Chapter Thirteen Clause Twelve Does Not Cover Kissing
Chapter Thirteen
Clause Twelve Does Not Cover Kissing
SADIE
The morning after I kissed Beckett Vale, I added kissing to the list of services our marriage did not provide.
I did not write it down.
That would have required getting out of bed.
Beckett lay on the right side beneath a separate cream blanket, asleep with the unreasonable composure of a man posing for an advertisement about responsible rest. The pink silk border still divided the mattress like a border between two countries with a trade dispute.
Early light came down through the glass ceiling in a thin copper wash, the color Mars makes at that hour and nowhere else, and it moved along his forearm and stopped at his knuckles, and one of his hands rested beside the silk close enough that I could have touched his fingers without crossing the line.
The villa smelled faintly of last night’s rain program in the garden and of the tea he had left cooling on the sill.
I looked at his mouth. This was poor risk management. I rolled onto my back and stared through the glass ceiling.
Morning light had turned the Rose Dome pale gold. Beyond it, the canyon stretched into red distance. Somewhere beneath us, a fountain began playing the first seven notes of a love song before cutting itself off.
Beckett opened his eyes.
“Did you disable the fountain?”
“Yesterday.”
“It is trying to recover.”
“That will be addressed.”
His voice was rough with sleep.
I looked more firmly at the ceiling.
“We need a rule.”
The mattress shifted as he sat up.
“About the fountain?”
“About last night.”
Silence.
I heard the click of his watch closing around his wrist.
“All right,” he said.
I sat up, clutching my separate blanket with a dignity it had not earned.
“It cannot happen again.”
Beckett’s face changed so little that another person might have missed it. I was not another person. His jaw tightened once. Then the expression disappeared.
“Agreed.”
He said it too quickly.
The word landed on my pride with the efficiency of a luggage cart.
“Good.”
“Good.”
“Because the contract cannot distinguish real affection from campaign performance.”
“Clause twelve distinguishes private conduct from campaign obligations.”
“Clause twelve covers access, recording, and disclosure. It does not cover kissing.”
“Apparently not.”
“It should.”
“You negotiated the language.”
“Under unusual conditions.”
“You had Lila and three lawyers.”
“Lila was threatening to throw things from another continent. She was not focused on romantic ambiguity.”
Beckett got out of bed and folded his blanket. Of course he folded it. I watched his hands and remembered them at my waist. Poorer risk management.
“I will ask legal to draft an amendment,” he said.
“No.”
He looked at me.
“No amendment?”
“I do not want the network receiving a document titled Kissing Restrictions.”
“It would be titled Private Conduct Clarification.”
“That is worse.”
“It is more accurate.”
“It sounds like we were caught in a supply closet.”
“We were in a garden corridor.”
Heat moved into my face.
“I remember.”
His gaze held mine. For one reckless second, neither of us looked away. Then his phone alarm sounded from the kitchen. POTTERY STUDIO LIVE, 9:00 A.M.
I had never been rescued by ceramics before.
The Red Clay Studio occupied a round glass room on the east side of the dome. Six pottery wheels faced the canyon. Shelves displayed bowls, cups, and vases in colors inspired by the landscape, which meant red, darker red, and one blue glaze placed there by a courageous dissident.
Nico waited beside two aprons. One read HIS. The other read HERS. I held mine up.
“Do you have one that says MINE?”
“We can remove the lettering,” Nico said.
Beckett had already turned his apron inside out.
I hated how much I liked him for that.
The instructor introduced herself as Ines, a ceramic artist from New Mexico with silver hair, clay on both elbows, and the calm expression of a woman who had watched many couples discover they could not make bowls.
I examined the wheels.
Five used floor pedals. The sixth had a hand control attached to the table.
“Only one accessible station?”
Ines glanced toward the storage door.
“The other hand control arrived yesterday. Facilities hasn’t installed it.”
Beckett looked at Nico.
“Why?”
“The installation was scheduled for tomorrow.”
“The studio opened today.”
Nico touched his earpiece.
“Facilities is on the way.”
Beckett moved to the hand-control wheel and gave me the station beside it. He did not make a speech about accessibility. He did not look toward the camera. He simply refused to present a delay as if it were a feature.
This was becoming a dangerous habit.
“Today you’ll create a shared keepsake,” she said.
“No,” Beckett and I said.
Ines looked at Nico. Nico looked toward the camera crew. The camera crew looked at the network producer. The producer examined the floor.
Ines nodded. “Individual bowls.”
“Excellent adaptation,” I said.
The live light turned green. Nico welcomed the audience to A Love Worth Shaping. I gave him one look.
