Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
The shop was certainly a step above the art spaces I’d gone to as a tween. There, I’d picked out a ceramic item to paint, generally from an assortment of cutesy dogs and cats and cups and plates.
This place wasn’t like that. It was minimalist and neat.
The walls were lined with wood shelves showcasing various pieces of art, and in the center, a wood table covered in butcher paper awaited us.
Across the top sat a mason jar with popsicle sticks, some small glass containers, a few pairs of gloves, and a row of small squeeze bottles filled with all the colors of the rainbow.
Two rotating fans pointed downward from opposite corners of the room, making it pleasantly breezy.
“What is this?” I asked.
“A resin art workshop,” Grant said, watching me take in the space.
I’d heard of resin art, but I had no idea what it entailed, which meant I was about to betray my distinct lack of feminine artsiness. Not that Grant would’ve assumed I possessed any. But I wouldn’t have assumed he was a crafty person, and yet he’d chosen this for our date.
“Have you done resin art before?” I asked.
“Nope.” He waved and smiled at the woman who emerged from a back room. She looked to be about forty with a head of frizzy brown curls and a colorful tunic beneath her messy apron.
I watched Grant as he approached her, still trying to figure out why in the world he had chosen this of all places. It was so…random. So unexpected, which, to be fair, was par for the course with Grant.
“Welcome to Swirl,” the woman said cheerily as she shook his hand. “My name is Misha, and I own the workshop. I’ll give you a quick tour, then let you settle in and get to creating. Does that sound good?”
“Sounds great,” Grant said.
I nodded politely.
Misha showed us the shelves of art to our left, which held everything from bookmarks and coasters to large blocky letters. Each piece was unique, but most held various items suspended in a clear or colorful material.
She guided us to the table next, explaining what was in the bottles and what it would need to be mixed with before we poured and added anything in.
The back wall of the shop held a variety of products we could choose as molds or bases—everything we’d seen on the art wall and then some.
There were necklaces, plates, pieces of knotty wood, and a dozen other options, each with an example of a finished piece above.
On the table to the right of that were the mix-ins: dried flowers, seashells, pine fronds, charms, beads, book pages, spices, and even googly eyes.
“So, that’s us,” Misha said, looking over her shop with pride. “Your sweet boyfriend”—she beamed at Grant—“reserved the entire shop, so you’ll have it all to yourselves.”
I opened my mouth to correct her assumption, but she barreled on.
“I’m just a ring away”—she reached for a bell on the nearest table and gave it a musical wiggle—“if you need any help, but I promise not to peek in unless I’m summoned.
” She winked at us like we had plans to do things far more intimate than make resin art in her shop, tall street-facing windows notwithstanding.
“The most important thing is to enjoy the process. If you do that, the final product will bring you joy.” She handed us both an apron, gave her smile an extra little oomph, then turned and left.
Grant looped the head of the apron around his neck and tied it in the back, his eyes on me, sparkling with amusement, like he knew it killed me not to set Misha straight about our relationship.
I ignored him and put on my own apron, feeling suddenly very domestic, like I was about to put a casserole in the oven. Was it obvious I rarely cooked or baked? My hair snagged on the neck of the apron, and I ran a hand under it to flip it free.
I winced.
If I’d been imagining entrancing Grant with a hair-commercial-worthy toss of my red hair, I’d been sadly mistaken.
A chunk seemed to have caught in the adjustable metal ring.
I fiddled with it, but it had no intention of cooperating.
Like a toddler with a marker, my hair needed to be kept contained or it tried to sabotage me.
“Lemme help,” Grant said, coming over.
“I’ve got it,” I said, tugging it in a different direction and shifting away from him.
“Do you, though?” he asked with amusement as he came up behind me.
“Eventually,” I argued, but I dropped my arms because my shoulders were burning.
Grant gently moved aside the majority of my hair, his fingers grazing my neck and leaving behind a prickle of contact in their wake, like someone had brushed a livewire across my skin.
I shut my eyes and braced myself for the inevitable tugs and pinches as he worked the hair free, but they never came. Gentleness was a foreign concept to Grant when it came to communication, but his hands…my gosh.
His fingertips skipped and grazed my skin with nary a tug on my hair.
“No wonder you keep your hair up,” he said.
I suppressed the urge to look back over my shoulder. “Yeah. It doesn’t play nicely.”
“Maybe not, but it looks amazing.”
