Page 44 of Faking the Heat

I carry her to bed.

I put her down on my side of it, which I do not point out and she does not mention, and she is asleep before I get the light off, curled on her side with one hand under her cheek and the other flung out into the space where I am about to be.

I stand there in the dark for a second longer than I need to.

Somewhere out there is a report I have to write and a family I have to think about and a chief who is going to ask me on Monday how I’m doing in a tone that means he already knows.

None of it is gone. That is not how any of this works. You do not get to wash it off.

But my hands are clean, and there is somebody in my bed who put them under the water and held onto them until they were, and I have run out of ways to call that anything other than what it is.

I get in beside her. She turns into me in her sleep without waking, the way I want her to every night for the rest of my life, and I put my arm over her and my face in her wet hair.

Six years.

I could have said something six years ago.

Chapter twenty

The Extended Arrangement

Mandy

The morning light in the loft is too honest. It pours through the floor-to-ceiling windows in great, unforgiving shafts. I wake up tangled in his legs, the heavy cotton of his sheets smelling like him, cedar, laundry soap, and that faint lingering woodsmoke that seems to live in his pores. For three minutes the world is quiet. No deadlines, no charred apartment, no complicated lies. Just the steady rhythm of his breathing against my neck and the fact that I don’t want to move. I want to stay in this suspended animation permanently, tucked into the heat of him where the rest of it can’t reach us.

Then my phone goes off on the floor, a frantic buzzing like a hornet in a glass jar. The vibration rattles against the concrete, a harsh intrusion into the peace. I grope for it, my fingers brushing the cold floor until I snag the charging cable and haul the thing up. The screen is a blinding white glare in the dim room. Mom.

I slide the bar to answer, my heart rate already climbing. “Mandy, darling! We’re just finishing up at the hotel.” My mother’s voice chirps before I can get a hello out. She sounds dangerously energetic, the tone she reserves for announcing that she has reorganized my spice cabinet by region of origin or found a flaw in a dress I spent three hundred dollars on. “Your father and I were talking. It’s just so silly for us to be all the way across town when you have all that lovely space in the loft. And since we’re staying an extra week to really get things settled...”

My heart doesn’t drop so much as perform a full Olympic dive into my stomach, sticking the landing with a nauseating thud. I sit up fast enough to jar Sterling awake. He groans, eyes blinking open, dark and heavy with sleep and momentarily confused. I press the phone closer to my ear and my voice comes out a thin strangled reed. “Staying? An extra week? Mom, I thought….”

“Well, your father wants to be thorough, and he is doing some business with someone he met at the gallery on Friday. Isn’t that wonderful?” Her voice is a steamroller of domestic intent. “The guest room is perfect, really. We’ll be out of your hair, but it’ll give us so much more time to get to know Sterling. He’s such a find, Mandy. Honestly, I don’t know how you kept him a secret for so long. Why waste money on a hotel when we can be together?” She pauses, and I can practically hear her ticking off a mental list of ways she intends to improve my life. “We’ll be there in two hours with the luggage. See you soon. Love you.”

She hangs up and I stare at the opposite wall. The exposed brick appears to be vibrating, wait, maybe that’s me. Sterling sits up beside me, the sheet falling to his waist, and rubs a hand over his face. His voice is gravelly and thick. “That sounded like a Carol Peterson ambush. What’s the damage, Sparkles?”

“They’re moving in.” The words feel like a sentence being handed down. I turn to look at him, my eyes wide. “They’re extending by a week. They’re moving into the guest room. In two hours. Sterling, the guest room.”

Sterling goes still. It’s that firefighter stillness, the way he looks when he’s assessing a patient for spinal trauma. He’s doing the math. The guest room isn’t a guest room anymore, it’s the room where I keep my salvaged life. Since the fire it’s been a makeshift storage locker for my singed clothes, my portfolios, and the twin bed I’m supposedly sleeping in to maintain our platonic roommate status. If they move into that room, they’ll see it in five seconds. It looks like a temporary camp, not the bedroom of a woman who lives, and likely sleeps, with her boyfriend.

“They think we’re a couple.” My voice climbs an octave as the panic sharpens. “Couples share bedrooms, Sterling. They don’t keep a secondary crash pad for when the mood strikes. If they take the guest room, I have to move in here. For real. All the way. We have to make it look like I’ve been sleeping in this bed for months.”

He looks at me, and for a second the witty retort he usually has cocked and loaded doesn’t arrive. He just looks at the empty side of his king-sized bed, his expression unreadable. “Okay,” he says quietly, and it grounds me. “Then we move you in. Right now.”

The next ninety minutes are a blur of frantic, high-stakes choreography. We don’t talk about the night before, the way it stripped everything down. We don’t talk about it because if we do I might actually come apart, and right now I need to be a pillar of deception. So we treat it as a tactical extraction. I haul my suitcases out of the guest room, my breathing shallow. Sterling clears out a massive section of his walk-in closet, shoving navy work shirts and charcoal suits to one side to open a gap for my sweaters and floral prints.

The closet is narrow, a cedar-lined box that smells like him and expensive leather. It’s a space built for one person, and as we squeeze into it the walls seem to come inward. Every time I turn to hang a blouse my shoulder brushes his chest. Every time he reaches for a bin on the upper shelf his arm grazes mine. It’s a constant electric friction that stands the hair up on my arms. I’m trying to fold a cashmere cardigan, fingers trembling so badly I can’t get the sleeves square, when he reaches over and takes it out of my hands. His hand rests over mine for a second, warm and calloused against my cold fingers.

“Breathe, Mandy.” He doesn’t look at me. His focus is entirely on the precision of the fold. He smooths the fabric with a care that seems far too intimate for a sweater. “It’s just clothes. We’ve handled a gas leak and a three-alarm fire. We can handle cotton-poly blends.”

“It’s not just clothes.” My voice is muffled by the rows of hanging shirts. The lavender of my shampoo is mixing with his cedar and making something new and confusing in the small space. “It’s the permanence of it. My prints are on your dresser next to your department photos. My toothbrush is in your holder. It looks like a life, Sterling. A real one. It feels like we’re erasing the line.”

He stops moving. He’s holding one of my framed prints, a geometric study of the L-tracks, and he looks at it for a long beat. He doesn’t say he likes it. He doesn’t say he wants it there. He just sets it carefully on the top shelf and adjusts the angle until it lines up exactly with the edge of the wood. “Maybe that’s not the worst thing,” he says, so low I almost lose it under the hum of the HVAC.

I open my mouth to ask what he means. I want to ask whether he’s still method-acting the perfect partner or whether the plates under our friendship have moved far enough to make a whole new continent. But the buzzer for the freight elevator lets out a sharp, demanding ring. A herald of doom in a cardigan.

“They’re here.” It comes out a squeak. I scramble out of the closet and nearly go over a pair of his fire boots. Sterling catches me by the waist, his grip firm and grounding, and doesn’t let go immediately. He holds me there in the little hallway between the bedroom and the main room, looking down at me, checking my face for signs of total meltdown.

“Remember the safe word?” A small crooked smile pulls at the corner of his mouth, the one he uses when he’s trying to head off a panic attack.