“Culpeper,” Cole said finally, and I felt a rush of blood in my cheeks at the way he said it. “I’m going to open my eyes.”

“No, you aren’t.” I put the bite in his mouth.

He rolled the pie around for quite a while before he swallowed.

He sighed deeply.

“Don’t open yet, there’s more,” I said. “Verdict?”

“Mmmm.”

“Ready for the next?”

“Is it chocolate?”

It was the chocolate-caramel crostata, crusted with sea salt.

It was the best food ever, if you were in a food-eating mood.

“Mostly.”

“Just a small bite, then,” he warned.

“Good. I barely want to share this much with you anyway.”

He opened his mouth obediently, and I placed a small forkful of the caramel-drizzled-chocolate in it. I reminded him, “Eyes still closed.”

Savoring the chocolate, he sighed even more deeply.

“That one,” he said, “would be the one I would happily let kill me. Eyes still closed?”

“Yes,” I said. “Open your mouth.”

I kept him waiting again, while I looked at the lines of his cheeks and his jaw and his eyebrows, all of them so purposeful and dazzling and at home here in this place of purposeful and dazzling things. Then I leaned across the table and kissed his open mouth. It still tasted of caramel. I felt him say Mmmm, the sound vibrating against my lips, and then he pressed his hand against my neck and kissed me back, earnest and certain.

My heart felt so full I thought it would explode. It was unfamiliar with pumping blood instead of ice.

I sat back. Cole wiped lipstick onto a napkin. I waited for my pulse to return to normal.

I said, “Also, here’s this.”

I pushed a Pie Hole T-shirt over to him.

Cole sighed a third time, as if this was his favorite flavor of all. He rubbed the shirt against his cheek. Then he picked up his fork and ate his pie in two bites.

I took longer to eat mine, first, because I chewed, and second, because I explored his new phone while I ate. I thumbed through various apps, all of them with Cole’s name over them.

“Do you really want me to be you online?”

Cole smiled. His real smile. “I trust you.”

Chapter Eighteen

· cole ·

By the time I got to the studio with my retinue of cameramen, I had already emailed music concepts to both Jeremy and Leyla, and formed an idea of what the episode would look like. I figured as long as I kept them interesting, Baby wouldn’t try to make things unpleasant.

The way sharpt33th worked was this: Each “season”

was six weeks long, and most of them had six to nine episodes that could appear at any time. It didn’t seem like the most logical way to run a show, but it had been running that way before I arrived and I guessed it would keep running that way after I was gone. Baby had developed a core viewing audience with the SharpT33th app installed on various devices, and those core watchers were rewarded for their dedication by being the first to see the irregularly timed episodes. The idea was that when Baby’s disastrous subject did something heinous, it could be posted immediately to the Internet, and if you were sitting by your phone, you could be the first to know. After that first blast out onto the web, the shows got archived and could be watched at any time by anybody. The ideal was once a week, but my contract specified that I could be asked to do up to two a week “if material and demand warranted.”

Those extra episodes were always when her subject melted down.

I wasn’t going to do those.

The recording studio, close and gray and soulless, was unfamiliar to me, but known to Leyla, who gripped hands with the sound engineer when we arrived, and then immediately sourced kombucha from a fridge. Joan and T lurked with their cameras.

“Hello, man,” said the sound engineer. “I’m Dante. How’s it hanging?”

Jeremy and I exchanged a look.

“A little to the left,” I replied. “How much time do we have?”

Both Leyla and Dante looked insulted at the immediate introduction of business talk, but here was the truth: Studios made me anxious. It wasn’t that I didn’t like being in one; it was just that for as long as I’d been in music, I’d always been on deadline in one. It didn’t matter how big NARKOTIKA got; in the end it was always a new album squeezed into a set number of studio hours before I was scheduled to go back on tour again.

There was never enough time to get the songs like I wanted them. Nothing had ever gone out as a disaster, but it had come close. Close enough that I never forgot what the stakes were.

Also, it was freezing cold in the studio. Like a systems test on my wolf-strained nerves.

“Do you want to, like, get to know the equipment?” Dante asked. “I mean —”

“What I’d like,” I said, “is to put down my gear and have those two people over there start hooking in to your equipment while you pull up your Wikipedia page so I can tell who else you’ve recorded and I can see if we’re going to be best friends or mortal enemies by the end of this session.”

Dante looked at me. Leyla looked at me. The cameras looked at me. Jeremy set down his case and flipped open the snaps to get his bass out.

No one was moving.

Jeremy looked up. He said, very pleasant and surprised, “Oh. Didn’t you know? Cole doesn’t do small talk.”

Sometimes I can be an asshole. Sometimes I don’t care.

Everyone went to do what I said.

“Also,” I added, “can we have it warmer in here? I can’t feel my goddamn fingers.”

Jeremy stood up and adjusted the strap of his bass. He played a soporific bass riff and paused to tune. “Just like old days.”

“Almost,” I said. I didn’t say Victor, but I was thinking it.

My eyes were on Leyla as she messed around with the drum kit.

“Which of those things are we doing?” Jeremy asked. He meant the files I’d sent. “I fooled around with a few of them.”

“Which are you feeling?”

Jeremy glanced at the cameras. He glanced back at me. In a low, casual voice, he asked, “Depends. What’s the way?”

God, I loved smart people.

“Special guests,” I said, turning my phone so he could see.