The studio changes with him in it. The space that holds a six-foot sculpture and all my tools and the accumulated debrisof months of work suddenly feels tight. He's too large for the room. Too present. The air rearranges itself around him—or my attention rearranges, which amounts to the same thing.
I pull the cargo door back down to the six-inch gap. The clatter echoes off the concrete walls and then it's quiet. Just the hum of the space heater. The tick of cooling metal. And him, standing in my studio, breathing my air.
I go back to the workbench. Pick up the torch. I'm going to work. I'm going to weld while he's here because welding is what I do and if I stop doing it I'll have to look at him and if I look at him I don't know what will happen.
I pull the mask down and relight the torch. The blue-white flare fills the room. I lean into the join and try to lay a bead and my hand shakes and the bead wanders and I kill the torch and stand there with my mask down and my eyes closed and my heart hammering.
I can feel him behind me. Not close—he's stayed near the door, giving me space the way he gave me space on the walk. But his presence has a gravity that distance doesn't diminish. He's in my studio. In my place. The only place in the world where I feel completely myself, and he's standing in it, and the self I feel isn't the one I'm used to.
I pull the mask up. Turn around.
He's moved. Not toward me—toward the new piece. He's standing in front of the rough framing, the barely-there skeleton, and he's looking at it with the same expression he wore at the gallery. The unguarded one. The one that slips out before he can catch it.
His hand comes up. Slowly. He touches one of the steel bars—just his fingertips, resting against the metal I welded an hour ago. The metal that's still warm.
The intimacy of it empties my lungs. His hand on my work. His skin against something I made. It's more personal than if he'd touched my body—more invasive, more tender, more unbearable. Because my work is the truest part of me, the part I can't fake, and he's touching it like it's sacred.
"Don't," I say. The word comes out strangled.
He pulls his hand back. Looks at me.
The distance between us is maybe eight feet. The space heater hums. The studio is dim—just the overhead fluorescents and the work light clamped to the bench, throwing long shadows across the concrete floor.
"Why are you here?" I ask.
"I was walking past."
"No you weren't."
He doesn't deny it. Something in his jaw shifts—a tightening, a decision—and he says, "No. I wasn't."
"So why?"
"Because I needed to see you."
Not wanted. Needed. The word lands differently. Heavier. More dangerous.
"You can't just show up at someone's—"
"I know."
"It's the middle of the night."
"I know."
"This isn't—"
"I know, Jess."
My name in his mouth. That low, rough voice wrapping around the single syllable. It stops me the way a hand on my chest would stop me—physical, immediate, total.
I don't move. I don't speak. I stand at the workbench with my gloves in my hand and my mask on my forehead and I watch him cross the studio toward me.
He doesn't rush. Each step is deliberate—not the calculated precision I've been distrusting for weeks, but something rawer. The walk of a man who knows he shouldn't be doing what he's doing and can't stop. His eyes don't leave mine. The mask is gone. Everything underneath is on the surface and it's looking at me with an expression I have no defense against.
Want. Not polished attraction. Not smooth, calibrated interest. Want in its rawest form—desperate, exposed, almost painful. He's looking at me the way a starving person looks at food, and the nakedness of it should repulse me.
It doesn't repulse me.
