Chapter 13 - Jess
I wake up with my fingers on my mouth.
I get up. Shower. The hot water hits my skin and I stand under it too long, letting the heat replace the other heat, which doesn't work because the other heat isn't external. It's somewhere inside my rib cage, lodged there like shrapnel from an explosion I walked into willingly.
I get dressed. Work clothes. The tank top I was wearing last night is in the laundry pile and I don't look at it because looking at it would mean thinking about what I was wearing when he kissed me, and I'm not thinking about that.
I'm going to the studio. I'm going to work.
I'm going to be a sculptor and not a woman who can still feel the exact pressure of a man's fingers in her hair.
The studio is worse.
I unlock the cargo door and roll it up and the smell hits me—ozone, hot metal, the lingering ghost of last night's welding session.
And something else. Faint, almost gone, but there if you know what you're looking for.
His cologne. The warm, clean, expensive scent that I've been cataloging since the bodega.
He was here. In this space. Standing by my workbench, standing by my sculpture, standing in front of me with his mask gone and his eyes raw and his hand reaching for my face.
I walk to the workbench. The spot where I was standing when he kissed me. I can see the scuff marks on the concrete where my boots slid back against the bench leg. Evidence. Physical proof that it happened, that it wasn't something I dreamed in a sweat-soaked bed at 2 AM.
I touch the workbench edge where I gripped it after he left. The metal is cold. Everything is cold this morning except the thing in my chest that won't stop burning.
I try to work. I fire up the torch, pull on the gloves, lean into the new piece. My hands are steadier than last night but not steady enough—the bead wanders, the heat distribution is off, and I kill the torch after ten minutes because I'm wasting material and my focus is gone.
My focus is in a dark jacket walking through Brooklyn at midnight. My focus walked out of my studio without looking back and took my concentration with it.
I sit on the crate and drink the coffee I brought from Hector's and stare at the new piece and try to think about steel and can only think about skin.
The jacket is in my apartment. His jacket.
Four days I've had it, and last night I slept in it.
Actually slept in it—pulled it on over my sleep shirt after I got home, zipped myself into his scent and his warmth and his too-big sleeves, and lay down in it and stared at the ceiling with my heart beating so hard I could hear it in the pillow.
I'm disgusted with myself. Not for kissing him—the kiss was inevitable, I can see that now, the way you can see the inevitability of a weld that's been heating too long.
The metal was always going to give. We were always going to end up in front of that workbench with his mouth on mine and my fists in his jacket.
I'm disgusted because I liked it. Not just liked it—craved it.
The feel of him against me. The size of him, the heat, the overwhelming physical fact of his body pressed against mine.
And worse: the way he took control. His hand on my jaw, tilting my face up.
His hand on my hip, heavy and certain. He didn't ask.
He moved through my space and my resistance like a man who'd decided something and wouldn't be redirected, and the part of me that should have objected—the foster-care survivor, the woman who's spent twenty-eight years maintaining control of every interaction—that part went quiet.
Not just quiet. That part liked it too.
That's the part I'm disgusted about. Because I know what it means when a woman like me responds to a man like that.
It means the thing I've been afraid of is true: underneath all the steel and stubbornness, underneath the independence I've built like armor, there's a part of me that wants to let go.
That wants someone else to hold the weight for a while.
And that wanting is dangerous. It's the crack in the foundation. The gap you don't choose to leave open but can't figure out how to close.
Two days pass. He's not at the bodega.
The first morning, I walk in and scan the room before I realize I'm scanning it. He's not there. Just Hector and an old man reading a newspaper and the coffee machine gurgling. I order my coffee and leave and tell myself the dip in my stomach is hunger, not disappointment.
The second morning, same thing. He's not there. Not on the street either—I walk the route between my apartment and the studio and he's nowhere. The neighborhood has his shape cut out of it, a man-sized absence that I keep noticing.
By the third morning, I'm angry. Not at him—at myself. Because I'm looking for him. Actively, consciously looking for a man in the same streets where I complained about him being too present, too precise, too much. He's gone and I want him back and the hypocrisy of that makes me want to scream.
I call Tess on Thursday night because I need to say it out loud or I'm going to lose my mind.
"Something happened," I say.
Silence on her end. Then: "With the neighborhood guy."
"With Damien. Yes."
"Define something."
"He came to the studio. Wednesday night. Late. And he—we—" I close my eyes. "He kissed me."
More silence. Then Tess says, very carefully, "He came to your studio late at night."
"Yes."
"Uninvited."
"I lifted the door."
"But he came uninvited."
"Yes."
