15. The Aftermath of a Kiss
Chapter fifteen
The Aftermath of a Kiss
Sterling
Mandy is all elbows and tensed posture, her body angled away from where Derek stood, like she’s protecting something fragile from a draft.
If she were a cat, her hackles would be up and she’d have shredded the napkin in front of her.
As it is, her hands just work the stylus in a nervous loop, tap, twirl, tap, twirl, like she can draw an escape route through friction alone.
Kayla rounds the counter, mug in hand, and drops into the chair across from us. Her gaze is merciless, but not unkind. She lifts her mug, blows on the steam, and says, “I have never in my life seen a more convincing fake kiss.”
She lets it sit, the word “convincing” flexing with all the subtlety of a judge’s gavel.
I look at Mandy, whose face goes a full shade redder.
She’s lost somewhere between wanting to be swallowed by the faux-velvet chair and setting the entire café on fire to escape.
Her chin tucks, she adjusts her glasses, and she inspects her cuticles like there might be a cheat sheet for emotional math written under her nails.
I reach for the cold brew Mandy abandoned, raise it, and sip like it’s the only thing anchoring me to the moment. I meet Kayla’s eyes. She’s already got the pin in the grenade, thumb hovering.
Kayla leans forward, elbows to tabletop, and ticks off points on her fingers. “First, the angle of the jaw. Second, the hand-to-face ratio. Third, the amount of time you both forgot there was an audience.” She looks at me, then at Mandy, then back again. “You two want to run that by me again?”
Mandy’s voice is faint and only barely controlled. “We were… selling the performance. It’s what the situation called for.” She says this with a kind of airy detachment, like she’s reading off a menu at a drive-thru window.
Kayla gives me the look, a wide, flat, piercing thing that makes me wonder how often she had to tune out liars on the other side of a bakery counter before she opened her own place. “Care to expand, Sterling?”
I shrug, letting my shoulders do half the talking.
“It was tactical. Derek bought it.” I say this as if it cost me nothing, but the moment is already replaying on loop in my mind.
The weight of Mandy’s jaw cupped in my palm, the micro-shiver that ran through her just before our lips met, the way she inhaled like she was coming up for air after a dive.
Kayla holds my gaze, studying it like she’s looking for a seam in a forged painting. The pause stretches long enough for the milk steamer’s hiss to cut through, then the bell over the door signals a new customer who beelines for a table by the window.
Mandy straightens, but doesn’t let go of the stylus. She pushes it flush against the table, then lines it up with the seam in the wood. She’s holding together by sheer force of will, her cheeks blotched, pupils too wide for the level of light.
Kayla leans back, fanning her face with a napkin. “If you two are faking it, you should take that show on the road.” She takes a slow sip of tea, her eyes dancing over the rim of the mug. “The way you grabbed her waist? The way she melted into you? That wasn’t tactical. That was tectonic.”
I clear my throat, fighting the heat climbing my neck. “It sold the story. Mandy needed...”
“...to make him jealous? Please.” Kayla cuts me off, turning to Mandy with a wicked grin. “Honey, you didn’t want to win. You wanted to climb him like a fire escape.”
Mandy’s face flushes deep crimson. She grips her stylus like a lifeline. “I wanted Derek to stop treating me like a problem he could solve with flowers and condescension.”
“Uh-huh,” Kayla says, not buying it for a second. She leans forward, elbows on the table. “And you...” she points her teaspoon at me, “...you looked like you forgot your own name.”
I shift in my seat.
She shakes her head, sighing like a disappointed mechanic looking at a totaled car. “You two keep saying ’for show,’ but your bodies aren’t reading from the same script.”
The new customer’s espresso order interrupts, Kayla excuses herself with a nod, leaving me and Mandy alone at the table.
Mandy doesn’t fill the silence. I wonder if she’s rehearsing new ways to evade, or if she’s just exhausted from the emotional airstrike that was Derek in a cardigan and over-caffeinated charm.
Mandy finally looks at me, the stylus going still in her hands for the first time all morning. “Are you going to catch hell for this? Leaving your shift?”
I lean back in the too-small chair and give her my most serious expression. “Absolutely. Feldman’s going to make me do the supply inventory for a month.” I pause just long enough and wink. “Totally worth it.”
She blinks. “Sterling…”
“Also,” I add, “I’m pretty sure I’m owed at least one more fake kiss as hazard pay. Union rules.”
The color that hits her cheeks is immediate and spectacular.
She opens her mouth, closes it, then points the stylus at me like a warning she has no intention of following through on.
She stands, drops it in her bag, and smooths down her shirt with the focused energy of someone who needs something to do with their hands.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” she says, very precisely. “Do not be like this when I get back.”
I raise the cold brew. “No promises.”
I watch her walk away, catch the moment she hesitates by the door, then disappears down the hall. My chest is tight, like I’ve just run a sprint instead of survived a coffee date.
The second Mandy’s silhouette vanishes down the bathroom corridor, Kayla swoops in taking the seat across from me.
She sets her mug on the table, leans in, and dials up the intensity in her stare by about a thousand percent.
The air between us prickles, as if she’s about to use my soul for target practice.
She leans over the table, and speaks in a voice only I can hear. “You’re a terrible liar, Sterling.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Didn’t know I was lying.”
She sits, leans back, folds her arms. “Let’s be so for real right now,” she says. “She likes you.”
I don’t flinch. It would only encourage her. “She likes a lot of people,” I counter, hoping the deadpan will redirect the trajectory.
Kayla ignores it, waving one sharp-nailed hand in a gesture that manages to insult the very concept of denial.
