Chapter Fifteen
Even the three-flight stair climb between him and Zach’s studio wasn’t enough to spoil Flynn’s excitement at getting to see where Zach worked. He was a little out of breath when he got to the top, sure, but the way his heart was pounding wasn’tjustabout that.
Maybe it was stupid, but this felt… intimate. Intimate in a strange way he’d never quite experienced before. Flynn always thought of artists as broody and secretive, closely guarding their work, but Zach had been anything but.
He’d been eager to show Flynn his work, and that… it felt special. It felt liketrust.
Flynn doubted that just anyone got to see this, shared space or not.
Zach answered the door almost as Flynn knocked on it, beaming broadly at him.
“I heard you coming up the stairs,” Zach said. “Or… I figured it was either you or Suki, and she was going for supplies, so I thought it’d be nice to open the door either way.”
He stepped back, giving Flynn space to slip inside.
The moment the door closed behind him, Flynn looked around the space in awe. The opposite wall was all glass, the way a lot of old factories were, though it’d been hard to tell from the entrance side that this building was one.
The whole high-ceilinged room was flooded with light, four distinct work areas each taking up a quarter of the room lengthways, a few makeshift screens and industrial galvanized steel shelving units in place to mark out the borders. It seemed like those borders tended to spill over a lot, though.
Everything was barely-contained chaos, and there was a sense of urgency in the air that infected even Flynn’s completely unartistic soul.
“Wow,” he said after a moment, realizing he’d gone quiet. “This place is cool.”
Zach grinned at him. “I’m glad you think so,” he said, rocking on the balls of his feet. “I like it here. It’s kind of more a home than my apartment is. I mean, my apartment is the third one I’ve lived in in two years, but this place… it’s always been here.”
Flynn nodded, his sense that this wasspecialto Zach confirmed. He was seeing something important. Something that mattered.
Which was why he’d wanted to see it in the first place. He wantedmoreof Zach, and that didn’t just mean he wanted to kiss him.
He wanted to know him,reallyknow him, understand the kind of person he was. Because Zach was fascinating to him, and if he was the first man Flynn had been interested enough in to finally realize that he wasn’t as straight as he’d been telling himself? Then he was important.
“Show me what you’re working on?” Flynn asked, glancing over to the space that looked most likely to be Zach’s.
Zach headed over to it, gesturing for Flynn to follow and stopping in front of a huge set of shelves.
“I mostly do commercial work here,” Zach said. “I mean… work I cansell, I still do it all by hand, but…” he trailed off, gesturing broadly at the shelves. “The left side is finished, the right side is stuff that’s still drying before it’s ready to fire or re-fire. There’s a kiln downstairs. I could show you, but it’s not all that interesting.”
Flynn was listening, but he was also already wandering over to the finished side, taking in shelf upon shelf of beautiful mugs and plates and vases, all catching the sunlight and showing off the beautiful jewel-bright colors and intricate patterns of their glazes.
He glanced at Zach, and then back at the shelves, and his heart did a few complicated aerial maneuvers at the thought thatZach, who was adorable and sweet and funny could make things this beautiful in this kind of quantity. Like it was nothing. Like art just flowed out of his fingers.
Maybe that was stupid, or overly romanticized, but… Flynn was impressed, anyway.
“Can I touch?” he asked, reaching out to a vase that had a beautiful carved pattern to it that went right through the clay. It wouldn’t have held much water, but he got the impression it wasn’t really meant to.
“Go for it,” Zach said. “I like to think my work is… tactile, I guess. Especially things like mugs and cups, but other stuff, too. I think… I dunno, did your parents ever have a vase you weren’t allowed to touch?”
“Not really,” Flynn said, picking the one that’d caught his eye up and tracing the patterns in it with the tip of his finger, feeling out the shapes. Itwantedto be touched, almost, the way it was designed making it satisfying to run his fingers over it, and that had to be deliberate.
“Well, mine did. It was always in the front hall, and sometimes my dad would bring home flowers to put in it, but mostly it sat idle. It was Chinese, I think. I don’t remember it clearly enough to look it up, but I remember it being covered in tiny flowers, and the edges were gilded. What Imostlyremember, though, was that I wasn’t allowed to touch it.”
Flynn set the vase he was holding down, sensing that the slight waver in Zach’s voice meant he was about to share something important. Something secret, something Flynn wanted to give his full attention to.
“Obviously, telling a little kid they can’t have something just makes them want it more,” he said, shifting his weight. “So when I was three or four, I pushed a chair from the kitchen into the hallway so I could stand up and get a really good look at it.”
The sense that this story was going to go somewhere Flynn didn’t like washed over him uneasily, settling as a faint buzzing in the base of his skull. If Zach was going to share it, he was willing to listen, but…
He knew how it was going to go, and his heart already hurt.
