5. Neve
NEVE
Iwork late because the workshop is mine after dark.
The courtyard empties by seven. Lea locks the coffee shop, Millie closes the candy shop, Iris turns off the gallery lights, and the Trading Post goes quiet.
I light everything.
The pilot flame under the melting pot. The taper candles on the windowsill. Three votives on the supply shelf, test batches from last week that I’m burning down to evaluate the scent throw at the halfway mark.
The overhead light stays off. I work by candlelight when I’m making something new because the color of the flame tells me things the thermometer can’t.
A yellow flame burns hot and fast. A blue flame burns steady.
The space between yellow and blue is where the wax does its best work, and I can only read it in the dark.
The amber blend is on the workbench—the one I haven’t been able to finish, the one with the floating base note, the one Graham told me to try with smoke.
I uncap the bottle of birch tar I ordered two days ago and hold it under my nose.
Dark, resinous, and faintly charred. It smells like something that survived a fire and came out richer for it.
I add two drops to the test batch and stir.
Music is playing from my phone on the shelf. Something low and instrumental that I chose because it matches the speed of my hands. I’m moving through the workshop without thinking, reaching for tools and materials by feel, adjusting temperatures by instinct.
This is what it looks like when I stop holding back. Every feeling I spent twenty-three years learning to contain is in my hands tonight. It’s in the wax and the flame and the smoke curling up from the votives on the shelf.
I don’t hear the door open, but I feel the air change. A shift in the draft, the candle flames bending toward the entrance for half a second. I turn around with the stir stick still in my hand.
Graham is in the doorway.
He’s looking at my workshop the way I’ve never seen anyone look at anything. His eyes move from the candles on the windowsill to the votives on the shelf to the pilot flame to the melting pot to my hands, still holding the stir stick, still warm from the wax.
He takes in all of it—every open flame, every surface glowing with low golden light—and I watch his body go rigid. His shoulders draw up. His jaw locks. His breathing changes, something shallow and controlled that I can hear from across the room.
He’s seeing danger. Every flame in this room is a threat his training has taught him to eliminate, and I’m standing in the middle of all of it with smoke in my hair and wax on my wrists. I’m the most dangerous thing here because I’m not afraid.
“Graham,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. He looks at me for one long second, and his face is a war I can read from ten feet away. Then he turns and walks out. The door closes behind him. The bell rings once, bright and sharp, and the candle flames straighten.
Silence.
I set the stir stick down. My hands are steady, and my breathing is even, and both make me furious because I learned this.
I learned how to hold still when someone walks away from the full version of me.
I practiced it for years in a house in Northern Virginia where every overwhelming feeling was met with quiet withdrawal, where my mother’s face would go smooth and neutral when I cried too hard or laughed too loud or loved something with too much of my body.
I learned to watch people leave a room I made too intense, and I learned to keep my breathing steady while they did it, and I’m so tired of being good at this.
I don’t chase him. I don’t shrink. I pick up the stir stick and go back to work because the wax is at one-sixty-eight and the pour window doesn’t care about the man who just walked out my door.
I add the fragrance oil at one-seventy-two and stir twenty times, clockwise, even pressure.
The amber blend with birch tar smoke blooms upward—warm and dark and grounded in a way the original never was.
The base note isn’t floating anymore. The smoke pulled it down, gave it weight, gave it somewhere to land.
He was right. The blend needed smoke. And he couldn’t stay long enough to smell it.
I’m reaching for the first jar when the door opens again.
The bell rings. The candle flames bend. I turn around with the pour pitcher in my hand.
Graham is standing in the doorway. The same doorway, the same posture, the same man who walked out four minutes ago. But his face is different. The war is over, and whatever won is written across him in a way I can read even in candlelight.
He steps inside. The door closes behind him. He walks past the windowsill candles without touching them, past the votives on the shelf, past the pilot flame. He walks into the center of my workshop and stands in the middle of every open flame in the room.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“You left.”
“I know.”
“My parents do that. When I’m too much, they leave the room. They don’t yell, they don’t argue, they just go quiet and walk away. And I stand there and keep my breathing steady and wait for the door to close, because that’s what I learned to do.”
“I know,” he says again, and his voice cracks on it.
Just barely, a fracture at the back of his throat that I might miss if I weren’t listening for it.
“I saw you in here with all these flames, and you were beautiful, and my body told me to shut it down. Every fire in this room, every open flame, every piece of it. My training, my history, everything I’ve built since I was eight years old screaming at me to contain it. ”
“And you listened.”
“For four minutes.” He takes a breath. “Then I turned around in the parking lot and came back, because the thing that scares me more than fire is the look on your face when I walked out that door.”
My grip tightens on the pour pitcher.
“You’re not the fire that destroyed my life, Neve.
” His voice is low and raw. “You’re the warmth I’ve been freezing without.
And I don’t know how to stand in a room full of flames and not try to control them.
But I want to learn. I need to learn, because the alternative is walking away from you, and I made it four minutes before that became something I can’t do. ”
The candles are still burning. Every flame in the workshop is lit, throwing gold across the stone walls and the wooden shelves and his face, and he’s standing in the middle of all of it. The man who controls fire, choosing to stand in it.
I set the pitcher on the workbench. “Smell this.”
He blinks. “What?”
I hold up the stir stick. The amber blend, finished, with the smoke note he suggested two days ago.
“It’s done,” I say. “You were right. Smoke was the missing note.”
He crosses the last three feet between us and leans in. The fragrance reaches him, and I watch his face change. The tension loosens—not all of it, but enough. His eyes close for half a second.
“Warm,” he says. “Heavy. Grounded.”
“It needed something that knew about burning,” I say. “Something that had been through heat and came out different. The smoke doesn’t fight the honey. It gives it a home.”
He opens his eyes and looks at me, and I look at him, and the workshop is full of fire and neither of us is afraid.
“Stay,” I say.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I reach up and put my hand on his jaw. He turns his face into my palm, and his breath is warm against my wrist. The candles are still burning, and the blend is ready to pour, and the man who walked out my door came back before the wax cooled.
That’s all I needed to know.