over hers, the same way he had in the car, long ago. It was like he had found an old underground wire. The jolt in her skin was still there.
“Floss,” he said.
“Oh, um.” Orla tried hard to think. “She’s just like you imagine. What you see is what you get. Prettier, though. If you can believe that.”
Danny twisted around and nodded at the thick ream of paper on Orla’s desk. Its top sheet was marked up with red pen. “Oh, there it is,” he said. “Your book.”
“How did you know about my book?” she said.
He pinched the skin on the top of her hand. “I see it on the show sometimes,” he said. “In the background. I knew what it had to be.”
Orla felt blood flooding into her cheeks. She had not yet kissed him, she had not yet slept with him, but she realized now that this was the pinnacle: luscious validation. He had been watching her as closely as she was watching him. “You were right,” she said. “It’s my book.”
“Yeah, I knew it,” Danny said. “I always knew it.” He put his hands on either side of her jaw and pulled her toward him. She felt the pulse of the strobe light at the graduation party. She felt his serious eyes trained on her the first day of school. She heard him asking if she would remember them, the line that had pulled her through years and years, that had sent her the only way she wanted to go: back, by way of special.
When she pulled him onto the mattress, she steered him away from the end of the bed that touched her desk, not wanting to disturb the papers he had marveled at. The pages were full of Microsoft gibberish, lorem ipsum and so on. When production had asked her to print out her book as a prop, she only had, after all this time, forty-nine pages. The heft of them would not hold up on camera. “It’s no problem,” Mason had said, beckoning to an intern. “We’ll make it look like a real thing.”
* * *
Danny stayed and stayed. He told Orla he had endless days off available, because Catherine didn’t like vacations. Orla pretended to be hearing it for the first time when he said he managed the cold-storage facility, though she had known it from Facebook for ages, and she listened as he explained what this meant: tracking the comings and goings of frozen fish and icy medicines, dressed in an industrial-grade parka and usually alone, working long hours that ensured he saw the sun only on Saturdays. She wanted to do nothing less than change his world, to turn it from an unending spool of cold and dark to something filled with light and warmth, and to make sure he knew the glow depended on her. She brought him to everything: a charity gala for which Melissa begrudgingly called in a loaner tux. A Brooklyn arena concert that they watched from a luxury box, Danny’s eyes popping at the twinkling private bar. A women’s magazine party celebrating female “influencers.” Danny asked what the term meant, and Orla shrugged before turning to receive the editor in chief, who murmured in her ear, “If those bottom-feeders at Lady-ish could see you now!”
“Let’s get out of here,” Danny whispered when the editor floated on. “Let’s get pizza.” Having him around reminded Orla that she, too, had once felt starving at every fancy event, that there was a time before she could be satisfied by artful bites of almost nothing on crackers.
“We’re leaving,” she told Floss.
Midselfie, Floss gave a shuddering sigh without looking away from her phone. “Must you make my best friend be lame every night?” she whined in Danny’s direction, loud enough that the departing editor glanced discreetly over her shoulder.
Orla flicked her hand at Danny in a way that meant he shouldn’t worry about Floss. Floss’s attitude toward Danny, Orla sensed, was one of patient disdain, as if Orla had started wearing a tacky hat everywhere, and Floss could only wait for her to outgrow it. If Orla wasn’t careful, she could find herself feeling flattered by this show of possessiveness. She had to remind herself that that was what it was: a show. She didn’t doubt that she and Floss were best friends, but that only meant she knew Floss very well—well enough to realize that, to Floss, friendship was theater. Floss shrieked with joy when Orla entered a room, and captioned