Page 25 of Faking the Heat

“That’s our start.” I finally look back at her, and my gaze locks onto hers with a weight that feels like a physical touch. “That night under the awning. We didn’t just wait out the rain. We worked out we didn’t want to be anywhere else. In our new history, I don’t just give you my jacket. I kiss you right there, next to a window display of stale plastic wedding cakes.”

She stares at me, and I can see her pulse going in the hollow of her throat. The detail is so specific, so vivid, that for a second I can almost feel the phantom damp of the rain on my skin and the chill of the Chicago wind. I can almost feel the weight of my own hands on her waist, pulling her out of the cold. I don’t tell her I’ve spent the last two years wondering what would have happened if I’d actually done it. I don’t tell her I know exactly how many buttons were on that dress because I counted them while I was trying to talk myself out of falling for my best friend.

“Sterling,” she whispers, barely audible over the hum of the fridge. “That’s- that’s a very good story. It’s almost too good.”

“It’s a consistent story,” I correct, though my voice has lost its clinical edge. I look down at the notebook and my pen starts moving again, but my hand is less steady than it was five minutes ago. I’m pressing hard enough to indent the page. “First kiss: April fourteenth. Under a bakery awning. Very romantic. Very Peterson-approved. We’ll say the tow truck driver arrived right as we pulled apart.”

We spend the next hour filling the pages of the notebook, turning our lives into a screenplay. We invent a history of small moments, layering fiction over the sturdy bones of real friendship. We decide our first fight was over my stubborn refusal to admit that a critically planned sci-fi movie was actually bad, which is a real argument we had three years ago. We decide the first I love you happened on a hike in the Indiana Dunes, which is a total fabrication, though we did hike there and I did spend the entire time making sure she didn’t go over a tree root. Every time I offer a detail it feels like reading coordinates off a map I didn’t know I’d been drawing.

I catch myself watching the way her thumb hitches when she’s thinking, a small tic I’ve never quite focused on before. I watch the way her auburn hair takes the yellow light and gives back copper, which I have somehow missed in six years. I’m doing it again, the noticing spiral. I’m cataloguing the way the shirt sits across her shoulders, the exact green in her eyes. I tell myself it’s tactical interest. I tell myself I’m being thorough. But the heat in this room is climbing and it has nothing to do with the furnace.

“We need a safe word,” she says suddenly, the thought going up like a flare. It’s a way to break the tension and I take it with a gratitude I don’t want to examine. “For when the performance gets to be too much. Or when my mother starts on grandchildren and bridal showers.”

I look up, a ghost of a smile at the corner of my mouth, the first real humor I’ve felt since her parents left. “Grandchildren? We’ve been dating an hour and she’s already picking names and nursery themes?”

“She’s a Peterson.” She leans back in the industrial chair and lets out a sigh. “She works in four-year increments. We’re currently in the stable partner phase, which leads directly to the diamond ring phase by the next fiscal quarter. She’s probably already checking availability at the country club back home.”

“We should save the safe word for the marriage,” I say. “The fake one. Which, based on your mother’s fiscal calendar, we have roughly ninety days to prepare for.”

She laughs at that. I look at her, and for a moment the air in the kitchen changes. The humor evaporates and something heavier takes its place, and the fine hair on my arms stands up. The warehouse feels smaller. The distance across the table feels shorter. The blue notebook between us looks like a map of a country I’m suddenly desperate to visit.

I reach across the table and put my hand over hers where it rests on the edge of the notebook. My palm is rough, calloused from years of hauling hose and swinging a Halligan, and it’s warm and entirely too certain. I don’t pull away this time. I leave it there, a physical tether between the lie we’re building and whatever the nameless thing is. Her skin hums under my hand. I can feel her pulse going fast and light, mirroring mine.

“The safe word is cereal,” I say, my voice dropping. “If it gets to be too much, or if you think I’m playing the part too well. If the lines get blurry. You say cereal and we back off. We reset. Deal?”

