Page 35 of Jax
My jaw flexed. “Let me guess. You dumped him immediately.”
“Three years later,” she said, dry. “Right after he told me he’d ‘allow’ me to change mediums if I wasn’t making us enough money.”
“I hope you welded something through his windshield.”
She laughed, full-bodied and unexpected. “No. But I did make a six-foot installation of a woman’s hand flipping the bird. Sold that one myself, no gallery needed.”
The smile that tugged at my mouth wasn’t about the joke. It was in the way her voice carried that pride. She wasn’t posturing. She was reclaiming something, and that was a hell of a lot more powerful than revenge.
“Most people get quiet when they don’t know what to say,” I murmured. “You only go still when you’re doing something that makes you feel alive.”
She didn’t answer. Just looked at me with eyes sharp enough to cut and restless enough to run. Like she couldn’t decide whether to thank me or tell me to back off, and maybe I wouldn’t have blamed her for either.
Still, I reached across the bench and tossed her the rag.
“You want this room again,” I said, voice rough now, low in a way that settled into the bones instead of the ears, “just ask.” The pause that followed stretched long enough to gather weight. “Next time,” I added, “I’ll bring you a TIG machine.”
The smile she gave me then wasn’t for show. It was quiet and earned and real, and it hit harder than I wanted to admit, because I knew it. I was already in trouble.
She didn’t finish the piece. Not even close. But when she finally cut the arc, set the rod holder down, and peeled off her mask, the shift in her was unmistakable. Hair clung to her cheek, soot streaked across her temple, a smear of rusty dust caught in the hollow of her throat. And beneath it all, that glow—less adrenaline, more reverence. The look of someone who’d made something out of nothing and bent lightning into form with her own bare hands.
She stood like a sculpture herself—raw, radiant, and too honest to stare at for long.
“You look like yourself right now,” I said before I could stop it. It wasn’t meant as a compliment. It was just true.
Her smile faltered, as if she hadn’t expected to be seen and didn’t know how to wear it. She looked down, dusted her palms on her thighs, and said nothing.
Good. I didn’t want gratitude.
I grabbed a water bottle from the far end of the bench and held it out. She took it, and her fingers brushed mine, warm from the torch, callused from whatever had shaped her before. The kind of hand that didn’t startle or shake. The kind that could hold heat and not break open.
“You okay?” I asked, not because I didn’t know, but because it still needed saying. This wasn’t a scene, but it still wasn’t the kind of space you walked away from without checking in.
She unscrewed the cap, took a long drink, then nodded. “Yeah. Good. That was… what I needed.”
She wasn’t talking about the sculpture. She meant the silence. The autonomy. The fire and the steel and the room that asked for nothing but purpose.
“I’ll scrounge up some more metal for you to use next time,” I offered, stepping around the arc welder to start flipping switches, shutting things down one by one. “Keep the gloves. No one else uses this setup.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Is that your way of saying I passed the test?”
I looked at her, and for a moment, I let her see it. The respect. The restraint. The heat still burned low in my chest even if I had no fucking right to it.
“No. Just means I trust you not to set the place on fire.”
She smiled again, smaller this time, and that one punched harder than the first.
As she packed up her sketchbook and gloves, I moved to coil the leads, stowing the rods, and swept the bench like routine would make this feel less… personal. But it was. The quiet between us wasn’t empty anymore. It was layered. Laced with something that didn’t have a name yet.
She walked toward the door, paused, turned back.
“Thanks,” she said. Simple. Not soft. But real.
I nodded once. “Anytime.” She left, the door swinging shut behind her with a muted click, and I stayed standing there, surrounded by the scent of hot metal and burnt ozone, staring at the half-finished sculpture on the bench like it had teeth, which it did. It wasn’t done. Neither was she. And maybe neither was I.
The workshop felt wrong after she left. Not empty, just altered. Like the air still held the heat of her hands and buzzed with the echo of her focus. I sat on the edge of the workbench, elbows on my knees, a coil of lead held slack in one hand. The sculpture sat a few feet away, sharp-edged and bleeding with intention. It looked like she’d carved a piece of herself into the steel and left it there to pulse without her.
I used to love this. The control. The give of fire against metal. The rhythm of a clean weld settling into shape like breath. I’dbuilt a life around the belief that anything could be forced into structure, if you held it long enough. But now it felt hollow. Just movement I used to understand, a ritual stripped of meaning. I ran my hand across the bench, grounding myself in friction and grain, trying not to think about her. Useless. The image was already burned in.
