Page 81 of Faking the Heat

I stare at the page until the ink bleeds a little in the humidity of the car. I’ve spent my whole life keeping one foot out the door, treating every relationship like a lease I could break if the risk of heartbreak got too high. Then I used the phrase fake dating like a shield, a way to have the intimacy I wanted without ever admitting I was terrified of losing it.

But the fire taught me that everything is temporary. Everything can burn on a single Tuesday morning. The only thing that stays is the person who grabs your cat and your laptop and tells you to run, and then spends the next three months making sure you never feel the cold.

I don’t want the clean start. I want the messy, loud, terrifyingly real life in Chicago. I want an arrangement with no expiration date on it. I want to be the girl who stays.

***

I make the call at two o’clock from my own kitchen table, because I decided somewhere on the drive back that if I am going to say these things out loud I am going to say them standing in the middle of the life I am asking to keep.

Her name is Diane Okafor and she is the creative director and she has been extremely gracious in eleven emails that I have not answered. She comes up on the screen against a wall of exposed brick with a headset on and a coffee she has clearly forgotten about.

“Mandy. Finally.” She’s smiling. She has no idea. “I was starting to think you’d emigrated.”

“I’m sorry about the delay.”

“Don’t be. Everyone takes a fortnight.” She pulls the coffee toward her. “So. Tell me what you need to hear and let’s get you on a plane.”

And here is where my throat closes, because there is a version of the next ninety seconds where I say something pleasant and non-committal and ask about relocation packages, and I can feel that version sitting right there, fully formed, entirely available.

I put my hand flat on the envelope.

“I’m not going to relocate,” I say.

The pause that follows is about a second long and seems like it lasts a week.

“Okay,” Diane says. Her voice hasn’t changed but her face has, very slightly. “Say more.”

“I want to work with you. I’ve wanted to work with you since I saw the Merrow rebrand in my second year and I have a folder on my laptop that is embarrassing in its thoroughness.” My voice is doing something wobbly at the edges and I keep going anyway. “But I’m not moving to New York. My life is in Chicago. So, what I’d like to propose is that I come on as a consultant rather than staff. I keep my own studio here. I keep my own clients, which I know is the part you’re going to have a problem with. And I fly out once a quarter for anything that genuinely has to happen in a room.”

Silence.

Diane sets the coffee down. She takes the headset off, which I have learned over four years of client calls is almost never good.

“You understand this is the associate creative director role,” she says. “On the Whitlock account. That is not a consultancy.”

“I know.”

“We have people who have been at that firm nine years waiting for it.”

“I know that too.”

“Then help me out, because I have to walk into a room at four o’clock and explain this to two partners.” She leans back. “Why would we do that?”

And this is the part I did not write on the envelope, because I did not know it until my mouth is already open.

“Because you didn’t come to me for a New Yorker,” I say. “You’ve got eleven hundred of those in a two-mile radius. You came to me because you saw the Halberd work and the distillery identity and the thing I did for the community kitchen on Ashland, and every single one of those was made here, by somebody who lives here. If you move me to Lafayette Street and put me in a room with the same forty people who look at the same things, you get a slightly worse version of what you already have. If you leave me where I am, you get the thing you actually wanted.”

I stop. My heart is going like a bird in a box.

Diane doesn’t say anything for four seconds, which I count.

“Say the studio part again,” she says.

“I keep my own studio.”

“Do you have one?”

And there it is. The actual question. The one that is going to sink this, because the honest answer is that I have a laptop, a rented one-bedroom that smells of paint, and a cat who does not respect furniture.