“I could ask you the same thing. How does everything not seem pointless or fake?”
It’s like asking why art exists, or why love feels good. The question is so big it tears at the corners of my brain. I settle for poking him again. “Because it isn’t! Life is fun and weird and always changing and how long have you felt like this?”
Will tilts his head so his face is half in shadow. “A while.”
“Have you gone to see someone about it?”
“I’m not depressed, I just don’t know what to do with myself. I’ve got the money to do anything, but nothing interests me.”
“But everything is so interesting!” I say, still baffled. “You’re at a sugar baby commiseration party having taken six drinks to the face!”
He smiles, teeth flashing in the dark. “Okay, so this is interesting, but what about the rest? How do I get back on track?”
“You’re asking me?”
He chuckles. “You’re the artist. Don’t you all know the secrets of the universe?”
Over Will’s shoulder, I see the sugar babies nudging each other and smiling at us. They can see where this is going and so can I. I feel bad. Why do I get a date out of this shitty evening and not them? But, before I can move away, the song changes into a gentler, electronic one. Will’s hands slide up my waist and we sway back and forth, slow dancing. I know that if I look up, he’ll kiss me, and as electric as the thought is, I keep my eyes on Will’s collarbones.
Molding porcelain into cups takes twenty minutes—especially if you’re not too fussed about the shape. The firing is what makes ceramics such a lengthy process. A kiln needs days to harden possibility into certainty. It requires precision. Heat. Deliberate action.
A cup has been thrown between Will and I, all I have to do is put it in the kiln. Yet, I’m not kissing him, I’m swaying and thinking and thinking and swaying.
Will lowers his mouth to my ear. “I think you’re fucking fascinating.”
All at once, I know why I can’t kiss him. What he’s saying strikes a familiar chord and that chord is ‘fix me, manic pixie dream girl. Make life worth living with your artsy vagina.’ They played it once a week in Portland. It was my version of Wonderwall. Only, I could shake off the bearded mama’s boys. Will is something else. An All-American tech bro whose Achilles heel isn’t ‘having a PS4 controller welded to his hand’ but ‘debilitating success.’ So intriguing. So handsome. Such a dangerous move when I need to focus on not being broke.
“Marley?”
God, I want to say yes. ‘Yes, William Faulkner, I will heal you with my magic pussy. I will pour loveliness into your mouth until you know the world is too hilarious and terrible and gorgeous to be boring.’
But that’s impossible. I’m not magic, and neither is my pussy.
“I can’t fix you,” I say. “Whatever you’ve lost, you won’t find it in bed with me.”
Will raises an eyebrow. “Bed? Who said anything about bed? I’m saving myself for marriage, thanks.”
I laugh. Will laughs too. He’s got a great laugh, clear and hard. How many girls have there been since he designed Hellfire? Lots, I’m betting. He’s got that look. Did any of them feel the gray dusting him? Did they pull away or want to make him better? The latter, I’m guessing. The call to fix the broken bird is strong, and so is Will’s beauty. I squint, trying to see his eyes, but Will’s hat is shadowing his forehead. I stand on tiptoe and pull the cap off his head. Bar light bathes his face, turning his hair to gold. I want to put my fingers through it. Kiss him, feel him.
Will’s arms tighten around me. “I know I said I’m committed to celibacy, but I’d make an exception for you.”
But you’re bored, I think. And I can only be new once. What about tomorrow, Will? What about my bills and your grayness? We can fuck, but who’s going to save us?
I poke him in his muscly abdomen. “You don’t need a lover; you need to not be bored with life.”
“Things can be two things.”
“Not these kinds of things. You don’t want us to hurt each other, do you?”
His face grows solemn. “That’s the last thing I want.”
“Then how do we make something good out of this surprise connection?”
Will sways us back and forth, looking thoughtful. “We could have a bath?”
“Be serious.”
“I am! I do my best thinking in the bath. Also, I smell like old wine.”
I giggle, and then it comes. The solution. I beam and I must look a bit insane because Will drops his hands from my waist. “You okay?”
“Oh yeah, I have the best idea ever.”
The corner of his mouth quirks. “Go on.”
