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“That was tier three,” I manage. My voice is unsteady and I hate it. “That was — categorically tier three. Pre-approved per instance. Discussed in advance. You broke—”
“I know.”
“That’s two rules. Seven and three. In one afternoon.”
“I know.” He’s looking at me, and he’s not smug about it, which is somehow worse — if he were smug, I’d have something to fight. He just looks a little wrecked himself, a little surprised, like the static caught him too. “She was about to take the whole thing apart. You were about to give her a perfect cool answer and she’d have known it was an answer. I gave her something she couldn’t argue with.” A beat. “It worked. You saw her face.”
“That’s not—” I stop. Start over, shorter, because the long sentences are the tell and I can hear myself getting long. “You should have asked.”
“There wasn’t time to ask.”
“You should have asked,” I say again, quieter, and we both know I’m not really talking about Vivienne anymore, I’m talking about the hand on my face and the thing that flooded in when the static cleared, the oh no, the part where I kissed him back and meant it in a way that is not in any rule, that breaks the only rule that was ever just mine.
He hears it. I watch him hear it. He steps back, gives me the air, drops his hand.
“Okay,” he says. “Next time I’ll ask.”
Next time.
Neither of us says anything about next time.
He walks me out, and the hallway’s mostly cleared, and the news of the kiss is already traveling — I can feel it, the looks, the phones — which means it worked, which means Vivienne will tell people the boyfriend is real because she watched it be real, which means the plan did exactly what the plan was built to do. By Monday, the department will have absorbed it. By the showcase, it’ll be old news. The arrangement is functioning perfectly.
At the door, he stops, half into the cold, the way he does.
“You’ve got the showcase thing,” he says. “The Yale slot. Reyes posts Monday.”
“How do you—”
“You said it. Just now. In the studio.” He shrugs. “I listen. Whatever happens Monday — you’re the best one in the room. I already told you that, when there was nothing in it for me, so you know it’s true.” A beat. “Go get it, Beckett.”
And he’s gone, into the blue evening, leaving me in the warm doorway of the building where I’m most myself, with my mouth still warm and my plan working perfectly and a rule — the only rule that was ever mine alone, rule eight, do not under any circumstances forget that this is fake — lying in pieces on the floor of Studio B where I will not be able to find all of them again.
I press two fingers to my lips before I can stop myself.
And admit the thing I’m not going to say out loud to anyone, not Margo, not the sealed record, not even fully to myself:
I forgot it was fake.
For about ten seconds in Studio B, with his hand on my face, I forgot completely.
Which is the one thing I wrote down, in pen, underlined, specifically so it would never happen.
Chapter 15
Beau
I’ve been awake since five and my shoulder isn’t why.
That’s the part that bothers me. My shoulder’s bad this morning — worse than usual, a deep ache that’s moved from the joint into the muscle around it, the kind that means I overcompensated in practice yesterday and my body’s filing the invoice. But the shoulder I know what to do with. Ice it, eat the ibuprofen, don’t tell anyone, play through it. The shoulder is a managed problem.
The other thing is not a managed problem.
The other thing is that I kissed Sloane Beckett in a dark studio yesterday and she kissed me back, and I have not had a single clean thought since.
And I think: that’s the thing she does to me. Yesterday I kissed her to shut Vivienne up — that was the play, that was the read, the only move that killed the thing Vivienne came to do — and somewhere in the middle of executing the play I stopped executing anything, and felt her hand close in the front of my jacket, and that was that. Game over. Whatever was holding the line in me went down and hasn’t come back up.
I noticed, of course. A beat late. The way I notice everything.
