Chapter 6
Carter
The brief arrives as a numbered list, because Priya believes a thing isn’t real until it’s a deliverable.
I read it twice and put my phone face-down on the table.
Across from me, Sloane reads hers all the way to the bottom, the way she reads everything, and then she puts her phone face-down too. Same gesture.
Same second. It’s the first thing we’ve ever agreed on without arguing about it first, and neither of us says so.
The rooftop is the kind of staged that costs money to look unstaged.
Someone’s strung bistro lights nobody plugged in for ambiance and set out two glasses of something amber neither of us will drink.
Below us Atlanta does its actual living — horns, a saxophone two blocks down, heat coming off the tar in visible waves — while across the street, in a window I’m not supposed to be able to spot, a long lens catches the last of the gold.
“North corner,” Sloane murmurs, reading the skyline the way she reads a room, for the angles. “She’s not wrong about the light. I hate that she’s not wrong about the light.”
“Careful. That almost sounded like respect.”
“It was logistics.” She sits, arranging herself into the frame without appearing to. “Respect would require her to ask me a question before she answered it for me.”
“They can hear us?” she asks.
“Long lens, no mic. They can see us. They’re reading the body, not the words.” I pick up my drink so my hands have a job. “Which means we have to actually talk, or it looks like two people waiting for a bus.”
“So talk.”
“You first. Real question or fake one?”
She studies me. The rooftop’s all warm light and the low roar of a city that has no idea this is staged. “Real,” she says. “What did you want? Before all this. Before Atlanta.”
And here’s the thing I do, the thing I’ve done a thousand times — I load the joke. It’s right there, easy, I wanted abs and a sponsorship, and she’d let me have it and we’d both move on.
But she’s watching my face the way she watches everything, for the line that causes a problem later, and the joke dies on the way up.
“I wanted to be good enough that I didn’t have to be anything else,” I say. Quiet. The grin nowhere. “One thing I was so good at that nobody needed me to also be the fun one.”
The cameras across the street get exactly nothing useful, because I’ve gone still and honest and that doesn’t photograph.
“And?” she says.
I feel the next sentence coming, the true one underneath, and I shut the door on it. Pick the grin back up. “And then I got famous for being the fun one. The universe has a sense of humor. So do I, allegedly.”
She lets the dodge go. But she saw it — saw me almost hand her something and then not — and she files it, and that should bother me more than it does.
“My turn,” I say, before she can put the lid back on the moment. “Real question.”
“That’s not how it works. I didn’t agree to a format.”
“You asked me what I wanted. I answered. The format’s already running.” I turn my glass on the table without drinking it. “What do you do when no one’s watching? Not the blazer version. The Sunday one.”
Something flickers. She looks at the skyline instead of at me, and for a second I’m sure she’s going to file the question and hand me back nothing.
“I cook for one and I don’t photograph it,” she says finally.
“No recipe, no plan, whatever’s in the fridge.
I put on something I’d never admit to and make a mess in a kitchen nobody’s going to inspect — and then I clean it before bed, because I can’t sleep in a kitchen that isn’t right.
” A beat. “That’s the whole show. It’s not interesting. ”
“It’s the most interesting thing you’ve said all night.”
“Then your night’s been thin.” But the edge is gone from it, and across the street the lens is getting two people leaning toward each other over undrinkable amber drinks, and for once the shot and the truth are the same shot.
***
My phone buzzes against the table. Priya. One word.
Closer.
“They want the hand,” I say.
“I read the list.”
“I’m going to reach across the table now. For the shot.” I say it flat, on the record, so we both know what it is. “You can move it if you want. Nobody’d blame you.”
I reach. Slow, telegraphed, a winger giving the defender every chance to step. I cover her hand with mine on the table.
She doesn’t move it.
The city noise drops out — not really, but that’s what it does in my head, the whole rooftop going quiet around the four square inches where my palm is over the back of her hand. Her skin’s cool.
Mine isn’t. I can feel her pulse, or I’m imagining it, and I genuinely couldn’t tell you which.
Her thumb moves. One millimeter, against the side of my finger. I’d bet my career she doesn’t know she did it.
I’ve been keeping score since the dinner. Two-one her, then three-one after the facility, a tally I run because losing to her is the most fun I’ve had in a season. I think about the score now and find I’ve stopped caring where it stands, which is new, and not good, and I do it anyway.
