Page 85 of Faking the Heat

I look down at myself.

I am wearing flannel pyjama bottoms with small woodland creatures on them and a T-shirt from a 5K I did not finish, and I have slept eleven hours with my hair wet, so the left side of my head has made a decision that the right side has not been consulted on. There is a cat on the counter who is not supposed to be on the counter. There are eleven unopened boxes in my living room.

I open the door anyway, and that is the whole of my personal growth right there, in one movement, at ten past eight in the morning.

Sterling Hayes is standing in my hallway.

He’s showered. He’s shaved. He’s in the grey Henley I once told him made him look like a man who owns a canoe, an insult he has evidently been carrying around like a medal. He looks like he has slept for about eleven hours himself and is still not caught up.

And he’s holding the blue notebook.

Neither of us says anything for a second that goes on considerably too long.

“Your hair,” he says.

“I’m aware of my hair.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything about your hair.”

“You said the word hair, Sterling.”

“I did do that.” He shifts his weight. “Can I come in? I’ve been standing in this hallway for four minutes working up to knocking, and a woman came out of 3A and looked at me like I was casing the building.”

“That’s Mrs. Alvarez. She looks at everybody like that.”

“Right.” A pause. “Mandy.”

“Come in.”

He comes in, and my apartment immediately becomes a smaller apartment, which is a thing he does to rooms.

He stops three steps inside and I watch him take it in, and I know exactly what he is seeing, because I have been standing in the middle of it since five o’clock this morning with a mug going cold in my hand.

The boxes are still boxes. But the long wall, the blank white one I have been treating like an accusation for a week and a half, is covered.

I did it at four in the morning because I could not sleep and I had a roll of masking tape. Every layout I have going. The distillery identity. The community kitchen work. Colour studies. Two full alphabets I drew by hand in an evening because it was that or lie in the dark. It’s a mess. It’s the least symmetrical thing I have ever put on a wall in my life.

And in among all of it, because I did not sort them out and I was not expecting anybody, there are about nine drawings of him.

He doesn’t say anything for a long moment.

“That’s my kitchen,” he says at last.

“It is.”

“That’s Bowie on my bookshelf.”

“He was up there for two hours. I had time.”

He moves closer to the wall. He puts one hand out and doesn’t quite touch the paper, the way people do in galleries, and I have to physically stop myself from telling him it’s all rough.

“This is from the fire escape,” he says.

“Yes.”

“You weren’t drawing anything on the fire escape. I’d have noticed.”

“I drew it afterwards. I do that.” My face is extremely hot. “I draw things afterwards.”