"Jess." Her voice has shifted—still warm, but with a layer of something underneath. Not quite alarm. Caution. "That's—how do you feel about that?"
"I don't know. Confused. Angry. Like I've been plugged into a wall socket and the voltage is too high." I press my phone against my ear. "He's not there anymore. He hasn't been at the bodega in days. He just—disappeared."
"Do you have his number?"
"No."
"Do you know where he lives?"
"No."
"What does he do for a living?"
"Consulting. Corporate something. He was vague about it."
The pause that follows is long enough for me to hear exactly how it sounds. A man I can't reach, can't locate, don't have a number for, who showed up at my studio at 11 PM and kissed me and vanished.
"I know how it sounds," I say.
"It sounds like you need more information before you do anything else.
" Her voice is gentle. "I'm not saying he's bad, Jess.
I'm saying you don't know enough yet. And the kiss—the kiss happened in your studio in the middle of the night.
That's intense. That's—a lot. And you don't even have his phone number. "
She's right. She's completely, infuriatingly right.
"If he comes back," she says, "get his number. Find out where he lives. Ask him real questions and don't accept vague answers. You deserve to know who you're kissing."
After we hang up, I sit on my bed and look at the jacket. It's still on the bad hanger, on the back of the door. The fabric has taken on the shape of the hanger now—the shoulders bent slightly, the collar turned up.
I should return it. Walk into the bodega tomorrow morning and if he's there, hand it over and say thank you and establish some boundaries and ask the questions Tess told me to ask.
That's what I should do.
On Saturday morning, he's at the bodega.
I see him through the window before I go in—at the counter, his back to me, that specific posture I'd know anywhere now. The controlled stillness. The width of the shoulders. The way he holds himself like a man who's aware of every inch of space around him.
My heart does something violent. I push through the door.
He turns. Our eyes meet across Hector's counter and the air between us changes—thickens, charges, becomes something you could cut with a torch. He looks the same. Dark jacket, dark eyes, that face that gives nothing away.
Except it does give something away. Right now, looking at me, his eyes are doing the thing they did in the gallery—the involuntary opening, the crack in the composure. Brief. A flash. Then it's gone, and he nods.
The nod.
Except it's not the nod anymore. It's the same physical gesture—brief, measured—but the content has changed. The nod used to say I see you. Now it says I've had my mouth on yours and my hands in your hair and I know what sound you make when I pull you against me.
I nod back. My face is hot. I order my coffee from Hector, who is blissfully oblivious, and I stand at the counter and don't look at Damien Cross and feel every atom of his presence the way you feel a heat lamp—invisible, directional, impossible to ignore.
He leaves first. Doesn't speak. Doesn't linger. Just goes, the door closing behind him, the bell chiming once.
I stand at the counter and breathe.
That afternoon, a text arrives from an unknown number.
14 East 62nd Street. Apartment 19A. Tomorrow. 8 PM.
No name. No greeting. No "if you'd like to" or "would you want to." Just an address and a time and the presumption—the staggering, infuriating presumption—that I'll come.
I stare at the text for a long time. My thumb hovers over the keyboard. I should reply with something sharp—who is this or you can't just summon people or I don't take orders from strangers.
Except he's not a stranger. He's the man who kissed me in my studio and walked away without looking back and then disappeared for four days and then reappeared at the bodega and nodded at me like the nod contained the entire history of human desire.
14 East 62nd Street. The Upper East Side. The kind of address where apartments cost more than I'll earn in a lifetime.
I should not go. Tess would tell me not to go. Every rational instinct I have is telling me not to go—to a stranger's apartment, at night, alone, a man I can't even Google because I don't know enough about him to construct a search query.
I save the number in my phone. I don't reply.
I go to the studio and work until midnight and the new piece takes shape under my hands—two steel forms, angled toward each other, the space between them narrowing but not closing. Tension without resolution. The metal knows what I'm feeling before I do.
Sunday morning, I wake up. I shower. I dress. I go to the studio and work all day. I eat a sandwich. I check my phone eleven times.
At 6 PM, I go home. I shower again. I stand in front of my closet—the rail with the work clothes and the green dress and the jacket that still smells like him.
I put on the green dress. I pick up his jacket, folded over my arm.
I'm going.
I know I'm going. I've known since the text arrived. I was always going to go, the same way the metal was always going to give, the same way the kiss was always going to happen.
Some things are inevitable. You can resist them, delay them, argue with them in your head for thirty-six hours while pretending to work on a sculpture.
But you can't stop them.
I lock my apartment. I walk to the subway. I ride uptown with a jacket on my arm and a dress on my body and my heart in my throat.
14 East 62nd Street.
8 PM.
I'm going.