Chapter 5 - Jess
The sculpture is almost done, and I'm terrified.
Not of the work—the work is the one thing I'm never afraid of.
The ribs are complete now, all twelve of them, curving upward from the reclaimed-wood base with a grace that still surprises me.
The cross-braces are solid. The welds are clean.
The whole structure stands almost six feet tall and hums with a tension I can feel when I stand close to it, like it's vibrating at a frequency just below hearing.
It's the gap that terrifies me. The space at the top where the ribs reach toward each other and don't touch. I've been staring at it for days, and I still don't know whether to close it.
Four weeks until the show. Four weeks to finish, to decide, to somehow become the kind of person who stands in a gallery and lets strangers look at the most honest thing she's ever made.
I'm working on the hand sculpture this morning—the second piece, the small one Nish asked about.
I've cleaned up the wire base and refined the fingers, and now I'm adding texture to the forearm with a ball-peen hammer, dimpling the iron in a way that suggests effort.
Strain. The surface of something that's been through pressure and shows it.
The studio is cold, as always, but I've made it more mine over the past few weeks.
There's a sprig of dried eucalyptus in a jar on the workbench that I bought from a street vendor because I liked the smell.
A postcard from Tess tucked into the frame of the pegboard—a Georgia O'Keeffe flower, bold and pink and unapologetic.
A blanket folded on the crate where I sit to eat, because the concrete holds the cold and my legs go numb without it.
Small things. But they make the space feel like it belongs to someone, and that someone is me.
My phone rings mid-hammer. Nish.
"I'm coming to see the work," he says. "Today. No arguments."
"It's not—"
"If you say it's not ready, I'm going to reach through this phone and shake you. I need to see it, Jess. For the catalog. For placement. For my own peace of mind, because you've been describing this piece to me for weeks and I'm dying."
I laugh. I can't help it. Nish's enthusiasm is the purest thing I've ever encountered in the art world—there's no angle to it, no calculation. He just loves art the way some people love music or food or weather. Completely. Without reservation.
"Fine," I say. "Come after lunch. And don't bring anyone."
"Just me. I promise."
He arrives at two, slightly out of breath from the walk from the subway, wearing a scarf that's too long for him and carrying a paper bag.
"Pastries," he says, setting the bag on the workbench. "From that place on Atlantic. The almond ones you like."
"You remembered."
"I remember everything about the people I'm trying to keep happy." He grins, then turns toward the sculpture, and the grin fades.
He goes still. Completely still, the way Tess did, but different—Tess looked at it as a fellow artist. Nish is looking at it as someone who's spent his career finding work that matters and showing it to the world.
He walks around it slowly. Touches one of the lower ribs with his fingertips, then pulls his hand back like he's been shocked.
"Jess," he says, and his voice has changed. Quieter. Almost reverent. "This is—"
He doesn't finish. He walks around it again. Stands in front of it, then behind it, then crouches to look up through the ribs at the gap above.
When he stands, his eyes are bright. "This is the best piece in the show. And I haven't seen the other eleven yet, so I shouldn't say that, but I'm saying it anyway. This is extraordinary."
My throat tightens. I look at the floor because I don't know what to do with my face.
"The gap at the top," he says. "Are you closing it?"
"I don't know yet."
"Don't." He says it firmly, with a conviction that surprises me. "Leave it open. That's where the whole piece breathes. If you close it, it becomes a statement. Open, it's a question. Questions are always more powerful."
I look at the sculpture. At the gap. The ribs reaching, not touching.
A question.
"Also," Nish says, his voice returning to normal, business mode kicking in, "I should tell you—the show got a boost. An anonymous donor came through with a significant gift.
We're getting professional lighting, a printed catalog, proper marketing.
I've never had this kind of support for a group show. "
"Anonymous?"
"Completely. Came through an arts patronage fund. My accountant nearly fell off his chair." He's beaming. "It means your work gets shown the way it deserves. Real lighting, Jess. Not my usual disaster with clip-on lamps."
I smile because his excitement is contagious, but something brushes against the edge of my attention. Anonymous donor. Anonymous latch repair. I'm collecting anonymities like loose change, and I don't know what they add up to.
Probably nothing. The art world runs on anonymous donations—rich people like tax deductions and the feeling of benevolence without the inconvenience of being thanked. It has nothing to do with a replaced latch on a warehouse in Brooklyn.
I push it aside and eat a pastry with Nish, and we talk about the catalog and the opening night and whether I should write an artist's statement, which I'd rather not do but apparently it's expected.
After he leaves, I clean up and realise I'm out of welding rods. Also low on grinding discs, and the clamp on my vice grip is slipping, which means I need a new one before it fails mid-weld and ruins a piece. The hardware store on Fourth is open until eight. I pull on my jacket and head out.
The store is the good kind of cluttered—narrow aisles stacked floor to ceiling, everything slightly dusty, staffed by a man named George who knows where every item is by some form of spatial memory that borders on supernatural.
I like it here. It smells like metal and wood and machine oil, which is basically my perfume at this point.
I'm in the welding aisle, reaching for a box of 7018 rods on the top shelf—why do they always put the ones I need on the top shelf, I'm not that short—when a hand reaches past me and lifts the box down.
I didn't ask for help. I was handling it.
"This one?" The voice is low. British. And close—closer than a stranger should be, close enough that I can feel the warmth of him behind me without him actually touching me.
I turn, and my first thought is: too much.
