It's a perfect blend of our worlds, a visual representation of how two people who were never supposed to be more than friends ended up becoming everything to each other.

Sterling is at the counter, his back to me. He's wearing his department gray t-shirt, the one I've officially stolen about fifty times, and his hair is still damp from the shower. The muscles in his back shift as he reaches for the ceramic jar of coffee beans. He moves with a quiet, efficient grace that I never tire of watching. He's a man of action, of logistics, of structural integrity.

He doesn't turn around yet, but he knows I'm there. He always knows. He reaches for a mug, his movements precise and efficient, honed by years of military discipline and fire-line adrenaline. It's the same broad-shouldered silhouette that used to make me retreat into sarcasm, but now it's just home.

“Coffee's nearly up, Sparkles,” he says, his voice a low rumble that vibrates in the quiet of the morning. “Heavy on the cream, no sugar. Exactly how you like it when you're pretending you're ready to start the day.”

I stop at the edge of the kitchen island. I look at the coffee mug, a heavy, matte-black thing I bought him for his birthday. I look at him. My throat feels like I've swallowed a handful of dry charcoal. I was going to be witty. I was going to have a punchline ready. I had imagined this moment a dozen times in the five minutes I spent staring at the test in the bathroom, but all the clever scripts have evaporated.

“Sterling,” I say, and my voice breaks on the second syllable.

He turns, his expression already shifting into that focused, protective mask he wears when he senses a structural collapse. The humor in his eyes dies away, replaced by an instant, sharp concern. He sets the mug down on the granite with a soft clack.

“Mandy? What is it? You're pale.” He's across the kitchen before I can even blink, his hands coming up to hover near my shoulders, checking for injury or distress by instinct. “Did you have a nightmare? Is it the apartment? The gas? Tell me.”