“Right, you’re boring.”
“Exactly. You and I are very dull.”
“Then tell me one of your boring stories.”
I shift again so my head can rest against the pillow closest to me. Faust’s mostly on his side, and his body is tucked against the back of the sofa, so it isn’t like I’m getting closer to his chest. There are still plenty of inches between all of our other body parts.
“Well, okay. A boring story. Hm. I guess… how I got into modeling is boring.”
I wait—for the inevitable male excitement, the sly grin at a pretty-ish woman mentioningmodeling. But Faust doesn’t say anything, and since he isn’t looking at me, and it’s dark, and I’m going to deny this ever happened anyway, I let myself smile at his nonreaction. At how well he listens. I do like that about him.
“I didn’t really want to be a model. I was pretty young when people started telling me to do it. Family members and stuff.” Ten, to be exact, the first time Grandma said I was too pretty to stay in our small town; that counts as scouting, probably. “And it seemed like one of the most boring jobs ever. And kind of… not demeaning, I don’t think that’s true, but tedious? I thought models only got to walk around runways or fake city sets for makeup commercials.”
“But you’d always wanted to be a designer?”
“Yeah. That, or a statistician.”
“I can see it. You, telling people what’s going to happen,” Faust says. And heat blooms behind my cheeks. And I’m grateful he can’t possibly see that. “Why’d fashion win?”
I pause, debating telling him the real truth. But I’ll probably be fired for dating Bernard tonight, so I say, “Numbers don’t sing like art does. Maybe they do for other people, but not for me. There isn’t that glow—you know? That excitement. I’m good at math. I pick beauty. I wake up because the world could be a more beautiful place. Does that make sense?”
“You always make sense.”
I swallow, flushed. “Sure. It’s like… when I first met my best friend, she had this giant lavender coat, and I didn’t even know they made coats like that until I saw her walking down the street in it,wearing it like she forgot she was wearing it. Like she’d been rushing out the door and just had to grab her 1970s purple disco coat.”
“Right.” He laughs quietly.
“And I was, like, obsessed with it, because it was so her. Who I love, yes, but she’s one of those people that…” I search for the perfect words, then realize that’s it. “She’s so exact. She doesn’t talk. Shespeaks. And when she’s speaking to you, it’s like she’s spent years working on exactly the right thing to say, only she hasn’t, you know she hasn’t, since you’re talking to her right now and there’s no way she can predict every conversation.”
“Something you try to do?”
I ignore that. “I didn’t want the coat because it was purple, or a statement, or unique, or expensive, which it was. I wanted it because she had it. When fashion works, you’re selling the idea that you’re happy. And if someone just buys that coat, maybe they will be, too.”
“And you’re going to tell me that isn’t manipulative.”
“It’d be manipulative if it didn’t work. Then it’s just effective.”
That makes him laugh full-out, and we’re so close together that I feel his laughter seep from the air into my skin. “You bought the coat.”
“Of course I bought the coat. Three years later, the second I had extra money laying around, in green, so she didn’t think I was just copying her? You bet. But”—I take a breath, fully grinning—“she’d already moved on. She was in her cheetah phase.”
“So why not buy a cheetah coat?”
“That’s fashion level two. It isn’t about wanting to buy everything someone is wearing. It’s wanting to buy that moment. My new best friend walking down the street, making me realize how much bigger New York was than my hometown. Fashion is time travel, I guess. Itlets you go back to those moments that meant something to you.” I look at him, eyes closed, peaceful. Try to snapshot this into my brain. This moment, right here, please. “But this time, you’re the person who meant something to you.”
And it’s deeper than that. You always remember that birthday when your dad gave you that necklace, or how it felt to thrift that Coach bag everyone said was ugly, then wore two summers later. When you were at a wedding and saw a woman in a plunging black silk nightie of a dress, and you weren’t surprised the maid of honor “accidentally” spilled a martini on her, and you just had to buy the same style as soon as possible so you could feel that illicitly bold.
I’ll always remember that I’m in jeans right now, the button pinching my stomach a bit too much. That Faust’s in one of the loose shirts I’d gotten for him.
I wait for him to say something else.Evil fashion girl, merchandising aspirations.The shit men usually say when they realize why they wear army-green shirts and look-how-capable-I-am cargo shorts and just-a-casual-guy jeans and very-busy-very-important tech vests.
I wait, like I’ve learned to with him, and Faust smiles.
“You want to design memories,” he says softly.
A warm feeling shimmers inside my chest. “I don’t know about that.”
Faust’s fingers wind through my hair. I’m so used to the sensation by now—the line we keep crossing no matter how hard I try—that I don’t even blink when his hand curls against the back of my neck. Fingers brushing up, soothing me, making me sleepy. “It’s like that with driving, too. Each race is a day of your life someone else remembers. You give the time to them.”