“I need money and you need to not be a husk of a man. We could waste our chemistry on a filthy one-night stand—”
“Waste?”
“Or we could compromise and both get what we need.”
“Do a sixty-nine?”
I reach up and jam his cap back on his head. “No, I give you clay throwing lessons. Eight, to be exact. That’s how long it takes to learn to throw a decent cup.”
Will frowns, taking his hat off again. “And the benefits are...?”
“I earn money while working on my own ceramics, and you learn a new skill while we solve your chronic boredom, neither of us catching feelings or using the other as a human crutch. It’s a win-win!”
“And sex would be a lose-lose?”
I feel bad for what I’m about to say, but it needs to be said. “Do you find once you’ve slept with a girl, you don’t care about her anymore?”
“I never used to.”
“But now?”
Will’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t deny it.
I shake my head. “Come on, man, let’s skip the part where I try to change you and you resent me for trying. Let’s make a valuable contribution to each other’s lives!”
He shakes his head, but he’s smiling. “You’d be great in sales.”
“I’m better in art. And perspective changing.”
He grins. “You really are a keyhole girl, aren’t you? Sliding through problems to the solutions.”
I laugh, but I’m caught off guard. I’m used to being the one who notices things, not being noticed. “So, do you agree to be taught the art of clay throwing?”
“Sure. When can we start? Tomorrow?”
It’s soon, but when I leave Alchemy, I know it’ll feel like a million years. “That works. Meet me at Blue Lodge at eight with a packed lunch and an open mind.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” he says, and then he makes one. He brushes a curl from my left eye, then cups my cheek, stroking the soft of my skin. His eyes are dark, his pupils blown out with whatever chemical lust dumps into your system. I know I should resist, but it turns out the cup of my good intentions is paper, and it burns the second I offer it to the kiln. I raise myself on my tiptoes again and I kiss him.
Will’s mouth is hot with liquor and so sure, he might have kissed me a million times before, only he hasn’t because I would have remembered. I would have made cups and bowls and necklaces and rings and bracelets and vases and sixty-foot statues in tribute to this perfection. Time dawdles and I close my eyes and try to take in everything—the tingling in my lips, the sugar babies singing along to Billie Eilish, the sandalwood of Will’s cologne, detectable even beneath the wine. Mostly, I just feel the heat of his skin on mine. That’s what being alive is. Heat.
There is a round of applause and Will and I unwind ourselves from the best kiss of my life.
Will looks as dazed as I feel. “That was...”
“I know.” I feel ten feet tall, but my conscience is nipping at my brain, reminding me of all the reasons why I didn’t want to make this physical. I take a small step back. “We can be better than sex, Will.”
“Is that possible?”
“Right now, I’m not sure.”
He pulls me closer and I can feel the hardness between his legs. In defiance of mys
elf, I touch his hair. It’s silky and firm, like the tip of an expensive paintbrush. His mouth brushes my neck and chills skitter down my spine. I want to say yes all over again, but I also know cups crumble in the kiln. Usually, the ones you want to last the most because you over-handle them push the destruction into the clay. Will was right, I can slip through things and find the solutions, but I want that for other people too. I gently press him backward. “Blue Lodge studio at eight.”
“Marley...”
I flash him a smile. “I swear on the sound and the fury we’re going to be good for each other. See you at eight.”
Chapter 4
Will
The woman behind the counter waves her plastic tongs in my face. “Was that last one sour cherry or huckleberry?”
I smother a yawn and point at the purple-topped doughnuts. “Whatever those are, please.”
“Huckleberry.” She picks up a glossy pastry and places it lovingly beside my eleven other choices. “Coffee? Milk?”
“A coffee, please.” My sentence warps as I give another yawn. I didn’t get any sleep last night, just paced the house strung out on Marley Ellis.
Marley Ellis. Her name is like an incantation. Rabbits vanish, flowers appear. My mind goes to sex and stays there until I do something about it. Fifteen-year-olds would be embarrassed by the amount of jacking off I did last night. My saving grace is I didn’t Google her and jack off to the search results. I’ve known her less than twelve hours, but I’ve never had it so fucking bad. I feel so scattered, I could swear I drove to Granny’s doughnut shop on clouds, watching grassy snow falling into the sky. Marley Ellis. The artist. The almost sugar baby. The girl who wants me to be happy instead of laid.
