Kessian walked past the shelves with stacks of bowls and mugs in different shapes and sizes. He ran his finger over one with a drip glaze in robin’s-egg blue.
“Are they all enchanted?”
None of the work had labels, but I didn’t need any. I had a map in my head of all the spells and which shelves they belonged to. “Not all. That section hasn’t been glazed or fired yet, and this shelf has enchantments I added in the slip, but for these ones, I’m waiting until I fire them toincorporate the spell. I have some runes I activate in the kiln for specific projects. Recently—” I picked up the half-finished mug from my workbench, showing Kessian the potion brewing inside. “I found a way to make a mug that gives the drinker energy to last until bedtime without a caffeine crash. I’d been working on it a while, but the enchantment gave me cold chills, so it needed some perfecting.”
I went on a long time, explaining the different spells and tithes I’d discovered for them, how crafting the tithe into the material made the spells last, before realizing I’d rambled for an embarrassingly long duration.
But Kessian seemed … genuinely interested?
“Do you think you could teach me to throw?” he asked.
Without consideration for the late hour, I ripped open a sleeve of clay and slapped it onto my workbench. I began by showing him the motion for wedging the clay, folding it over and over in a spiral to get all the bubbles out.
In daily life, I hated getting dirty hands or things under my nails. Normally I couldn’t concentrate until I’d scrubbed myself clean. Cooking was a constant war between prepping meat and sauces and running my fingers under the tap.
With pottery, it was different. There was something about the earthy tactility of it that set me free.
As I sped up, showing him how the layers looked like a ram’s horn, I noticed him staring, not at the clay, but at my arms and, particularly, my hands. I’d rolled up my sleeves to the elbow, the veins and muscles of my forearms standing out as I kneaded.
“Did you catch all that?” I asked.
He looked up at me. “I think you’ll find you haveallmy attention.”
“Great. Now it’s your turn to try.” I passed him the half-wedged lump of clay to practice on.
“You must give killer massages,” he said as he mimicked my motions. “This isn’t easy.”
“Don’t turn it to the left quite so much each time. Just a small turn.”
“Are you going to deflect every time I flirt?”
“I’ve never given a massage, so I wouldn’t know.”
“I can think of someone you can practice on.”
“Focus.” I said it as much to him as myself. Though my misgivings about his secrets had mostly fallen away, the fear of letting my lonely heart get carried away hadn’t. It was a possibility made more likely by the attentive way Kessian listened to me ramble about my favorite hobby. Once the clay was wedged, I set up my wheel for him, sitting him down, helping to pat the clay until it was dead center. I gave him a minute to experiment with the pedal pressure and speed before finally wetting my hands so we could get to the fun bit.
I gave him a demonstration first. He watched, but I couldn’t be sure how much he took in. His gaze kept drifting from the wheel to my face, a curious intensity to his eyes. I felt undressed. Not nude, but … known. As I went over the coning technique, the body posture, how to position his hands, my love for the craft seemed as much a fascination to him as my forearms had been a second prior.
When I told him he should give it a go, he snapped to attention.
The moment he applied pressure, the cone of clay began to wobble.
I moved my stool behind him and repositioned his arms. “Like this. Elbows tucked against your waist.”
He concentrated, stabilizing the cone with my guidance. The slip on my hands left clay fingerprints on his skin, a map of all the places I was touching him. Leaning against his back with my chin over his shoulder, his hair tickled my cheek, and I could smell the citrus tang of his shampoo.
I’d occupied this position before, in a more heated memory than this moment, but a different sort of intimacy charged the air around us.
Kessian sat rigidly, his spine a taut bowstring. It actually helped, allowing him to move mechanically, keeping an even pressure as, together, we shaped a small pot.
Once finished, I showed him how to lift it from the wheel. Though a little wonky, it had the charm of all first projects—made before perfectionism and the burden of knowledge made everything either flawed or a work in progress.
I held it out to him. “After it dries, it’ll be ready for glazing, or we could bisque fire it like this.”
“Can I drill a hole in the bottom?”
“What for?”
