Page 90 of Faking the Heat

“That was the worst sixty feet of my life.”

“That was the moment,” she says.

I turn my head to look at her.

“That was the moment I knew,” she says. “Not the dance. Not the dress. I was standing on the other side of Michigan in a blanket that smelled like a truck, and I watched you stay in that doorway with your hand out for the next person coming down, and I thought: he isn’t going to come and get me. He’s going to trust me to handle it.” Her fingers tighten. “Nobody has ever trusted me to handle anything in my life. Everybody’s always arrived.”

And there it is. Six years of being the man who arrives, and the thing that finally landed was the one time I didn’t.

“I nearly came,” I admit.

“I know you did.”

“There was a probie on the door and a hundred people above the fourth and I was the ranking officer standing in that doorway, and I stood there and did the arithmetic on whether I could live with myself, and it was very close.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Good,” she says, and she says it fiercely. “Don’t. Ever. I don’t want the man who leaves the door.”

The radiator comes on somewhere with a knock and a hiss. Bowie relocates to somewhere less structurally sound. Outside, a garbage truck is reversing down her street, and it is Thursday, and I am going to have to be at the station at eight tomorrow morning and I do not care about a single thing in the world.

“I’m going to need a new rule,” I say.

“For the notebook?”

“For the notebook.”

She reaches over and gets it and finds the red pen, which she has apparently also kept, in a drawer, in a different apartment, for reasons neither of us is going to examine this morning.

“Go on then,” she says.

“Rule Thirteen.” I take the pen off her. “No expiry date.”

I write it in badly, because my hands are still not entirely steady, and she looks at it for a long moment with her chin on my shoulder.

“That’s not a rule,” she says. “That’s a lease.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

“Sign it, then.”

So I do.

Chapter thirty-eight

Morning Light

Mandy

We stayed on the floor of my living room until the light moved off the wall. Then we went out and had breakfast at two in the afternoon like a pair of criminals, and afterwards Sterling stood in the middle of my apartment looking at eleven unopened boxes and a mattress on a frame, and observed, with enormous diplomacy, that the place had a lot of potential.

So we came back here. Both of us and the cat, in one trip, because between us we own almost nothing that isn’t a book.

I still have the lease on Chandler Street and I am not giving it up. There is a wall in there covered in masking tape and forty drawings, and it is the first room that has ever been only mine, and I am going to need somewhere to work out of until I find a storefront with a window I can put my name on. But I didn’t sleep there last night.

The gray dawn filters through the warehouse windows in soft, dusty shafts, illuminating the aged red brick and the heavy industrial beams of the loft. I stay very still, my head resting on Sterling's chest, listening to the slow, steady thump of his heart. It's a rhythmic, grounding sound, nothing like the frantic mechanical screech of the fire alarm that started this whole mess weeks ago, or the careful, echoing quiet of a rented one-bedroom four blocks from a building that burned. Here, in the center of his bed, the world feels anchored.