He's tall. Dark-haired. The coat I recognize from the bodega—expensive, out of place, the kind of thing that announces money without saying a word.
But it's not the coat that bothers me. It's his face.
His expression. The way he's looking at me with an attention so focused it feels like a physical thing, like a hand pressed flat against my sternum.
Nobody looks at strangers like that. Not in New York. Not in a hardware store. You look through people, past them, around them. You don't look into them, not with that kind of intensity, not unless you want something.
"I had it," I say, taking the box from him. My voice comes out flatter than I intended, but I don't correct it.
"Of course. Sorry." He steps back, but only slightly.
The space between us is still too small.
He's in my aisle, in my space, holding a shopping basket with lightbulbs and duct tape and a padlock, and everything about him is precise—the way he stands, the way he tilts his head, the way he apologized.
Too precise. Like a man who's practiced being casual and almost pulled it off.
Almost.
"You weld." He's looking at my hands. Not a question. He's clocked the burns, the calluses, the mark on my forearm. Reading me like a page, quickly and without permission.
"I'm a sculptor," I say, and immediately wish I hadn't, because the word feels too intimate for this moment. Too much of an offering to a man who already seems to be taking more than he's been given.
Something shifts behind his eyes when I say it. A sharpening. A hunger, almost, though that's a strange word for a hardware store aisle. Like I've confirmed something he already knew, or given him something he was waiting for.
"What kind of sculpture?" he asks.
"Steel, mostly. Mixed media."
"That sounds physical."
"It is."
The conversation is banal. The words are nothing.
But underneath them, something is happening that I don't like and can't stop.
He's watching me with an attention that feels practiced, calibrated—not the clumsy staring of a man who finds a woman attractive, but something more deliberate.
More considered. Like he's already decided something about me that I haven't been consulted on.
"I've seen you before," I say. "At Hector's. The bodega."
"I've just moved to the area. I'm setting up a space nearby." He extends his hand. "Damien Cross."
I take it because not taking it would be strange. His grip is firm, warm, and he holds the handshake for exactly the right duration. Exactly right. The kind of social calibration that most people don't manage because most people aren't thinking about it. He is.
And then, in the second before he lets go, his thumb shifts. A fraction of an inch across the back of my hand. Subtle. Almost invisible.
Deliberate.
Something warm moves through my stomach, and I hate that it does, because this man is standing in my space with his too-perfect handshake and his too-focused eyes and his assumption that I needed help reaching a shelf, and I should be annoyed. I am annoyed.
I'm also aware of exactly where his thumb touched my skin.
"Jess Rowe," I say, pulling my hand back.
"What are you working on, Jess Rowe?" He says my full name like he's tasting it, and the intimacy of that—a stranger savoring your name—lands somewhere between flattering and presumptuous.
I tell him about the show. Briefly. The group exhibition, four weeks out. He asks where, and I tell him, and he nods with that filing-away quality that I've already noticed and already distrust.
"I'll look for it," he says.
"You don't have to—"
"I know I don't have to. I'd like to."
There it is again. That certainty. The calm, absolute confidence of a man who's used to the world arranging itself around his preferences.
I've known men like this—not many, because my world doesn't intersect with wealth and power very often, but enough.
Men who enter a room and assume it belongs to them.
Men who reach past you for things without asking.
"I should go," I say, gesturing toward the register.
"Of course." He steps back, giving me space, and the space feels like a concession he's choosing to make rather than something I'm entitled to.
I pay for my supplies and leave. He's still in the store—I can see him through the window, and I look for one second longer than I should before I turn away.
The evening air is cold on my face. I walk fast, the bag of welding supplies heavy in my hand, and I'm thinking about him in a way that irritates me.
Not the warmth. Not the way his thumb felt on my skin, though I'm aware of that too, annoyingly. I'm thinking about the control. The precision of him. The way every word, every gesture, every modulation of distance felt managed. Curated. Like a performance designed to look effortless.
I don't trust effortless. In my experience, people who appear effortless are working very hard at something they don't want you to see.
Back at the studio, I unpack the supplies and pull on my gloves. The sculpture waits. The work waits. This is what's real—steel and fire and the honest negotiation between what I want to make and what the material will allow.
Not a man in a hardware store who looked at me like I was a question he already knew the answer to.
I fire up the torch and get to work. The welds are good tonight—steady, clean, the joins coming together the way I want them. The rhythm takes over. The thinking quiets.
But in the pauses between welds, when I lift the mask and check my work, my hand goes to the back of my right hand. The place where his thumb grazed the skin. I catch myself doing it and stop, annoyed.
He was too much. Too focused. Too certain. Too present in a way that felt less like interest and more like intent.
And my hand is still tingling, which is the most irritating part of all.
I work until ten. Clean up, lock the studio, walk home. Same route, same streets. Tonight, the air behind me is just air.
In my apartment, I wash my face and change into my sleep shirt. I rub lotion into my hands, working it over the calluses, and pause at the back of my right hand.
I can still feel it.
"Stop it," I say out loud to no one.
I make tea. I sit on my bed. I think about the show, the sculpture, the gap at the top that I'm going to leave open because Nish is right—questions are more powerful than statements.
I don't think about Damien Cross.
I don't think about him so deliberately that it's almost the same as thinking about him, which I recognize, and which makes me roll my eyes at myself.
I fall asleep. The tea goes cold on the mattress beside me.
Tomorrow, I'll work. Tomorrow, the sculpture. Tomorrow, the only things that matter.
Him, I'll forget by next week.