Page 24 of Faking the Heat

When the door latches behind Mandy’s parents, a silence moves in that’s not just quiet, but airless. Like her parents took all the air from the room with them when they left. I lean against the kitchen counter, arms folded so tight I can feel my triceps pinching, and stare at the door for a long second before I look at Mandy.

She’s in the middle of the living room, both hands locked behind her back, like a kid lined up for inspection. The smile is still there, rigid as rebar. It looks more like rigor mortis than relief. Her glasses have slipped to the tip of her nose, and she’s blinking fast, as if every time she closes her eyes she gets to disappear for a microsecond.

Neither of us moves.

I clear my throat first. “So...”

“I know,” she says, hands up like she’s surrendering to a SWAT team. “I know, I just- they were already looking at those pictures, and my mom had that face, and then you came home, and I panicked, and it came out before I could-”

I hold up a hand. Not the stop talking gesture, more the pause and roll back the tape one. “Let’s start over. Why exactly did you need a boyfriend so badly you conscripted me without warning?”

She bites her lip hard enough that I worry she’s going to split it, then thinks better of it and shoves her glasses back up. She starts to pace, her earrings, one side a toaster, the other a bathtub, swing wildly as she moves. Then she does the breathing thing, in and out, long and slow, the one I showed her after the Wicker Park incident, when she hyperventilated in the back of a cab and I had to talk her down from the edge of a full panic attack.

“Every time my parents visit, it’s a performance review. The apartment gets graded. My work gets graded. My relationship status is a whole PowerPoint slide, which means my breakup with Derek is also a quarterly report.” She isn’t looking at me. She’s looking at the bookshelves, at the horizon of Chicago outside the windows. “The last time I said I was just focusing on myself, my mother signed me up for a singles cooking class. In Evanston. On a Tuesday.”

I don’t laugh. It’s close, but not quite. I let my arms drop, my jaw unclench, feel some of the adrenaline drain out of my legs.

She keeps going, her voice steadier now, almost detached. “They look at me like an open problem, Sterling. A project that’s gone over budget and behind schedule. For one hour, because of you, they looked at me like I was settled. Like I was finally doing something right because a man like you wanted me. Do you have any idea how intoxicating that felt? To not be the broken thing in the room for once?”

That hits me like an arrow to the chest.

“How long are they in town?”

“Two weeks,” she says, no hesitation. The number is a blunt instrument.

I nod once. I’m locked in. There’s no time to stage a tactical retreat.

“Okay,” I say. “If I’m going to be your co-conspirator in relationship fraud, we’re at least going to be organized about it. We do the two weeks. But if we’re going to lie to your mother and father, we’re going to do it right. We need a consistent story. We need a history.”

“Don’t we have history?” She arches a brow above the cat-eye frames and bites her lip.

“Romantic history,” I clarify.

I gesture toward the kitchen island, where the yellow light of the low-hanging lamp pools on the surface like honey. The blue spiral notebook is still sitting there, the one we used for the Roommate Rules, its wire binding glinting like a row of teeth. “Sit down, Mandy. We’re going to map this out like a mission.”

She sits, her legs looking a little like jelly as the adrenaline crash finally arrives. I sit across from her, filling the small radius of light. I flip to a fresh page, and the scratch of the pen against the paper is loud in the quiet loft, underscored by the low hum of the refrigerator. It’s a grounding sound, a tactical move in a war of fiction. I can feel her watching me, her gaze heavy and focused, and I’m aware that I’m enjoying this considerably more than a man in my position should.

“Okay.” My pen is poised over the paper. “When did we start dating? Officially. Not the version I improvised in the kitchen to save your skin.”

“Six months ago?” She bites her lip and twists a loose thread on her sleeve. “It feels like enough time to be serious. Enough to justify me staying here. But not so long that they’d be angry we didn’t tell them sooner.”

I nod and scribble it down. “Six months. That puts our anniversary in January. Cold. Lots of excuses for staying in. Now, the first date. Where was it? Don’t say the coffee shop. It needs to be memorable.”

“We could say that Italian place on 4th,” she offers, trying to think like a Peterson. “The one with the checked tablecloths and the candles in the wine bottles. It’s a cliché. Clichés are believable because they’re easy to visualize.”

“What are we, dogs sharing spaghetti?” I look up from the notebook. My eyes fix on hers, and the air in the loft seems to thin. “That isn’t us. That’s a movie. If we’re going to sell this, it has to feel like it grew out of the friendship. It has to be something we actually did, just reframed. If we don’t use real memories, we’ll trip over the details.”

I tap the pen against my chin, my gaze drifting toward the high industrial window. I’m looking for a specific moment, a piece of the past I have kept in a locked drawer for a long time. “Two years ago. That night at the Blue Note. The jazz bar near the park.”

She blinks, her expression shifting as the memory surfaces like an old photograph coming up in a darkroom. “The night my car wouldn’t start? The alternator died in the middle of a monsoon. We sat there three hours waiting for the tow truck. I remember the saxophonist was wearing a terrible fedora and playing everything a half-step flat.”

“The music was fine, Mandy.” My voice softens, the authoritative edge giving way to something quieter. “But you were wearing that red dress. The one with the little silk buttons down the back that you kept fussing with because you were nervous about the branding pitch the next morning. You kept reaching back to check them, and you didn’t realize I was watching the way your reflection looked in the window.”

She watches me as I speak, her fingers going still around the mug. I’m not looking at the notebook anymore. I’m looking at the space just past her shoulder. I remember the rain. I remember the way the streetlights blurred through the condensation on the window of the bar, turning the world into a wet neon smudge of blue and gold. I remember the way the light hit the curve of her neck and the way I wanted to reach out and stop her hands from shaking.

“We walked home,” I say, my voice low. “Or we tried to. We got about two blocks before we worked out the umbrellas were useless against that wind. We stood under the awning of that closed-down bakery for twenty minutes, watching the water come off the roof in sheets. You were shivering, your teeth actually chattering, and I gave you my department jacket. It came down to your knees. You looked like a kid playing dress-up.”

The silence in the kitchen is profound. I can see the way her throat tightens as she swallows. I remember that jacket. It was heavy, lined with thermal fabric, and when I draped it over her she looked up at me with an expression I couldn’t decode at the time. I thought it was gratitude. I told myself I was being steadfast, the man who always has a multi-tool and a plan for every contingency. But the truth is I didn’t want the rain to stop. I wanted to stand under that awning with her until the sun came up.