“The activity had a name before recent events,” he said quickly.
Comments rose beside the main camera. THE APRON IS INSIDE OUT. SHE REJECTED SHARED CLAY IN UNDER TWO SECONDS. WHY ARE THEY SITTING THREE FEET APART?
Beckett did not look at the screen. He looked directly beneath it. Ines placed a block of clay on each wheel.
“The secret is steady pressure,” she said. “Don’t force the shape. Listen to what the material is doing.”
Beckett studied his clay.
“It is not speaking.”
“That’s because you’re glaring at it.”
“I am assessing it.”
“Clay performs poorly under quarterly review.”
I laughed. Beckett looked at me. The wheel spun too fast beneath his hands. His clay leaned sharply to the left and collapsed.
The comments accelerated. SADIE LAUGHED AND HIS ENTIRE VASE LOST STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY. THAT MAN IS NOT FINE. PUT THE CLAY IN THE QUIET ROOM.
“More water,” Ines told him.
I dipped my fingers into my bowl. Beckett reached for the same one. Our hands stopped an inch apart. The room changed.
Nothing had happened. Every person with functioning vision noticed. I pulled back.
“You take it.”
“There is another bowl.”
“That one is beside you.”
“Correct.”
“Then why did you reach for mine?”
“It was closer.”
“By half an inch.”
“Efficiency compounds.”
Ines placed a third bowl between us.
“Neutral water,” she said.
The camera operator coughed into his fist. I wet my hands and centered the clay. For three peaceful minutes, I almost believed the activity could recover.
My bowl rose evenly. The walls remained upright. Ines praised my pressure. I began considering a second career in objects that could not betray me on a livestream.
Then Nico read the sponsor prompt.
“Partners may now place their hands over each other’s to shape a keepsake together.”
My fingers slipped. The rim of my bowl folded inward. Beckett’s wheel stopped.
“We are making individual pieces,” he said.
The producer spoke from behind the camera.
“The shared-hand moment is the activity’s primary promotional image.”
“Then photograph Ines’s hands,” I said. “She knows what she is doing.”
Ines raised both clay-covered palms.
“I’m available.”
Nico closed the sponsor card.
“We will proceed to decorative texture.”
He said it while walking backward.
I want to be clear that the Red Clay Studio had been designed by someone who understood ceramics and had never once considered a man in a rose-colored suit retreating from a failed sponsor prompt at speed.
The glazes lived on an open shelf along the curved wall, in wide shallow containers, because Ines liked to see her colors.
There were eleven of them. Nine were pink, because the campaign had commissioned a palette and the campaign had opinions.
Nico’s heel found the lowest shelf.
On Earth, a person who trips into a shelf goes down and stays down.
Mars is more generous. Nico left the floor with a kind of startled dignity, traveled a distance I would later describe to Lila as architecturally significant, and came to rest inside the shelving in a seated position, wearing most of the palette.
The containers did not break. That was the tragedy. They tipped, slowly, one into the next, in the long patient way that things fall in one third of gravity, and the glaze came out of them like something with a plan.
Nobody moved.
Ines put down her tools with the calm of a woman who had taught ceramics for thirty years and had been waiting for this.
“Don’t stand up,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re wet clay. Standing is how you become a different shape.”
Beckett was already moving. He crossed the studio, put one hand under Nico’s arm, and lifted him out of the shelving with the efficiency of a man who had read the workplace injury protocol twice and remembered both times.
Nico came up pink from collar to shoe.
Not evenly. That was what finished me. The pink had chosen a diagonal.
It ran from his left shoulder across his chest and down, and it had stopped at exactly the point where a designer would have stopped it, and one perfect stripe of the blue glaze, the courageous dissident, crossed the whole thing at the hip.
“Nico,” Beckett said.
“Don’t.”
“It is a considered look.”
Nico closed his eyes. “Say nothing about the blue.”
“I was not going to.”
“You were composing it.”
I put my head down on the wheel, which was still turning, and my hair got in the clay, and I did not care. I laughed until Ines came around the table and switched my station off out of professional concern.
The camera operator had never stopped recording. Nobody had told him to. He was, he explained afterward, contractually required to capture the full activity, and the full activity had simply expanded.
By the time facilities arrived with a hose rated for interior use, the clip existed in four countries.
Nico stood dripping in the doorway and watched the view count climb on the producer’s tablet.
“It isn’t a flattering angle,” he said.
“It is every angle,” the producer said.
“Then one of them will be flattering.”
