Page 65 of Faking the Heat

“Hey. I packed a box for you. Can talk about arrangements to pick up / drop off your stuff whenever. Sounds like you’re settled.”

I read it three times. The words are so practical they feel like a physical blow. “Arrangements.” That’s what we are now, a logistical puzzle to be solved, a series of items to be redistributed like assets in a corporate merger. He’s offering me a polite exit because he thinks I need one. He’s being the hero again, sacrificing whatever we were, whatever we almost were, to make sure I’m “safe” back in my own world. He doesn’t realize that his version of safety feels like an isolation ward.

My thumbs hover over the glass. My heart rate spikes, a frantic rhythm against the stillness of the room. I type out: I don’t want to be settled. I want to be back in your bed. I want to be the person you see when you wake up. I want to tell you that the fake anniversary dinner was the most real thing I’ve ever felt.

I delete it. I type: Is that it? Just arrangements? After everything?

I delete that too. The truth is too heavy, and I’m already carrying enough boxes today. The fear of rejection, of him confirming that he truly is done with me, keeps my fingers locked. I settle on two words that feel like a lie in my throat, words that are small enough to fit through the narrow door I’ve built for myself.

Sounds fine.

I hit send and immediately want to throw the phone across the room. I’ve spent my entire life being the “sounds fine” girl. The girl who gets the grades, picks the safe career, and dates the corporate lawyer because it’s what people like my parents expect. I’ve built a career on perfectionist precision, on hex codes and bleed margins and making sure every element of a brand identity is exactly where it’s supposed to be. And here I am, in an apartment snapped perfectly to the grid, feeling like I’m suffocating in a unit that has never once had me in it.

The phone goes off in my hand before I can set it down, and for one stupid second I think it is him calling.

Mom.

I let it ring twice while I arrange my face, which is a thing I do, and which I have never once examined.

“Sweetheart! Did you get in all right? Is the new place clean? Your father wants to know about the water pressure.”

“It’s great, Mom. Everything’s great.” I look around at the unopened boxes and the eggshell walls and the cat sulking in the bedroom. “The water pressure is excellent.”

“And Sterling? Is he helping you with the boxes? Men are useless at boxes but they’re very good at the heavy things. I’m so happy you guys got a better place, less drafty.”

And there it is. She doesn’t know. Of course she doesn’t know. They drove home on Sunday carrying a whole story that I put in their heads, and in that story I am a woman in love.

“He’s on shift,” I say. Which is not a lie. It is simply a true thing, arranged into the shape of a different one.

“Well. When things settle down, the two of you should come out. Your father has been talking about the lake again.”

And then I hear myself say it. “Actually, I was thinking I’d come and see you. In the next few days, maybe. Just me. I could drive out Thursday or Friday.”

The pause on the other end lasts about half a second, and I can hear her recalculating inside it.

“Just you?”

“Just me. It’s been a lot, Mom. I want to see you.”

Which is true. It is also the single most efficient sentence I have ever produced for getting somebody off a telephone, and I know the difference even while it is leaving my mouth. If I am at my parents’ house on Thursday then there is a plan, and if there is a plan then nobody has to ask me what I intend to do about anything. Including me.

“Well,” my mother says, warm and surprised and faintly suspicious. “That would be lovely, darling.”

I hang up and put the phone face down on the counter.

Two conversations in ten minutes, and I have told the truth in neither of them.

I need to work. I need to drown out the silence with the frantic, clicking rhythm of a mouse. I pick up Bowie, who lets out a huff of feline indignation, and flip open the laptop. I open my professional portfolio, intending to tweak the layout for a new client in a desperate bid for normalcy, but my hand stops dead on the trackpad. In the margins of a mock-up for a boutique distillery, right next to a series of elegant serif fonts and color swatches for ’burnt umber’ and ’aged copper,’ is a doodle. It’s not a logo. It’s a charcoal sketch of a man’s jawline, the slight graying at his temples, and the specific way his eyes crinkle when he’s trying not to laugh at one of his own bad jokes about cereal.

I didn’t even realize I’d drawn it. It’s a muscle memory. I’ve been integrating Sterling into my future for years without even knowing it. He’s in the margins of my work because he’s the only thing that makes the work feel real. He’s the only person who ever looked at my messy, anxious, obsessive brain and didn’t try to manage it or polish it for a client presentation. He just... loved it. He told my father my ambitions weren’t a hobby. He defended my life while I was too busy being afraid of it.

I close the portfolio and open the New York offer. I have read it eleven times and I still scroll straight to the bottom, because the bottom is where the clock is. They need an answer by the thirtieth. Two weeks. It is phrased very graciously, the way people phrase a thing when they assume the answer is obviously yes and they are only being polite about the formality of asking. It’s the wrong kind of safe. It’s a high-rise office and a six-figure salary and a life where I’d never have to worry about a gas leak again. But it’s a life without the sound of Station 99’s sirens in the distance. It’s a life without the man who knows exactly how I take my coffee and why I hate the color mustard.

The doorbell rings, a sharp, buzzing intrusion that makes me jump. For a split second the hope is so intense it’s painful, and I have to set the mug down before I drop it. Maybe he couldn’t handle the arrangements either. Maybe he’s outside with a pizza and that lopsided grin, ready to tell me he was wrong.

I pull the door open, my breath caught in my chest. It’s not Sterling. It’s Kayla, holding two large cups of tea and looking at me with the kind of brutal honesty that usually precedes an emotional bruising. She’s wearing a shirt that says ’Ban Comic Sans’ and her hair is piled into a messy pony that looks like it’s trying to escape the elastic.

“You look like hell,” she says, stepping past me into the pristine hallway without waiting for an invitation. “And this place smells like a hospital ward. Where’s the cat? I need something to pet that doesn’t look like it’s about to have a nervous breakdown.”