Like she'd been cold for a very long time and had forgotten what warmth felt like.
I know that feeling. I've been cold my whole life.
Tomorrow, or the day after—she'll come to the bodega with the jacket folded over her arm. Or I'll see her on the street. Or she'll appear at my door with that sharp look on her face.
And the gap between us will be smaller.
And I'll have to stand in front of her with the same hands that broke a man's fingers in a Montreal parking garage and held her hand in a hardware store like it was the most precious thing I'd ever touched.
All of those hands. The same hands.
She thinks she wants to see what's underneath.
She has no idea.
Chapter 11 - Jess
The jacket has been in my apartment for four days and I haven't returned it.
It's hanging on the back of my bedroom door, next to the green dress, on the hanger that sags. I didn't give it the good hanger. That felt like too much—like admitting something I'm not ready to admit. So it hangs on the bad hanger, slightly lopsided, the shoulders drooping in a way that would probably offend a man who wears clothes like that.
I haven't washed it. It still smells like him. I know this because I've checked, twice, burying my face in the collar and inhaling before my brain could intervene and stop me. Both times, I pulled away immediately and said something unkind to myself. Both times, the scent stayed in my nose for hours—warm, clean, expensive, the olfactory equivalent of a hand on the small of your back.
I need to return the jacket. I need to take it to the bodega and hand it to him with a polite thank-you and walk away and re-establish the distance that he collapsed in a single evening by the simple act of taking off his clothes and giving them to me.
Not his clothes. His jacket. One jacket. I need to stop thinking about it like he undressed for me on a sidewalk.
It's Wednesday night, almost eleven. I'm in the studio because the studio is where I go when my head is too loud. The new piece is barely started—a base, some rough framing, the skeleton of something I can't see yet. It's going to be different from the last one. Bigger, maybe. Angrier. The welds I've been laying down have a ferocity I recognize as emotional rather than structural, and I should probably examine that, but examining things is for people who aren't standing in a freezing studioat eleven o'clock at night trying to outrun their own nervous system.
The cargo door is cracked six inches for ventilation. The torch throws fumes, and the extractor fan hasn't worked since October, so the gap at the bottom is the difference between working and passing out. Cold air slides in along the floor, cutting through the heat of the torch, and the contrast feels good. Clean.
I finish a bead, kill the torch, and lift my mask to check the join. It's rough. Rougher than my usual work—I can see the wobble where my hand wasn't steady, and I know why my hand wasn't steady, and the knowing makes me clench my jaw so hard my teeth ache.
I set down the torch and pull off my gloves. Flex my fingers. My tank top is streaked with grime and there's a fresh burn on my forearm where a spark got past the glove—small, stinging, the kind of minor injury I normally don't register.
I register everything tonight. My body is tuned to a frequency that makes every sensation louder—the cold air on my bare arms, the ache in my shoulders, the smell of hot metal and ozone. Like someone turned up the volume on my skin.
I pull the mask back down and relight the torch. Focus. The metal. The join. The bead. This is what I know. This is what I'm good at. This is the thing that doesn't confuse me.
I weld for another ten minutes. When I lift the mask again, he's there.
Standing outside the cargo door. In the gap between the door and the pavement, I can see him from the knees down—dark trousers, dark shoes, still as a pillar. He's not moving. Not knocking. Not announcing himself. Just standing in the dark onthe other side of my door, the way you stand outside a room you're not sure you're allowed to enter.
My heart slams once, hard, and then settles into a rhythm that's too fast and too strong, like a drum being hit by someone who doesn't know their own strength.
I should close the door. Roll it down, lock the latch, pretend I didn't see him. It's eleven o'clock at night and a man is standing outside my studio and any reasonable woman would—
I reach down and lift the door.
It rolls up with a clatter that sounds obscene in the quiet street, and there he is. Full height. Dark jacket—a different one, not the suit from the gallery. His hands at his sides. His face half-lit by the glow from the studio, half in shadow.
He doesn't say anything. Neither do I.
The silence has a texture. A weight. It presses against my skin the way the cold air presses in from the street, and I stand in the doorway with my welding mask pushed up on my forehead and my gloves in one hand and my arms bare and burned and I let him look at me.
He looks. Not at my face—at all of me. The tank top, the work pants, the boots. The grease on my hands. The fresh burn on my forearm. His eyes move over me the way they moved over the sculpture at the gallery—with that total, consuming attention that I've been distrusting for weeks and that feels, right now, in the dark, less like surveillance and more like devotion.
I step back from the doorway. Not an invitation. Just a clearing of space. But he reads it as what it is, and he steps inside.
