Cole glumly explained Baby’s mandate.

“That’s not that bad,” I said. “So she wants you to talk to your fans?”

“I don’t want to talk to them,” he said. “All they want to talk about is whether I’ll take their virginity or write another song like ‘Villain’ or come play a show in whatever impossibly small place they live in. Did you put sugar in this?”

“No. It’s a grown-up coffee. I made it for you the grown-up way. Also, you don’t have to be one-on-one. You could just update them in general.”

“Update them! I’m being brilliant. Now I’m being amazing.

How tedious that would be for them.”

“Oh, it’s tedious already. Baby knows I’m not on the show, right?”

Cole glanced up at the camera. “Legally, she can use the back of your head but not your face. All that” — he gestured to the street — “is too loud for him to pick up any audio, but — do you want to go inside?”

I thought about how there was a certain dark pleasure to anonymously marking my territory, letting the fangirls know that he already had someone. And my hair looked great from the back.

“No,” I replied. “Drink your coffee.”

Cole took another sip. He looked pained. I slid a sugar packet I had been hiding from behind my mug and he leaped upon it.

As he sprinkled its contents into his absolutely already-perfect latte, I picked up the Baby phone. It was a rather nice one.

“Look at the way it sits in your hand.” Cole squinted critically at the phone in my palm. “It respects you. You could be Cole St. Clair, you know.”

I laughed, a little crueler than was strictly necessary. “Oh, I don’t think so. That position is already filled by someone incredibly overqualified.”

“I mean, you could be my voice. Try it. Say something.”

I gave him a scathing look. But the truth was, although Cole was a complicated creature, his projected self was quite simple. I opened Twitter and typed: hi hi hi world.

I hit post.

I had to admit, it was vaguely thrilling.

“What did I say?” Cole asked.

I showed him.

“I don’t use punctuation,” he said. “I also use a lot of these things.” He cupped his hands on either side of his face to demonstrate. “Parentheses.”

“Did you even read it?”

“I did. I know. I was admiring it. Let me see it again. Yes.

This is a great idea. It will free me up for all kinds of things.”

“Like lying around on your floor and firing nice people?”

“Hey, I don’t talk smack about your work. For the record, I’m going into the studio this afternoon.”

I studied his expression to see how he felt about this, but he was facing the camera, so his features were handsome and regulated and fixed into a studied, arrogant relaxation.

“You could come,” Cole said. “And be my — what is it called? Naked person. No. Muse. You could be my muse.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I have class. Maybe if you do all your homework, I’ll come by and give you a gold star.”

“Oh,” he said. “I could give you one, too. I’m all about sharing.”

“That’s big of you.”

Cole held his fingers eight inches apart, then reconsidered and made it ten.

The girl from behind the counter appeared with a tray.

“Here’s your st —”

“Shh,” I said. “It’s a surprise. For him, I mean. Close your eyes, Cole.”

Cole closed his eyes. Smiling at both of us, the waitress set the plates down. She left us there, but I noticed that she waited by the other side of the door, still with the same pleased, anticipatory smile on her face. It felt strange to be the genesis of such a pleasant expression.

“Open your mouth,” I ordered Cole. I worked to create what I thought was a bite-sized forkful of strawberry graham tart. It took longer than I expected.

“It is open,” Cole said. “In case you didn’t notice.”

“Keep it that way. I didn’t tell you to close it.”

I sat there for a long minute, watching Cole fidget, waiting to see if he would lose patience, while I smirked at his closed eyes and looked at the way his neck disappeared into the collar of his T-shirt. He shifted. His eyeballs looked back and forth beneath his eyelids. Anyone wanting to torture Cole would only have to tie him to a chair and do absolutely nothing. He’d beg to have his toenails removed just for something to entertain himself.

“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 www.sharpt33th.com 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 ass**le. 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.

“So, noisy,” Jeremy confirmed. “That third one, then. It does this?”

He played a little snatch of tune until I could tell which one he meant.

“Do you hear that?” I said to Leyla, who looked up with dislike on her face. “That’s the one we’re doing. Put your thinking cap on.”

I didn’t know if a thinking cap would fit over her dreads.

“Cole?” David — Derek — Damon — Dante? asked from overhead, his voice coming from everywhere. Behind a glass panel, I saw him moving behind an array of boards and computer screens. “Can you guys hear me in there?”

“Da.”

“My guys are bringing out your headphones. Let me know about the levels in your ears, and then we’ll do some levels in here. We’re all hooked up. What’s the working title for this track?”

“ ‘Gasoline Love,’ ” I replied.

Dante typed it in. “Nice.”

“Predictable,” replied Leyla from behind the kit.

I bristled. “There is nothing predictable about either gasoline or love, comrade. Why don’t you go back to not caring what tomorrow brings?”

Leyla shrugged and played a bit of drums.

It wasn’t bad. But —

I want Victor

I want Victor

I want Victor

I let myself think it for just a second, and then I shivered and turned to my keyboard. Misgiving still hung inside me. I thought about Isabel’s open mouth on mine, back at the pie shop.

Then we got to work.

Recording in a studio is nothing like playing live. Live is everything all at once. There’s no redos, no problem solving, just powering through. In a studio, though, everything becomes a puzzle. It’s easier if you do the edges first, but sometimes you can’t even tell what the edges are. Sometimes the hardest part is telling which track to lay down first — which track is going to be the skeleton to pack flesh onto. The vocals? But what if they’re not on the beat or if they drop out for measures and measures? The drums, then. But that left you with a track so spare that you might as well start with nothing, or just a click track. The keyboard, then, establishing the chords and the tone. It would have to be rerecorded, but at least it was something.

Mostly I liked it to start and end with me, anyway.

We worked for an hour, during which I hated Leyla more and more. There was nothing wrong with her drumming. It was fine. But Victor had been the best instrumentalist of us all.

Other bands had always tried to poach him from us. Magic hands. Leyla was just a person with a drum set.

How stupid I’d been to think I could just go into a studio with any other musicians and come out with something that sounded even vaguely like NARKOTIKA. Not stupid. Cocky.