Happy Place(59)

“Isn’t that humiliating?” I try to pull my phone away.

He doesn’t let go. “Why would it be humiliating?”

“Because I’m not Michelangelo,” I say. “My vases don’t need names.”

He holds the phone up. “This one needs a fucking name, and that name is Hank.” I reach for it again, but he yanks it out of reach, goes back to staring at the screen, creases rising from the insides of his brows. Quietly, he says, “It looks like him.”

“You don’t have to say that, Wyn,” I reply. “It’s a vase, by an amateur.”

“It looks like Montana,” he says. “The colors are exactly right.”

“Or maybe you’re just really high,” I say.

“I am definitely really high,” he says. “But I’m also right.”

Our eyes snag, warmth gathering at my core. I hold my hand out. He sets my phone in it.

“Did you show this to my mom?” he asks.

I shake my head. “I was thinking about giving it to her.”

“Let me buy it,” he says.

I laugh. “What? Definitely not.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not worth anything,” I say.

“It is to me,” he says.

“Then you can pay for shipping,” I say. “It will be from both of us.”

“Okay. I’ll pay for shipping.” After a pause, he says, “How’d you get into it?”

“Ceramics?”

He nods.

I let out a breath. “It was about a week after we broke up. I was walking home from a shift, and I was a couple blocks from ou—my apartment.” I correct myself at the last second, but my face flames anyway.

I hadn’t wanted to go home that day. I’d scrubbed in on another rough surgery. The patient pulled through, but I’d felt sick ever since.

All I wanted was to be wrapped up in Wyn’s arms, and I knew if I walked into our apartment, there’d be shadows of him everywhere but no trace of the real thing.

I swallow the lump burgeoning in my throat. “And I saw this shop. And it reminded me of being here, because, you know . . .”

“You can’t go four feet without hitting a ceramic nautilus shell vase?” he guesses.

“Exactly,” I say. “And I’ve never been super interested in all those pottery shops while we’re here, you know? But when I saw this place, I felt like . . . like it was a little piece of home. Or, you know, whatever the cottage is for us.”

“So you just went in?” he asks.

“I just went in.”

A smile teases at the edges of his mouth. “That’s not like you.”

“I know,” I say. “But I was having a bad day. And there was an ice cream shop next door, so I got a scoop there, and by the time I was leaving, people were showing up at the studio for a beginners’ class, and the alternative was to go home and watch more Murder, She Wrote, so I just went in.”

Softly, he says, “And you liked it.”

“I really liked it,” I admit.

“You’re good at it,” he says.

“Not really,” I say. “But that’s the thing. Nothing’s riding on it. If I mess it up, it doesn’t matter. I can start over, and honestly, I don’t even mind. Because when I’m working on it, I feel good. I’m not muscling through to see how it turns out. I like doing it. I don’t have to stay hyperfocused. I don’t have to do anything but stick my hands in some mud and be. I zone out and let my mind wander.”

He must see something in my expression, because he says, “What do you think about?”

My cheeks tingle. “I don’t know. Places, mostly.”

“Which places?”

I look down to the festival stretched out beneath us, watching a little boy and girl zigzag through the crowd with cotton candy bouquets twice as big as their heads. “Anywhere I’ve been happy,” I say.

There’s a long pause. “Montana?”

My throat twists. I nod.

“That bowl that looked like a butt—I was thinking about the water here in Knott’s Harbor,” I say. “About the waves, and how weird it is that they don’t really exist. Like the water is just the water, but the tide moves through them and the wind moves over them and they change shape, but they’re always just water.”

“So I guess,” he says, “some things change and stay the same.”

I know we’re high. I know he hasn’t actually said anything profound, but when his pale coyote eyes lift to mine, my heart seems to flip over, everything inside me turning a full one hundred and eighty degrees. It’s like I’ve been upside down all this time, and the motion has finally righted me.

“Is there one that looks like us?” he asks.

They all do, I think. You are in all of my happiest places.

You are where my mind goes when it needs to be soothed.

I shift on the bench. His fingertips graze my thigh. His focus homes in on the contact.

His lips knit together as he traces the fold of fabric, and while he’s not exactly touching me, the nerves along my hip still whir to life, heat, fizz.

“You have to feel this, Harriet,” he says dreamily.