Page 89 of Faking the Heat

“I found it.”

Rule Twelve. He gets to have a bad day.

“When did you write that?” I ask.

“The night you came back from the call with the kid.” She doesn’t look up. “You were asleep and I couldn’t be, and I went out to the kitchen and I found the notebook on the counter, and I sat there with your red pen and I wrote it in as small as I could so you wouldn’t see it, because I didn’t have the courage to say it to your face.” She traces the line with her finger. “I’ve never told anybody that.”

I take the notebook out of her hands, and I set it on the floor, and I get her off that box and into my arms in a movement I do not remember planning.

She comes up onto her toes and gets both hands in my hair and I kiss her, and it is not like the wall, and it is not like the shower, and it is not for anybody’s benefit, and there is no audience and no script and no arrangement and no expiry date bolted to the end of it.

It is just a Thursday morning in a half-unpacked apartment.

“Wait,” she says against my mouth. “Wait, wait.”

“What.”

“You said Tuesday in September.”

“What?”

“The latte.” She pulls back an inch, her glasses fogged and crooked. “You said a Tuesday in September six years ago. You know the day?”

“I know the day.”

“You know the day of the week?”

“Mandy,” I say, “I know what you were wearing.”

She makes a small wounded noise and pulls me back down, and for a considerable while after that neither of us says anything at all.

Some time later we end up on the floor of her living room with our backs against the sofa, because there is still no furniture and because standing up had stopped being realistic. She’s got my jacket over her legs. Bowie has installed himself on my chest with the entitlement of a small landlord and I have decided not to fight it.

“I have to tell you something,” she says. “It’s stupid.”

“Go on.”

“I turned down another job on Michigan Avenue on Tuesday night.” She’s watching the ceiling. “Derek. A real one, a good one, at a firm on twelve. Senior. Better money than New York.”

I go very still under the cat.

“He offered you a job.”

“He offered me a job, and he was honest about why, which is the closest thing to growth that man has ever demonstrated.” She turns her head. “I said no. Not because of you. I want that on the record too. I said no because it was the same offer he’s been making me for three years with a different wrapper on it, which is him deciding what I should want and arranging it before I’ve been asked.”

“Mandy.”

“And then he said, you never used to interrupt me.” She laughs, a small tired sound. “Which is the only apology I’m ever getting, and I’ve decided to accept it.”

I lie there on the floor of her apartment with a cat on my sternum and think about standing in a doorway on Michigan Avenue sixty feet away, counting people out of a stairwell, watching a man in a good coat talk to her and not hearing one word of it.

“I saw him cross the street,” I say.

“I know.”

“I couldn’t go.”

“I know that too.” Her hand finds mine on the floor. “Sterling. I watched you not come. Do you understand that I watched you decide?”