10. Co-conspirator
Chapter ten
Co-conspirator
Sterling
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.
“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.