“Deal,” she whispers. She can’t look away from me. The distance between us feels like it’s shrinking, the countertop turning into a landscape we’re both trying to cross without a compass. I want to pull my hand back to save myself and I also want to lean in until our foreheads touch. I want to ask whether she really remembers the buttons on that red dress, or whether she just knows it’s the kind of detail I’d notice. I want to know whether the jazz bar story was a confession dressed up as a script.

I look down at the list of dates we’ve invented, the fictional milestones of a relationship that exists only in the ink of a cheap spiral notebook. I let out a breath that sounds suspiciously like surrender. I pull my hand back, and the loss of contact registers like a bruise, a cold spot where the heat was a second ago.

I stand and close the notebook. I don’t look at her as I turn toward my room. “Get some sleep. We’ve got a lot of history to remember tomorrow. We have to be perfect.”

I thought this was a thing I could regulate. That the friend boundary was an anchor and not a tripwire. That I could be the guy who just shows up, no complications, nothing to hide behind.

But it turns out that when you have to explain yourself to an imaginary audience, the truth is louder than the lie.

Chapter eleven

The First Rehearsal

Sterlilng

The mirror in my bathroom is a liar, or maybe it just doesn’t have the vocabulary for the kind of disaster I’m currently courting. I stand there buttoning a charcoal-grey shirt that feels a little too stiff for a Tuesday, while my sister’s face pixelates on the screen of my phone propped against the soap dish. Becca is in her scrubs, her dark brown hair pulled back in a knot that looks like it survived a twelve-hour shift in the ER , (because it probably did) and she’s watching me with the kind of clinical detachment that usually precedes a very expensive diagnosis.

“You’re doing the face, Sterling.” Her voice sounds tiny through the speaker. She’s leaning against a vending machine somewhere in Providence, looking entirely too much like our mother for my comfort. “The one where you pretend you’re just running a routine maintenance check on a fire hydrant when you’re actually about to go into a fire without a tank.”

“It’s just a dinner, Becca.” I focus on the collar. I roll the sleeves up, exposing the scar on my forearm that I don’t usually think twice about. Tonight, for some reason, I’m hyper-aware of every mark, every rough edge. “A tactical maneuver. Mandy’s parents are in town, they think we’re a thing, and I’m just holding the line so her life doesn’t go up in insurance claims and disappointment. It’s what friends do.”

Becca lets out a slow whistle that makes me want to hang up. “Friends don’t spend forty minutes in a department store holding a shirt up to a window because she said something once about thunderclouds and the color of your eyes. Friends also don’t spend three hours on a Sunday evening curating a fake history involving bakery awnings and jazz bars.”

“We needed a narrative.” I check my watch. I’m ahead of schedule, which is my own version of panic. “High stakes, Bec. If we don’t have the lore down, they’ll pick her apart. You know how Mandy gets when she thinks she’s failing. She starts to vibrate. I’m just mitigating the vibration.”

“You’re deep-sea diving without a tank, big brother.” Her expression softens into something dangerously close to pity. “I’ve seen you save people. I’ve seen you pull old ladies out of burning kitchens and then stay three hours afterward to help them find the cat. This is different. You aren’t just saving her apartment. You’re trying to build a fortress around her. Just make sure you’re not standing inside it when the two weeks are up.”

“I have to go.” I ignore the cold stone her words have dropped into my gut. “I’m picking her up at the Teacup. Kayla’s there, so I’m already walking into a den of lions.”

“Sterling?” Becca calls out before I can tap the screen. I pause, my thumb over the red icon. “Try not to accidentally get engaged before the appetizers arrive. Mom would never forgive you if she wasn’t the first to know.”

I end the call without answering. The loft is too quiet afterward, the industrial space echoing with the ghosts of the conversations Mandy and I have been having all week. Her scent, something like vanilla and a hint of the hibiscus tea she’s obsessed with, has started to settle into the brickwork. It’s a domestic invasion I did not prepare for, a slow-acting poison that feels remarkably like home.