“This is the part,” she says, low, eyes on our hands, “where you say something charming and I pretend to be charmed.”
“I’m out of charming. Used it all on the brother joke.”
“You didn’t make a brother joke.”
“Exactly.”
She looks up. That’s the mistake — both of ours. She looks up and I’m already there, closer than the list asked for, and the staged thing and the real thing are standing in the exact same spot and I can’t tell them apart anymore.
Her eyes drop to my mouth and come back up, and she catches herself doing it — I feel her catch it, the tiny administrative horror of a woman who’s found a variable she didn’t authorize — and she doesn’t pull back. That’s the thing.
She doesn’t pull back. The not-pulling-back is louder than any lean.
The lights nobody plugged in stay dark. The city keeps not knowing. My hand’s still over hers, her thumb still doing the thing it doesn’t know it’s doing, and the half-inch between us has stopped being a distance and started being a decision.
“For the cameras,” I say. It’s a question and a permission and a lie, all three.
“For the cameras,” she says.
I kiss her.
***
It starts as the shot. I know how to do the shot — angle, softness, a hand at the jaw, the version that cuts well and means nothing.
I’ve done it for ad campaigns. I do it now.
And then somewhere in the first two seconds it stops being the shot.
Her hand comes up and fists in the front of my shirt — not pulling me in for the lens, pulling me in — and the careful thing I was doing falls off a roof.
I’m not angling for anyone. My hand’s in her hair and hers is twisted in my collar and she makes a sound against my mouth that no camera across any street is close enough to catch, and that sound is the realest thing that’s happened to me in two years.
This is the part I won’t tell her. Not the brother. Not the door I shut at the table.
None of it. My heart stays exactly where I keep it, locked, while every other part of me gives her the whole game.
The kiss isn’t smooth. It’s four chapters of me holding still finally not holding still — teeth, breath, my thumb on her jaw and her fingers gone white in my shirt, both of us a step behind ourselves, chasing it.
Desperate is the only honest word. The dam I’ve been calling restraint just goes.
There’s a second where she pulls back just far enough to look at me — checking, maybe, whether I’m performing, whether this is still the shot — and whatever she finds on my face makes the question pointless, because she’s the one who closes it again, her hand sliding from my collar to the back of my neck like she’s decided something she’ll deny by morning.
I lose the score completely. There’s no count.
There’s no campaign. There’s a woman who tastes like spearmint and contempt and something underneath both that she would die before naming, and there’s me, gone, finished, falling in real time on a rooftop while the woman in my hands is still telling herself this is work.
Red, I think, with no plan to ever say it. There you are.
***
She pulls back first.
Of course she does. She doesn’t dissolve, doesn’t melt, doesn’t do any of the things the moment is begging for. She sits back into her own chair, into her own spine, and she puts the wall up brick by brick while I watch, faster than I can get a hand into the gap.
She touches her mouth once. Smooths her dress. Picks her phone up off the table.
“That’ll cut well,” she says.
Three words. Cool as the back of her hand was before I warmed it. She’s filing the realest sixty seconds of my year under deliverable, in front of me, and the worst part is how good she’s at it — how completely she can stand inside a thing and call it a thing she’s managing.
“Sloane—”
“It’s a strong asset. Priya will be thrilled.” She’s already standing, clutch in hand, the card no doubt back in it. “Cars are downstairs.”
She walks to the rooftop door without looking back, heels even, spine straight, the enemy’s comms chief leaving a scene she’s decided didn’t happen to her.
It happened to me. I’m still in the chair, my shirt still creased where her fist was, the score I can’t find and the name I won’t say both sitting under my ribs like swallowed light.
My phone buzzes. Priya, naturally.
PERFECT. Hotel’s holding your rooms — same floor, early call’s at seven. Get some SLEEP, you two ??
Same floor. Same building. A hallway and two doors between me and a woman who just kissed me like the building was on fire and then told me it was a content strategy.
I’m not going to sleep. Neither is she. And we both have to pretend, for one more night under one more roof, that the wall she just rebuilt is load-bearing.
I get up. I go find the stairs instead of the elevator, because I am not, tonight, going to trust myself in a small moving box with the button for her floor.