“She likes you,” she repeats. “Not as a convenience, not as a security blanket, and not as a plus-one to piss off the ex. She likes you because you are the only person in her life who doesn’t try to re-paint her, you just show up. Consistently.”
I glance at the ceiling, searching for divine intervention.
All I see are pipes and ductwork, the exposed wiring that gives this place its “industrial chic.” I’m suddenly aware of how little armor I have in this moment.
Out on calls, I can suit up in Nomex and bunker gear, go blind and dumb to all but the problem at hand.
Here, I am just a guy in a t-shirt, watching a woman half my size dissect me with her eyes.
“She’s also not going to make the first move,” Kayla continues, each word clipped and deliberate. “Because she’s terrified if she wants anything too much, the universe will drop it off a bridge.”
I flex my hands on the tabletop, feeling the skin tighten over my knuckles. “It’s not that simple.”
Kayla grins, all teeth, the way predators do in nature documentaries right before the slow-motion footage kicks in.
“You’re right. It’s worse. Derek didn’t just kill her faith in romance, he burned her faith in herself to the fucking studs.
” Her voice is quiet enough to keep the old ladies by the front window from perking up, but I can hear the anger in it, the undertow of protectiveness.
“She told you that?” I ask, keeping my own voice low, trying to sound casual.
“She didn’t have to.” Kayla sips her tea, then sets it down so hard the liquid sloshes.
“After he cheated, he convinced her it was her fault for not being ambitious enough, not being sophisticated enough, not being… whatever. He took her biggest strength, her work, her personality, and made her feel like she was a liability. Now she second-guesses everything. She’s got this insane offer from a studio in New York and she’s been ghosting their emails for a month.
She’d rather freelance logos for shitty start-ups than risk failing at the one thing she’s been dreaming about. ”
A weight drops in my chest. I remember the day Mandy told me about the email, laughing like it was a joke.
“She’s scared, Sterling.” Kayla’s voice softens. “And you’re the only person she lets see it. I know you think you’re just helping, but you’re not neutral in this story. Not by a long shot.”
I stare at my hands. I want to protest, to say I’m just giving her a place to crash, just being a friend, but it’s a lie. I know it. Kayla knows it. The air between us crackles with all the unsaid things I’ve spent months pretending didn’t matter.
Before I can get a word out, there’s a slight shift in the light behind me, a shadow crossing the wall.
Kayla’s gaze slides past my shoulder, sharp as a blade.
I turn, and there’s Mandy, halfway back to the table, her eyes wide and blank for one unguarded heartbeat before the sun reflects on her giant star earrings making me squint and look away.
“Did I miss anything?” Her voice is light, but her knuckles are white.
Kayla is already back in cool-barista mode, pouring me a coffee I didn’t ask for.
“Just giving Sterling the house rules. No drama, no pets on the counter, no secrets.” She slides the mug in front of me, then looks between us.
Almost like she’s giving us both a benediction and an ultimatum before she walks away.
Mandy’s eyes flick to mine. For once, I hold her gaze and don’t let go. I want to say something, anything, to make it easier. But I remember what Kayla said: that Mandy trusts me because I show up. Not because I fix, not because I rescue, but because I stay.
“Six years later and still dangerous,” I say, keeping my voice low.
She looks up, confused. “What?”
I reach up and flick the giant glittering stars she's wearing, they throw off sparks every time she moves her head. “The earrings.”
Her face shifts, something softening in her expression. “You remember that?”
“Hard to forget. You literally fell into my arms, Sparkles.”
The nickname slips out without thought, the way it always has, but this time it hangs between us weighted with everything we haven't said.
Her cheeks flush, and for a second I see the girl she was, twenty-two, mortified, coffee dripping off my jaw while her earrings threw disco lights across the café walls.
“You were so calm about it,” she says, almost to herself. “I ruined your shirt. You'd just gotten back from-” she pauses, catching herself, “-from overseas. And I assaulted you with caffeine.”
“You were worth the dry cleaning.”
She laughs, a real sound, and some of the tension bleeds out of her shoulders. “You called me Sparkles right then. In front of your sister. I wanted to die.”
“I thought it was accurate. You were practically a solar flair.”
“I was wearing chandelier earrings Becca dared me to buy.” She touches her current earrings. “I'd forgotten about that until just now.”
I haven’t forgotten. I remember everything: the way she felt against me when I caught her, all elbows and apologies, the way she smelled like vanilla and panic. The way I didn’t want to let go, even with hot coffee soaking through my shirt.
“I remember what’s important.” I reach over and grab her chair dragging it closer to me. Mandy goes very still. The café noise fades to static around us-espresso machines and conversation and the bell over the door, all of it distant.
“Sterling,” she says, my name barely a whisper.
“Yeah?” I slide my hand to her jaw, slow enough that she could stop me. She doesn’t.
She opens her mouth, closes it. Whatever she was going to say, she swallows it down and reaches for safer ground. “Kayla's staring at us.”
I don't look away from her, lean in and whisper. “Let her stare.” Her eyes stay on mine and I can feel her breath, uneven, against my mouth.
“Cereal,” she says. The word is barely air.
It lands like a physical blow somewhere below my ribs. I pull back, putting distance between us that feels like a small, deliberate loss. “At least you didn’t wait for our fake wedding night.”
She laughs, short and a little breathless, and shoves her glasses up her nose. But she doesn’t look at me again right away, and I notice.
We finish our coffee in silence, but it’s not empty. It’s full of all the things we’re going to have to say, and the knowledge that, when we do, the other person will actually listen.
That’s how you start a fire, I think. Not with a spark, but with enough oxygen to keep it alive.