I change into my welding gear. Gloves, mask, the heavy jacket. The weight of the equipment is grounding—familiar, functional, the uniform of the person I understand how to be. I fire up the torch and look at the new piece.
The framing has taken shape over the past week. Two steel forms, angled toward each other, the space between them narrowing. I didn't plan this. The sculpture is building itself the way my best work always builds itself—through instinct, through the hands knowing before the brain catches up.
I see it now. What it's becoming. The two forms aren't colliding—one is yielding. Bending toward the other, not breaking, the structural integrity maintained even as the angle changes. Submission that isn't weakness. A curve that's chosen, not forced.
My hands know what I'm feeling. They always have.
I weld for two hours. The work is good—steady, focused, the beads clean and precise. The torch feels right in my hands. The metal responds. Whatever happened last night didn't take this from me—didn't diminish the part of me that lives in fire and steel. If anything, the work feels more alive. More charged. Like the current running through my body is flowing into the sculpture and giving it something it didn't have before.
I stop for water. Sit on the crate. Pull out my phone and call Tess.
"I stayed at his apartment," I say. No preamble.
Silence. Then: "Damien's apartment."
"Yes."
"Last night."
"Last night."
"And?"
"And I stayed. The whole night. I woke up in his bed this morning and he made me coffee and I wore his shirt and we talked about our mothers."
Another silence. Longer this time. I can hear Tess thinking—the particular quality of her breathing when she's choosing her words carefully.
"How was it?" she asks.
"Which part?"
"All of it."
I close my eyes. How was it. The question is like asking how a forest fire was. Destructive. Transformative. The kind of thing that changes the landscape permanently.
"I've never felt anything like it," I say. And the honesty of that—the raw, unprotected truth—makes my voice crack in a way I wasn't expecting.
"Oh, Jess," Tess says. Soft. Not pitying—recognizing. She hears the crack and she knows what it means. It means the wall is down. It means I'm standing in the open, undefended, and the sky could fall on me.
"His apartment is on the Upper East Side," I say. "East 62nd. It's huge and beautiful and there's nothing in it. Empty walls. Empty fridge. Like a hotel room someone's been staying in for months without unpacking."
"What does he do? Did you ask again?"
"I didn't. We talked about other things. His mother was a painter. She died when he was twelve. His father was controlling—the kind of man who makes the air heavy. He told me things, Tess. Real things. Things that cost him."
"But you still don't know what he does for a living."
"Consulting."
"Consulting isn't a thing. Consulting is what people say when they don't want to tell you what they actually do."
She's right. I know she's right. The word "consulting" is a closed door with a polite sign on it, and I've been so distracted by the doors he has been opening—his mother, his emptiness, his hands—that I haven't pushed on the one that stays shut.
"I'll ask him," I say.
"When?"
"Next time I see him."
