Page 67 of The Faceoff

“I want to hear you define tier three.”

“I’m not defining tier three, Sorensen, you know exactly⁠—”

“For the contract. For clarity. You’re the one who said define it properly now so we don’t relitigate⁠—”

“Kissing,” she says, fast and clipped, and there it is, the faint color coming up the side of her neck that she would deny under oath, the same one from the sidewalk, and she keeps her eyes hard on the page like the page did something. “Tier three is kissing. It’s pre-approved per instance. We discuss it before, not during, not as a surprise. It only happens if the situation genuinely requires it, and the situation will almost never genuinely require it, so this is largely theoretical.”

“Largely theoretical,” I repeat.

“Almost entirely.”

“You left yourself a window.”

“I left myself accurate language.” She points the pen at me. “Don’t read into the window.”

“I would never.”

“You’re reading into the window right now. I can see you reading into it.”

We get through rule four (no involving the real people in our lives more than necessary — her roommates know, my guys can suspect but don’t get confirmation, and Mormor absolutely does not find out, which Sloane writes in capital letters and underlines twice, and which makes me laugh out loud, because she has correctly identified the single greatest threat to both our peace). We get through rule five (a shared story, simple, mostly-true, which we already half-built at the bar). We get through rule six, which is logistics about texting frequency, and which is where it happens.

“We should be able to reach each other,” she says. “For coordination. So — exchange schedules, basically. I’ll text you mine, you text me yours, we flag the public appearances in advance.” She slides her phone across the counter. “I’ve already saved your number. I’ll just text you the rules so you have the document.”

And there it is. The small cliff I walk up to about four times a week and have to decide how to walk around.

Because she’ll text me the rules, and then they’ll be a wall of text on a screen, and reading a wall of text on a screen is a different sport for me than it is for her — it’s slow, and it’s effort, and it’s the kind of thing that’s fine when I’m alone with time and bad when someone’s watching and waiting for a reply. I can do it. I just can’t do it casually, and casual is the whole disguise.

“Just talk me through them now,” I say. “I’ll remember.”

She looks up. “It’s six rules with sub-clauses. You’ll remember six rules with sub-clauses?”

“I remember every line combination O’Grady’s run in three years and half of them don’t have names. I’ll remember six rules.”

“That’s a very specific deflection.”

“It’s not a deflection, it’s a skill.”

She doesn’t push it. That’s the thing — she looks at me for a half-second longer than the moment needs, the one she gave the clipboard in the back room and my shoulder at the bar, and I watch her decide not to chase it. She just slides the phone back, and says, “Fine. But you’re getting the document eventually. I’m not running this on your memory and good intentions.”

“Text it to me whenever,” I say, which is true, because whenever is a word that means when I have time alone to sit with it, and she doesn’t know that’s what it means, and someday she might.

“Rule seven,” she says, and her voice changes.

Not a lot. But I’ve spent a week learning the registers of this voice and this is a new one — flatter, more careful, the words coming out in the exact grammatical order of a person who has rehearsed them.

“You don’t get to be kind to me when no one’s watching.”

I wait, because I can tell there’s more, and because I’ve learned that the space after a Sloane sentence is sometimes where the real sentence lives.

“The whole thing only works if we both stay in our roles,” she says, to the page, not to me. “When we’re seen, fine. Do the arm, do the proximity, do the looking-at-me thing. That’s the performance, and I’m good at performances, and so are you, apparently. But when it’s just us — no audience, no one to convince — we’re business partners. Colleagues. You don’t buy me coffee when there’s no one around to see it. You don’t —” she stops, restarts, and I notice she’s using more words than she needs, which I’ve started to understand is the tell, the place where the true thing is “— you don’t do the small things. The unprompted things. Because that’s how people get confused, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Okay,” I say.

She looks up, surprised, like she expected me to fight it. “Okay?”

“It’s your rule. You get rules about how you’re treated. That’s the whole point of rules.” I turn the coffee cup a quarter-turn on the counter. “I don’t fully get it. But I don’t have to get it to agree to it.”

Something moves across her face that I can’t read, and I’m good at reading faces, and the fact that I can’t read hers is becoming the most interesting unsolved thing in my life. She holds my eyes for a second. Then she writes something next to rule seven — a checkmark, or a note, I can’t see — and her shoulders come down a fraction in the way Theo’s did at the bar, the way people’s do when a thing they were braced for didn’t hurt.