Page 54 of Secondhand Secrets

He leaned over her and caught her lips in a sumptuous kiss, a kiss he imbued with the hollow hope of making her more than a short summer fling, even though he’d come to Harlow with no desire for anything serious.

She obliged the kiss, rising to drape her arms over his shoulders and sinking into his hold, the silken skin over her bare lower back filling his palms only for her to push away from him.

“Nah, ah.” A flurry of hard breaths followed her denial, and she went about jamming her shirt on. “We’re not going to let poor Aggie walk in on round two.”

He let out a laugh and turned for the bright red kettle in the pottery’s tiny kitchenette. “Okay, fine. What about coffee? Is coffee safe?”

An easy chuckle wafted from her general direction. “Sure, but there’s no fridge so no milk.”

He caught her strolling over as if to help, but he shook his head and pointed to a chair tucked under the small, nearby table. “You sit. I’ll make coffee. Straight black still gets a pass from me.”

She frowned but did as told, folding her legs beneath her on her designated chair. Even at school, she’d struggled to sit in chairs the traditional way, contorting her legs into weird shapes that seemed comfortable only to her.

The memory brought a smile to his face, and he ruffled his hair with one hand while depressing the kettle button with the other. More silence passed as he searched the bench’s lower cupboards for cups and processed this room’s distinct earthy scent of potter’s paint.

That smell brought about an unexpected reminder that a world outside his computers and bug-fixing existed. A world of handcrafted art and the woman who made it. The woman he fast fell for and would lose within a week, unless…

He pulled two cups out and placed them on the bench, the thick ceramic walls and mottled mauve and turquoise glaze a blatant Ally Egan creation.

This train of thought prodded him to learn more about something clearly important to her, so he nodded to the kiln and set about making her talk. “How hot do those things get?”

She narrowed her gaze at the kiln in a pensive look. “Well, that one is from Germany, and her name is Brunhilda, so I like to say she’s 1300 degrees Celsius. But if we must stick with local figures, I guess you could say about 2370 Fahrenheit.”

She shot him a smile that produced another chuckle from him. “Your kiln has a name?”

She tilted her head to one side in a way that said, Do you even know me? before adding, “Sure, the name Brunhilda means armed for battle, and trust me, that girl likes to put up a fight. Between bisque and glaze firing, a lot can go wrong.”

“Let me guess”—the kettle dinged, and he went about pouring water into a nearby plunger—“explosions?”

“If I’m not careful, lots of explosions.”

He lifted a glazed cup from the bench and inspected the swirling colors anew. “And how did you get this one to be so glossy and colorful?”

“Hmm…” She rose from her seat and wandered over, a thoughtful indent forming between her brows. “It’s the way the oxides react when heated—cobalt, manganese, potassium—most go on one color and come out something completely different when fired. The turquoise in this cup is made from copper, and the top glaze is essentially powdered glass mixed with water. The glass melts in the kiln and fuses into a high gloss when cooled. Over fire, and you get pinholes all over your work. Under fire and your piece looks like it’s coated in opaque glue.”

“And this one has neither.” He smiled at her, her attention still fixed on the cup in his hand. “Also, the way you describe the interaction between chemicals and heat. Ally, I wasn’t joking when I said you know how to science.”

She blinked up at him, her frown slowly easing. “I never thought of my work like that. Thanks.”

A small laugh escaped her, and her gaze continued to search his face, the bend in her brow and that thought-burdened look returning. “Was it hard leaving Harlow?”

He reeled a little at her question, not sure where the thought came from, though maybe his reference to her work got her thinking about leaving.

As much as he wanted to sweeten the truth, to make leaving seem simple so that she’d love Harlow a little less and him a whole lot more, his conscience got the best of him, and he vowed to share the truth.

“Harder than you’d think.” A lump took up space in his throat, and he spun around to the coffee plunger, hoping the subject would pass once he had coffee to serve.

But then, his next confession slipped out. “People around here seem to think leaving was the admirable thing to do. You know, like I instantly embarked on a bigger and better life, in a bigger and better city. But everything happened so fast, and I wasn’t ready, Ally. Everyone forgets that I watched my mother’s mental state disintegrate before my eyes. That I came home from school one day to find all our possessions strewn across the front lawn, and her bleeding from the countless wounds she’d inflicted on her arms. What if I hadn’t returned when I did? What if I’d done the usual that day and went out with you after school?”

Though he couldn’t see her, he imagined Ally’s stare hitting his back, his attention hooked to the unserved cup waiting on the bench before him.

No matter how much he told himself to move on from that day, the sense of being that same overwhelmed fourteen-year-old never seemed all that far away.

“Chip?” She called to him.

Though he turned, he failed to actually look at her and, instead, stared at the black speckles of rock amongst the floor’s polished concrete. “I had no control over any of it. Not how Mom reacted. Not about dropping everything I knew to move to Boston. Much less, I didn’t want to move to Boston. Especially not to live with Dad and his new woman.”

He swiped up a cup and ferried it over to her, his shoulders easing a little at having something to do.

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