He touches his thumb against the middle of my chin, the air taking on an electrical charge. “Is that the weed talking,” he teases gently, “or is it that I’ve still got powdered sugar on my mouth?”
For someone who’s spent a lifetime living inside her own mind, I become nothing but a body alarmingly fast, all buzzing nerve endings and tingling skin.
“This is confusing,” I whisper.
“I don’t feel confused,” he says.
“You must not be as high as me.”
His smile unfurls from one corner of his mouth, never quite making it to the other. “I know I’m not as high as you. You look like you ate a trash bag full of catnip.”
“I can feel my blood,” I say. “And these colors have tastes.”
“You’re not wrong,” he says.
“What do they taste like to you?” I ask.
He closes his eyes, his nose tipping up, the breeze ruffling his T-shirt. When he opens his eyes, his pupils have overtaken his irises. “Red gummy.”
I snort. “How astute.”
His eyes flash, lightning crackling in the pre-tornado green of them. “Okay, fine,” he says. “You want the truth?”
“About what these lights taste like?” I say. “Dying for it.”
His hand slides off the lap bar, the tips of his fingers dragging up the outside of my thigh all the way to my hip, his eyes watching their progress. “They taste like this fabric.”
I’m trying my best not to shiver, not to nuzzle into him, because the light pressure of his fingers against the satin of my sundress does in fact have a taste right now, and it’s delicious.
“Soft,” he says. The backs of his fingernails drag back down my thigh, sliding past the hem of my dress to the bare skin above my knee. My head falls back of its own volition. “Delicate. So fucking light it dissolves on your tongue.”
His eyes meet mine. His nails drag back up, a little heavier. For several seconds, or minutes, or hours, we hold on to each other’s gazes while his hand makes slow passes, up, down, up a little higher.
“Can I see more pictures?” he says.
I startle from my lust haze. “What?”
“Of your pottery,” he says.
“It’s not good,” I say.
“I don’t care,” he says. “Can I see it?”
Our gazes hold again. I’m really struggling to move at a normal pace. Every time I look at him, everything else stops, like we’re floating outside time and space.
I fumble my phone out and flip through my pictures.
Aside from a handful of targeted ads for murder mystery TV shows I wanted to remember to watch, there isn’t much to get through before I make it to shots of my last few projects. A mug, two different vases, another bowl that doesn’t really look butt-like at all. Or hardly, anyway.
I pass him my phone. He studies it, his tongue tracing over his bottom lip as he slowly flips through the pictures. We’ve done at least one full rotation on the Ferris wheel by the time he reaches the last one and starts flipping back the other way, pausing on each, zooming in to see the details of the glazes.
“This one.” He’s staring at the smaller of the vases, streaked with shades of green, blue, purple, and brown, a horizon of earthy colors.
My heart squeezes. “That one’s called Hank.”
He looks up, face open, with the expression that used to make me think of quicksand, a face that could pull you in and never let you go.
“You named it?” he says. “After my dad?”
“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?”