Page 87 of Faking the Heat

“I’m having a great time.” His voice comes out wrecked. “This is the best morning of my life and I would like a minute.”

So I stand in my own living room in pyjamas with woodland creatures on them and let a firefighter cry into his hands, and I do not touch him, because I have learned in the last three days that there is a kind of dignity you take away from a person by rushing over.

After a while he wipes his face with the heel of his hand, exactly the way his sister does, and looks up.

“Who told you,” he says.

“Told me what?”

“About the arithmetic.” He is watching me very carefully. “Somebody told you. That’s not a thing you’d have known to protect me from.”

“Your sister,” I say. “On Michigan Avenue. At about one in the morning while your hotel was on fire.”

“Of course she did.”

“She’s very frightening.”

“She’s the most frightening person I have ever met and she is five foot four.” He lets out a long breath and scrubs his face again. “What else did she tell you?”

“About Priya.”

“Ah.”

“The introducing thing. This is Sterling, he’s a firefighter.”

He nods slowly. He looks at the floor between his boots for a second.

“Yeah,” he says.

“Sterling.” I sit down on the box opposite him, which puts our knees about four inches apart. “I’m not going to do that. Not because I’ve made a decision not to. Because it would never occur to me. You are not a job that I’m dating. You’re the person who taped a list of rules to a fridge for me. You are the reason I know what a Halligan bar is, which has come up exactly twice and I was insufferable both times.”

He makes a sound that is half a laugh.

“And I need to say the other part,” I tell him, “because I have been saying everything except the other part for about three weeks.”

“Mandy,”

“No, I’m doing it. I’ve had four days and a burning hotel and a conversation with your sister to work up to this and if I don’t say it now I’ll be putting it off at Christmas.” I take a breath that goes all the way to the floor. “I’m in love with you. Not since the loft. Not since the arrangement. Since a long time before that, and I have been drawing your hands in the margins of other people’s logos for years and telling myself it was a habit.”

The rain has stopped outside. I hadn’t noticed it stop.

Sterling reaches over and picks the blue notebook up off the floor where he set it, and he turns it over in his hands like he’s forgotten what it’s for.

“Can I say the thing now,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Because I’ve had six years and a notebook and a two-thousand-mile flight from a medical student, and I have been standing in your hallway for four minutes, and I still don’t have a single word of it ready.”

“Sterling.”

“Yeah?”

“Just say it badly,” I tell him. “I don’t need it to be good. I’ve had the good version. The good version was fake.”

Chapter thirty-seven

Leap of Faith