Chapter Eight
JAYCEON
I am not looking for anything when I meet her.
I want to be clear about that, because the way people talk about this kind of thing — insta-love, they call it on the internet, as if the speed of it is the suspicious part — makes it sound like you have to be either naive or desperate to feel this fast. I'm neither.
I'm twenty-eight. I've had relationships.
I know the difference between chemistry and projection, between real recognition and the story you layer over someone because you want them to fit a certain role.
What happens with Aviance is not a story I layer over her. It is the opposite. It is her, specific and actual and entirely herself, and the fact that I feel it within the first twenty minutes is a function of clarity, not speed.
I meet her at a design trade fair at the Nashville Convention Center on a Saturday in early May.
I own a custom furniture workshop on the eastern edge of Midtown — Hawkins & Made, technically, which my college roommate Dex and I named as a joke that became a business — and I've been trying to get into contract work with residential interior designers for two years.
The trade fair is the right room to be in.
I've got a booth with photos of our work and a small piece — a walnut coffee table I made specifically for today, clean-lined and tactile — set up as a display.
I see her because she stops at the table.
Most people do the thing where they glance from a distance, maybe read the signage, maybe move on.
She stops at the table. She puts her fingertips on the surface of the walnut piece and she looks at it the way someone looks at something they genuinely see, not just observe, and that particular quality of attention is, in my experience, both rare and immediately recognizable.
"This is beautiful," she says, to the table, not to me.
"Thanks," I say. "I made it."
She looks up. Green-gray eyes, the kind of color that shifts depending on the light, and she's wearing a blazer over a sundress which should not work but absolutely works, and she's got a design portfolio bag over one shoulder and she looks at me with the same particular attention she was giving the table.
"Custom?" she asks.
"From the tree. We mill our own lumber on site, most of what we can. Tennessee white walnut, this one."
She looks back at the table. "The joinery," she says. "You're not hiding it."
"Why would I hide the part that proves it'll hold?"
Something in her expression relaxes. Just slightly. Like a muscle releasing that has been clenched for a while.
"I'm a graphic designer," she says. "Aviance Cox." She extends her hand.
"Jayceon Hawkins." I shake it. Her grip is firm and warm and she doesn't hold on longer than appropriate and somehow that tells me something too. "You're here for work?"
"Rebrand project. I'm doing the visual identity for Lantern Hospitality — they have five properties across the state. I'm looking at furniture suppliers for their redesign, we're doing the whole package."
"We've done hospitality work," I say, which is true — two boutique hotels in Chattanooga and one bed-and-breakfast outside Knoxville.
"Hold on." I pull a catalog from beneath the table.
Real paper, photographically printed, which she clearly appreciates because she takes it the same way she touched the table — with intention.
We talk for forty minutes.
It stops being about business after about fifteen.
It doesn't become overtly personal, it just — expands.
She asks how I got into woodworking and I tell her about my grandfather's shop in rural Georgia, the smell of sawdust and linseed oil that is still the interior smell of every room I love.
She tells me she got into design because she used to rearrange her bedroom furniture as a child and her mother finally bought her graph paper so she could plan it first.
"You were designing your own spaces at what age?" I ask.
"Eight," she says, slightly sheepish. "My mom called it weird."
"Your mom was wrong," I say. "That's a working designer in embryo."
She smiles. It's quick — not guarded exactly, but careful, like she's testing whether smiling at a stranger is still something she does. Like it's a small, tentative return of something that's been on hold.
She has recently been through something.
I don't know what, and I don't ask, because it's none of my business and she hasn't offered.
But there's a quality about her — a kind of managed composure that goes slightly beyond what the situation calls for, as if she's practicing being okay rather than simply being okay — that I recognize, because I spent a year of my own life after a difficult ended long relationship doing exactly that.
Practicing normal. Practicing the performance of ease until the ease became real.
I don't know her story yet. I don't need to.
What I need is an excuse to see her again.
"If you're seriously considering us for the Lantern project," I say, "you'd want to come to the workshop. See the full operation."
"I would need to," she agrees. All business. Clear-eyed. Entirely not giving me the indication that the last forty minutes were anything other than a professional conversation, which I respect enormously.
"I can make time on Wednesday or Thursday."
She takes my card. She looks at it, then at me, then at the walnut table.
"Wednesday," she says. "Ten o'clock."
"I'll have coffee ready," I say.
She smiles again, and this time it's slightly less careful.
She leaves, and I turn back to my booth, and Dex, who has been pretending to organize brochures six feet away for the last fifteen minutes, turns and looks at me with the expression of someone who has witnessed something he plans to discuss at length.
"Don't," I say.
"I didn't say anything," Dex says.
"Your face said it."
"My face said that you talked to a single woman for forty minutes at a trade fair and now she's coming to the workshop on Wednesday."
"She's a potential client."
"Jayceon."
"She's a potential client," I say, firmly.
She is a potential client.
But when I lock up the booth at the end of the day and walk to my truck and pull onto the interstate toward home, I am already looking forward to Wednesday in a way that has very little to do with the Lantern Hospitality contract.