He accepted a towel, declined the offer of a car, and walked back to his quarters through the Rose Dome in full view of the resort, because Nico did not believe in exits.
The comments abandoned pottery entirely.
ELEVEN CONTAINERS. HE WENT INTO ALL OF THEM. THE BLUE STRIPE WAS INTENTIONAL AND YOU CANNOT TELL ME OTHERWISE. THAT MAN WALKED HOME.
Ines cleaned her hands and looked at the ruined shelf without visible grief.
“I have wanted a reason to reorder those colors for a month,” she said.
The comments had become unreadable. I read them anyway. THEY ARE ACTING LIKE HANDS HAVE BEEN OUTLAWED. SOMETHING HAPPENED AFTER THE NOODLES.
HE SAID INDIVIDUAL PIECES LIKE A MAN DEFENDING A BORDER. Ines gave us wooden tools. I carved a simple line around my bowl.
Beckett attempted the same pattern. His was mathematically even, perfectly spaced, and emotionally threatening.
“It looks like a security fence,” I said.
“It is a repeating geometric border.”
“It has jurisdiction.”
“Your line is uneven.”
“Mine has freedom.”
“Your freedom is drifting downward.”
I looked at my bowl.
The line had become a slow spiral.
“It’s intentional.”
“Of course.”
“You agreed too quickly.”
His tool stopped. The words had escaped while the cameras were live. Nico found something to do with the glaze samples. Beckett’s voice stayed even.
“You stated a boundary.”
“I know.”
“Was I supposed to negotiate it?”
“No.”
“Then what response would have been acceptable?”
There was none.
That was the irritating part.
“A pause,” I said.
“I paused.”
“Not visibly.”
“I will revise my face.”
Ines made a small sound that might have been a laugh. My wheel turned beneath my hands. Beckett looked down at his bowl.
“I agreed because you asked me to,” he said.
The camera caught every word.
He did not soften it for the audience.
He did not turn it into a claim about respecting his wife or building trust through shared experience.
He gave me the truth and let it stand without branding.
The sharp place inside me eased.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You appear dissatisfied.”
“That’s my face.”
“I have been told mine requires revision.”
I smiled. His mouth almost answered. Then he remembered the rule. So did I.
Nico checked the remaining card.
“The final prompt asks each partner to carve one word into the base of the other’s piece.”
“No,” I said.
“There’s a non-contact version.”
“That sentence shouldn’t be necessary in a pottery class.”
“You may choose your own word and exchange the stamps.”
Ines opened a wooden box filled with letters.
I searched through them.
“Temporary has nine letters,” I said.
“Disclosed has nine,” Beckett replied.
“That isn’t romantic.”
“Neither is temporary.”
“Temporary is honest.”
“So is disclosed.”
The comment screen filled with arguments about which word better represented our marriage.
I found the letters I needed and pressed them into a scrap of clay.
MINE. Beckett read it. Something in his expression shifted. He selected his own letters.
CHOICE. The word sat between us on the table.
No name. No date. No promise.
Just the two things the contract was supposed to protect. Ines placed both scraps on the firing board.
“Those aren’t part of the sponsor activity,” Nico said.
“Good,” I told him.
Ines came around the table to inspect our work.
My bowl had a sloping rim and one side thicker than the other. Beckett’s had survived its original collapse and become a low, severe dish suitable for holding expensive keys.
“These will be fired and returned tomorrow,” she said.
Nico brightened. “Would you like your names stamped on the bottom?”
“No,” we said.
Ines held out two small clay stamps.
“Initials?”
“No,” we said again.
“A date?”
Beckett looked at me. I looked at him. The date would mean nothing to anyone else. To us, it would always be the morning after.
“Plain is fine,” I said.
The live light switched off.
The crew began packing cables. Nico carried the sponsor aprons away before I could suggest a ceremonial burning.
Ines moved our bowls to a drying board. A streak of red clay marked Beckett’s cheek. I reached toward it. He went still.
My hand stopped halfway between us. The rule had made every inch visible.
“Clay,” I said.
He picked up a towel and wiped the wrong side.
“Other cheek.”
He tried again and missed.
I laughed.
“This is becoming difficult to watch.”
“Then stop watching.”
I took the towel from him. For one second, I considered doing the simple thing. Touching his face. Wiping away the clay.
Letting the gesture mean only what it meant. Instead, I handed the towel back and pointed.
“Higher.”
He found the mark.
“Resolved.”
“Efficiently.”
“As promised.”
We walked out of the studio side by side without touching. The space between our hands felt more intimate than the kiss. That was the problem with rules. They did not remove wanting.
They outlined it.