"When is that?"
"I don't know."
A pause. "Jess, I'm not trying to be the voice of doom. I can hear it in your voice—whatever happened last night was real. I believe you. But please, for me, find out who this man is before you go any deeper. You deserve to know what you're walking into."
After we hang up, I sit on the crate for a long time. The sculpture stands in the center of the studio—the two forms bending toward each other, the yielding curve, the space between them charged and narrowing.
Tess is right. She's always right about me, which is the most infuriating quality a best friend can have. I'm walking into something I don't fully understand, with a man I can't fully read, and the only thing I know for certain is how he makes me feel—seen, held, undone.
That's not enough. Feeling isn't knowing. The hardware store nods and the gallery conversations and the night in hisapartment—those are feelings. What I don't have are facts. Where he works. Who he works for. Why a man who does corporate consulting lives in an apartment that costs more than a small country and has nothing personal on the walls except a painting he put away.
The gap between what I feel and what I know is wide enough to fall through. And I'm a woman who's spent her entire life checking the ground before she steps.
But I'm also a woman who held out her wrists last night and said "please" and meant it. A woman who left the gap open at the top of a sculpture because closing it would mean giving up. A woman who is, despite every rational instinct, despite every lesson the foster care system taught her about the cost of trusting people—falling.
I'm falling for Damien Cross. I can feel it happening the way you feel a weld reaching temperature—the slow heat building, the molecular shift, the point where the metal stops being what it was and becomes something new. I'm past the point of transformation. The heat is in me and I can't cool it down and I'm not sure I want to.
I'm terrified. I'm also more alive than I've been since I lit my first torch and watched the sparks cascade and felt, for the first time in my life, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
He made me feel that. In his apartment, in his bed, in his empty kitchen on a Sunday morning. Like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
I work until dark. The sculpture grows. The yielding form takes shape—not collapsing, not breaking. Bending with intention. Choosing its angle. The welds are some of the bestI've ever laid—clean, fluid, the metal doing what I ask it to do without resistance.
I lock the studio and walk home. The November air bites my face and my wrists ache gently under my jacket sleeves and I think about the word he said last night. Stay. The way it sounded in his mouth—not a command, not a request. A need, spoken without armor.
I stayed. And the staying didn't break me. The surrender didn't make me less.
I'm still standing. Still welding. Still Jess.
Just Jess with a gap she's decided to leave open.
In my apartment, I lock the door. Make tea. Sit on the bed. The lavender on the windowsill. Tess's postcard. The familiar architecture of my life, small and mine.
His jacket is gone—I returned it last night, folded over my arm, a prop for an entrance I hadn't planned. The back of the door holds only the green dress now, on the good hanger. The dress that started this. The twelve-dollar thrift store dress that Tess found and that I wore to a gallery and then to a man's apartment and then home on a Sunday morning with silk burns on my wrists.
I finish my tea. I turn off the light. The dark is quiet. My body hums. The marks on my wrists pulse gently—his rhythm, imposed on my skin, fading but not gone.
My phone buzzes on the mattress beside me.
I pick it up. His number—the one I saved after the first text, the summons to East 62nd that I told myself I wouldn't answer and answered anyway.
You left something here.
I stare at the screen. The bra, obviously. But the words don't read like a man talking about underwear. They read like a man talking about everything—the trust I left in his bedroom, the truth I left in his kitchen, the piece of myself I left in his hands when I held out my wrists and said "please."
I should reply with something sharp. Something that puts distance between us. Something that re-establishes the boundary I've been demolishing all week.
My thumbs hover over the screen.
I type:I know.
I send it before I can change my mind. Then I put the phone face-down on the mattress and lie in the dark and wait for my heart to slow down.
It doesn't slow down.
It doesn't slow down for a long time.
Chapter 18 - Damien
