Page 93 of Faking the Heat

Home Together

Mandy

Four months after I stopped being afraid of the smoke, I wake up at six on a Saturday because somebody in this apartment cannot find his other boot.

I lie there for a while with my eyes shut and listen to him not finding it. Sterling has a very particular sound when he is looking for something, a kind of low methodical shifting, and underneath it the specific rustle of a man trying extremely hard to be quiet in a building made entirely of concrete and echo. The refrigerator opens. Closes. A cabinet. The refrigerator again, which is not where boots live.

“Behind the drafting chair,” I say into the pillow.

A pause. “How do you know that.”

“Because on Thursday you took them off standing up, which you always do, and you were looking at the sketches on the wall, which you always are, so they’re behind the chair.”

Another pause. Then, from the other room, in the flat voice of a man who has just found his boot behind a drafting chair: “That’s deeply unsettling.”

This is what four months looks like. Not the big things. Not the night on the kitchen floor or the thing he said to my father at a bar he did not know I was standing behind. Just this, the accumulated evidence of two people who have stopped keeping score of whose apartment it is.

I get up eventually. The loft has changed in a way that happened so gradually I could not point at the day it did it. There is a second mug in the drying rack that has been there so long it has stopped being a guest. My drafting chair lives by the north windows now, permanently, and the industrial bookshelf that used to hold exactly four things holds my type specimens and a stack of his department manuals and a ceramic dish of miscellaneous hardware that neither of us can account for. Bowie has claimed the top of it and defends the position like a small furious general.

Sterling is in the kitchen in the boot and its partner, holding coffee, wearing the gray t-shirt I have been quietly stealing for six months and have now more or less annexed.

“You’re up early,” he says.

“Someone was conducting a search and rescue.”

“I was being considerate.”

“You opened the refrigerator twice.”

He hands me the mug he has already made, black, the way I take it, which he has never once had to ask about, and takes the second one for himself. We stand there at the counter not talking. The light is doing the thing it does at that hour, coming in long and low across the concrete, and out the window a garbage truck is working its way up the block with tremendous violence.

“Big day,” he says eventually.

“Don’t.”

“I’m just saying. Your name is on a window.”

“My name is on a window,” I agree, “and if one more person asks me about my five-year plan I’m going to lie down on my own floor.”

He puts his hand on the back of my neck, thumb moving slow along the top of my spine, and does not say anything reassuring, which is one of the approximately forty reasons I have stopped being able to imagine this any other way. He just stands there with his hand on my neck until the garbage truck gets to the end of the block.

It is a very ordinary morning. That is the whole thing about it. Nine months ago I stood barefoot on a curb in front of a burning building holding a cat carrier and a phone at eleven percent, and I would not have believed you if you had told me that the recovery from that would look like arguing about a boot.

He drives me over at ten. He has been to the studio eleven times now, more than I have, he helped run the electrical for the light table with a friend from the department who owed him something unspecified, and he spent a Sunday sanding the window frames because I said, once, in passing, that they caught. I did not ask him to do either of those things. I have learned that mentioning something within earshot of Sterling Hayes is functionally the same as filing a work order.

“Stop looking at it like that,” I tell him from the passenger seat.

“Like what.”

“Like you’re doing a size-up. It’s a building, not an incident.”

“Every building is an incident eventually,” he says, and pulls into the loading zone.

The light is exactly what I dreamed of. It's a clean, steady north-facing glow that spills across the wide-planked floors of my new studio, washing over the drafting table and the stacks of branding proofs like a benediction. There are no harsh shadows here, no flickering fluorescent hum to trigger a migraine, just the quiet, industrial elegance of a space that belongs entirely to me. Three blocks away, Kayla is probably steaming milk at The Inked Teacup, but here, the air smells like fresh white paint, expensive cardstock, and the faint, lingering scent of Sterling's cedar-wood cologne.

I adjust a framed logo on the brick wall, my fingers lingering on the glass. It's the satellite office for the New York firm, the one I negotiated for with a shaking voice and a heart full of terrifying certainty. They didn't just say yes; they gave me a budget for the storefront and a directive to build something real in Chicago. Looking at the gold lettering on the window, Peterson Design Studio, I realize the irony. My parents always wanted me to have a title. I just had to stop trying to earn their version of it before I could find my own.

This studio represents more than just a paycheck; it's a monument to the fact that I didn't have to run away to New York to be successful. I just had to stop being afraid of the smoke. The space is open and airy, with tall ceilings and exposed brick that mirrors the loft, but while the loft is our sanctuary, this is my forge. Here, I create. Here, I'm the lead designer, not just a freelancer scratching out logos on a kitchen counter in between emergency calls.