Page 45 of Faking the Heat

“Cereal,” I whisper. “Though right now I’d settle for a very large glass of something stronger.”

He laughs, a low rumble I feel through my palms where they’ve ended up flat on his chest. He leans down and presses a quick, firm kiss to my forehead. It isn’t for an audience. The door is still shut. There’s nobody in the room but us and Bowie, who is watching from the top of the dresser with narrow, judgmental eyes. “Let’s go, Sparkles. Showtime.”

The second I open the door the loft floods with my mother’s perfume, something floral and expensive and suffocating that cuts through the industrial air like a blade. Robert and Carol Peterson come in on a rolling symphony of suitcases and expectations. My father doesn’t say hello before he’s inspecting the kitchen island, his brow furrowed with the intensity of a man who suspects a hidden fault in every surface. He tests the quarter-turn faucet and nods slightly when the water pressure meets his standards.

“It’s just so much more sensible,” Mom says, patting my cheek as she breezes past toward the guest room with the confidence of a conquering general. “And the light in here! Mandy, you must get so much work done. Though I imagine Sterling is quite the distraction.”

She winks at him, and heat crawls straight up my neck and settles in my ears.

Sterling doesn’t miss a beat. He steps up behind me and hooks an arm around my waist, pulling me back against him. It’s a practiced move by now, the stance we refined over the last week, but my body reacts like it’s the first time, every time. “She’s the distraction, Carol.” His voice is smooth and easy, dripping the kind of charm that makes my mother beam. “I’m just the guy who makes sure she eats lunch while she’s changing the world one logo at a time.”

We spend the afternoon playing house and it is the most exhausting high-wire act I have ever performed. Every movement is calculated. Every look has to be calibrated. I watch the way Sterling handles my father out on the rooftop deck, fielding questions about risk assessment and station life with a steady, unhurried patience. He doesn’t just tolerate them. He handles them. He makes my father laugh, which is a rare sound, and he listens to my mother’s decorating opinions as though they’re worth something. He’s too good at this. He’s so good at it that I have to look at the floor for a second. I’m using my parents as an excuse to stay in his bed, to keep waking up in his arms, and the guilt of it is a physical weight sitting behind my ribs.

As the afternoon fades into a bruising Chicago sunset the loft feels smaller. My mother has organized the pantry, which means I can no longer find the coffee, and my father is lecturing Sterling about the importance of checking fire extinguishers every six months, an irony Sterling absorbs with a straight face and a respectful nod. I watch them from the kitchen and feel like a ghost in my own life. My sketchbook is on the counter, and it’s the only thing here that feels like mine, and even its pages are full of him.

By dinner the tension has reached a fever pitch. We’re at the heavy wooden dining table, the city lights coming through the windows behind us like a thousand small witnesses. My mother is talking about wedding venues back home in Michigan City, her voice a cheerful staccato that makes my ears ring. She’s onto guest lists and floral arrangements for when the time comes, weaving a net around us that I have no idea how to cut.

“Of course, we’re not rushing you,” Mom says, which we all understand to mean she has already called three caterers and a florist. “But it’s good to have a plan. Stability is everything, Mandy. Especially after, well. After that Derek fiasco. We just want to see you settled with someone who has both feet on the ground.”

The name lands like cold water. The table goes briefly silent. My father looks up from his steak, eyes sharp behind his glasses.

“A/C seems good in here,” he says, changing the subject in one of the only ways he knows how. “But how’s the heating? These old warehouses get drafty. You want to make sure the insulation is up to code.”

“It’s fine, Dad.” My voice sounds distant even to me. I feel like I’m watching this dinner down a long dark tunnel. I look at Sterling. He’s sitting there perfectly composed in a dark button-down that makes his shoulders look impossible. He’s the hero in the dress shirt, the steady thing in the middle of my weather. He looks like everything they want for me. He looks like the safety I’ve been running toward since the fire.

And then, under the table, out of sight of everybody, his hand finds mine. He doesn’t just hold it. He hooks his fingers under the edge of my chair, an invisible line that pulls me back into the room.

It’s nothing, really. It’s the only thing keeping me from floating off into a panic attack. He’s holding me together while the lie we built starts to feel like a room with no door in it, and I understand, sitting there with my mother mid-sentence about June versus September, that the worst part of this charade isn’t the duplicity or the fear of being caught. It’s that I’ve stopped pretending with myself. I don’t want the two weeks to end. I don’t want to move back into whatever empty unit the landlord eventually shakes loose for me. There is a message in my inbox from four days ago that says structural assessment ongoing, no tenant timeline available at this stage, and I have read it eleven times, and every single time I have felt the same small disgraceful flicker of relief. I want the closet with his shirts in it and the morning light that’s too honest.

My mother keeps going. Sterling’s thumb starts moving in slow strokes across the back of my hand. It’s a promise, or a warning, or the only true thing at this table, and for the first time I let myself wonder whether he’s staying in character because he has to, or because he doesn’t want to come out of it either.

Chapter twenty-one

The Pillow Barrier

Sterling

My bedroom is not small.

It is a converted warehouse space with ten-foot windows and exposed Douglas fir beams and enough floor to run a drill in, and at this moment it has roughly the breathable atmosphere of a submarine with a bad seal. Mandy’s parents are in the guest room. Twenty feet of hallway and one sheet of drywall that the contractor put in as a formality.

Robert has been asleep for eleven minutes. I know because I have been counting. The man snores like a diesel engine turning over in the cold, a long rattling pull, then a pause just lengthy enough that you start doing math about his airway, then another pull. Carol has not made a sound, which is worse. Carol is the one who putters at six.

Mandy is on the far side of the bed holding her pillow against her chest like a riot shield.

She is in a navy silk sleep set that I have decided to have no opinion about. Her glasses are still on. Her shoulders are somewhere in the vicinity of her ears. She has been standing in that exact spot for ninety seconds without moving, and I have run enough scenes to know what I am looking at, which is a person about four minutes from a full stress response over a sleeping arrangement in a bed she has already slept in.

Twenty hours ago I had this woman in my shower.

I am aware of that. I am aware of it in the way you are aware of a live wire in standing water.

I have made a career out of walking into rooms where everyone is panicking and being the one who isn’t. I have a voice for it, low and slow and faintly bored, and I have watched it pull twenty points off a stranger’s heart rate in under a minute.

It has never once worked on Mandy Peterson.

So I go with the other thing.

“Okay,” I say. “I’m going to need you to stop holding that pillow like you’re about to be deposed.”