I kept my eyes squarely on the big, flowery letter K on the shelf ahead of me. K for knock it right off, Vivian.
Music came on over the speakers, the volume fluctuating until Misha settled on something present but not ear-shattering. It was upbeat, and it helped defray the tension.
“There.” Grant softly arranged my hair, and I clenched my eyes shut like my sight rather than my entire nervous system was the problem. “Shall we pick our poison?”
I turned to face him, and he jerked his head toward the table of molds.
We browsed them together, and I tried to envision what I might want to make—or what I was least likely to screw up. I was built for x- and y-axes, tables, and spreadsheets. Everything had its proper and precise place in my world. The messiness and free-flowing chaos of art wasn’t in my toolbox.
“Oh,” Grant said. “One thing I forgot to mention.”
I shot him a wary glance. “What’s that?”
“You’ll be making something for me, and I’ll be making something for you.”
My finger stopped tracing the gold of a necklace pendant. “What?”
“I’ll choose my object, but you’ll have full creative control. And vice versa.”
I stared at him. “So…you want to spend your money to have me make something you probably won’t like instead of making something you know you’ll like?”
“I’ll like whatever you make me, Vivian.”
I pressed my lips together and took my fingers off the necklace. Having Grant make me jewelry seemed like a bad idea. Instead, I settled on a tray mold—totally benign—while Grant chose two coasters.
“I know you hate how I put my coffee straight onto the desk,” he said, handing them to me.
“It’s barbaric,” I said and gave him my tray.
“Poor Vivian,” he said, inspecting it with twists and turns. “Her neat and orderly office has been invaded by an uncivilized brute.”
“Self-awareness is the first step.” I made my way to the mix-ins, and he joined me.
I tried to envision what sort of coaster design would suit him. How had I spent so much time with him and still felt so at sea about his likes and dislikes?
I looked at him from the corner of my eye and found him riffling through the googly eyes. “Seriously?” I said. “You want to do this that way?”
“I considered sneaking in one or two,” he said. “But no. I don’t want to do this that way.”
Choosing a design for Grant was even harder than choosing one for myself, but I tried to force myself not to overthink it. He’d be setting his coffee on these things, not getting buried with them.
I put some mix-ins and the coasters on a spot at the end of the table and started to get organized.
Two minutes later, Grant came up beside me.
“Hey,” I said, shielding my mix-ins from view. “What’re you doing?”
“Starting my project.”
“You can’t watch what I’m doing—it’ll ruin the surprise.”
He looked at me for a few seconds. “Are you saying you want me all the way over there?” He pointed at the opposite end of the table. “We’re on a date, Vivian. The entire point is to be close.”
I ignored the flutter of my pulse. “Hey, you’re the one who came up with this you-create-mine, I’ll-create-yours thing.” I scooched away, but there was only so far I could go until I reached the end of the table.
“I didn’t say it had to be a secret.” He scooched closer to me.
“Fine.” I hip-checked him back to his place, then started arranging the mix-ins on the coasters to get a sense for what I wanted them to look like.
Grant took one of my hands, then the other.
“Hey,” I said as he turned me toward him.
“That’s the other thing I forgot to tell you,” he said. “We’re not precision planning this art project, okay? We’re letting go.” He released my hands and gave me my pair of gloves. “Tonight, you and I are embracing messy.”
Those words shouldn’t have shot through my lungs and straight to my heart, but they did. I hated messy. I hated letting go. I wanted two hands on the wheel, both eyes on the road, my car smack dab in the middle of the lane. At all times.
Something inside me knew that with Grant more than anyone, I needed that amount of control. Messy with him was bound to be a whole different level.
But I took the gloves. These were his coasters, after all. If he didn’t mind them coming out hideous, who was I to argue?
I’d decided what colors I wanted, at least. Grant was a deep, vivid blue.
Confident. Cool. Mysterious like the night sky, which was why I chose gold flecks as one of the mix-ins.
But once I had the colors, I hit a dead end.
Everything Misha had explained about mixing the resin had slipped out of my brain.
From the corner of my eye, I watched as Grant mixed resin, hardener, and color in pourable glass cups.
He caught me watching. “Need help?”
“No,” I said, annoyed to hear my tone defensive.
He came over anyway.
“I’m fully capable of doing this myself, Grant,” I said, ignoring how my body reacted to his increasing proximity.