Two weeks until the show. Nish is arranging transport—a crew he trusts, proper crating, insurance that he insisted on paying for out of the anonymous donation fund. Everything is clicking into place with a smoothness that I keep waiting to be disrupted, because things don't click into place for me. They grind. They resist. They require force and patience and the willingness to be disappointed.
But not this time. This time, the lighting is professional. The catalog is printed—I've seen the proof, and my work looks stunning in it, which I say with genuine surprise because I've never seen my sculptures photographed well before. The marketing has reached actual collectors, actual critics. Nish says there's already a waiting list for opening night, which is a sentence I don't know how to process, so I've decided not to try.
I call Nish to confirm the transport details, and he's vibrating with the excitement he always carries when a show is coming together.
"The lighting designer came yesterday," he says. "Jess, I wish you could see what she's done with your corner. The spots on the main piece—the way the light comes through the gap at the top and hits the floor—" He makes a sound that I think is supposed to be an explosion. "It's going to stop people in their tracks."
"You're making me more nervous."
"Good. Nervous means you care. Artists who aren't nervous before a show are artists who aren't making anything that matters."
After we hang up, I clean the studio. Not because it needs cleaning—it's never clean, not really—but because the work is done and my hands need something to do. I sweep the concrete floor. I organize the tools on the pegboard. I fold the blanket on the crate and straighten the eucalyptus in its jar.
When the busywork runs out, I sit at the workbench with my sketchbook. I sketch when I'm between pieces—loose, unstructured drawings that sometimes become sculptures and sometimes become nothing. It's how I think when my hands aren't on metal.
I start drawing without a plan. Just shapes. Lines. A vertical form, tall, the proportions coming fast and certain—broad through the shoulder, narrow at the hip, a stance that suggests stillness and control. I add detail without deciding to. The angle of a jaw. The fall of a coat. Hands—precise hands, one holding something, the other resting at the side with a deliberateness that isn't quite relaxation.
I stop. Look at what I've drawn.
I've drawn him. Not his face—the features are vague, unfinished—but his shape. His posture. The architecture of the man from the hardware store, rendered from memory I didn't know I was keeping.
I don't crumple the page. Instead, I study it. There's something I'm trying to work out—something my hands are chasing that my conscious mind hasn't caught yet. The drawing isn't flattering or romantic. It's diagnostic. The same kind of sketch I'd make of a sculpture that wasn't working, trying to identify where the tension is wrong.
Because something about Damien Cross is wrong. Not dangerous-wrong, necessarily. Just—off. A frequency that doesn't match.
I've seen him around the neighborhood since the hardware store. He's at the bodega some mornings—not every morning, just often enough that his face has become one of the known faces in my routine. He nods when he sees me. A brief, measured acknowledgment—polite, appropriate, nothing to object to.
But I object to it anyway. Because the nod, like everything else about him, is too precise. Too calibrated. Every interaction with this man, however small, has the quality of something that's been rehearsed. The nod is exactly warm enough. Exactly restrained enough. It hits every mark without ever feeling spontaneous.
I know what spontaneous looks like. Hector is spontaneous—the way he slides my coffee across the counter before I've ordered, the offhand joke that's different every day. Cal is spontaneous—showing up with bagels, forgetting to knock. Spontaneous is messy and imperfect and human.
Damien Cross is not messy. Damien Cross is a man who has removed all the mess from his surface and left something smooth and flawless and slightly uncanny, like a sculpture that's been sanded so perfectly it no longer looks like it was made by human hands.
Last Tuesday, I passed him on the street. He was on his phone, walking the opposite direction, and our eyes met for maybe one second. He didn't smile. Didn't nod. Just looked at me, and there was something behind his eyes that the careful surface didn't quite contain—something raw and startling, gone so fast I might have imagined it.
I didn't imagine it. My artist's eye doesn't invent things. It records.
I look at the sketch again. The stance, the containment, the precise hands. I'm trying to draw the thing I saw in that one-second look. The crack in the surface. But I can't get it—it's like trying to sketch smoke. Present and then not.
I tear the page out and fold it into the back of the sketchbook. Not crumpled. Filed. Something to come back to when I understand it better.
The problem isn't that I'm attracted to him. The problem is that I can't read him, and I can read almost everyone. Growing up the way I did, you learn to decode people fast—within minutes of entering a new foster home, I could tell you who was safe, who was volatile, who was checked out, who would forget your name. It's a survival skill, and it's never failed me.
Damien Cross defeats it. His surface gives me nothing. The coat, the nod, the carefully modulated warmth—it's all consistent, all plausible, and none of it tells me what's underneath. He's the most unreadable person I've ever encountered, and that alone would be enough to make me uneasy, even without the too-focused eyes and the thumb across my hand and the voice that said my name like he was memorising it.
I don't like things I can't read. Unreadable things have a tendency to be dangerous, in my experience. The foster homes that looked perfect from the outside were always the ones with the worst secrets.
On Thursday, Tess calls. "Saturday. You and me. Thrift stores. You need something to wear to the opening."
"I have the black jeans—"
"The black jeans have a hole in the knee."
"It's fashion."
"It's a hole, Jess." I can hear her grinning through the phone. "Come on. When's the last time you tried on clothes?"
Saturday, she appears at my apartment door with two coffees and a determined expression. We take the subway to her favorite thrift stores—racks packed so tightly you have to push through them like undergrowth.