“Here you go.” The saleswoman hands me a takeaway cup. “Thirty dollars.”
I pay and gesture to a nearby bench. “Okay if I stay?”
“Go ahead, not like we’re busy.” She eyes me up like my old baseball coach. “I can’t remember the last time someone your age was in this early.”
“I know you guys sell out fast and I wanted a full dozen.”
That gets me a smile. “Breakfast meeting?”
“Sort of. I’m going to see a girl I like. She’s giving me clay throwing lessons.”
Her smile gets bigger. “Really?”
“Yeah,” I say, and the dam bursts. “Her name’s Marley and she’s an artist at Blue Lodge. She doesn’t think we should start something, but I’m hoping she changes her mind.”
The saleswoman shrugs, but her brown eyes are twinkling. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Eventually.”
The bell over the door rings as a tall guy strides in. The saleswoman moves away, taking her wisdom with her. I look out the window, watching the snow swirling past in a lace veil. Is Marley awake or is she curled up in bed, hugging a pillow and thinking of me? My cock throbs despite the workout I gave it last night. I bite back a groan. I can’t go to Marley’s studio with sex on the brain or I’ll come across like a sleazy asshole. I need to focus on something else. Changing Marley’s mind about me would be a good place to start. I resisted Googling last night, but unless there’s some seriously wild shit in her search results, I’m not going to run off and fap in a bakery restroom. I pull out my phone and search Marley’s name.
The first thing that comes up is her website. I click through and my heart jumps into my mouth. She’s looking right at me, smiling as she molds something at a workbench. Her curls are wild and her lips bright magenta. I stare at the picture until my eyes burn. I don’t want to blink in case she disappears. That silky, mischievous quality comes across even in 2D. That sense she can’t be held where she doesn’t want to be. When the picture is burned into my memory, I scroll down.
Marley Ellis is a Portland native who specializes in handcrafted jewelry and ceramics. Her work is inspired by the strange beauty of human nature. She uses a wide range of materials, including vintage fabrics, porcelain, plastic, and animal bone to capture what it means to be alive.
I smile. I can’t imagine how you communicate human nature in a necklace or a cup, but I like the way it sounds. My finger hovers over the portfolio link. I’m sure her work doesn’t suck, but I don’t know what I’ll do if it does. The page loads, but it’s blank, the images too high-resolution to appear instantaneously. I swig my coffee, anxiety mounting. Felix once dragged me to an art exhibition where all the paintings were made from crushed prescription pills. What if Marley’s art is as bad as that? The first image loads; a thick copper choker with red stones. Relief floods me. It’s nice, a bit indie but— something about the necklace demands another look. The metal isn’t copper, it’s rusty iron and the stones are red cloth, pushed through the metal like velvet bubbles. I scroll down.
This necklace was made for Sienna Nikolaev, in loving tribute to her wife, Zoya Nikolaev. It was hand forged from Zoya’s gardening spade and a dress she brought to America in 1973 while fleeing sexual persecution in her home country, the USSR. Sienna asked the artist, “How can I be brave now my heart has gone?” This necklace is her humble answer.
There’s a strange ache in my chest, but I don’t know what to do with it, so I scroll down the page. There are teacups shaped like seashells and silver necklaces decorated with candy-coloured buttons and bleached white bone. I pause on a strange, three-handled mug and read it was made for a mother whose conjoined twins died at birth. I put down my phone. My heart is pounding, my breath feels like it’s coming in through a straw. After months of feeling like a houseplant, this is an emotional overdose. I’m proud and miserable and shocked and devastated, but most of all, I’m angry.
Marley is broke. She makes necklaces out of Soviet Union shovels and comforts the mothers of dead babies, but she might have to stop making art so she can serve assholes like me eleven-dollar tacos. How is that fair?
It isn’t. But it won’t stay that way. I exit Marley’s website and call my accountant. It’s early in LA, but Chuck answers after the second ring. “What can I do for you, Will?”
Heart pounding, I tell him what I want. Chuck doesn’t ask questions. He’s got enough tech guys on his books that the requests stopped being strange a long time ago.
“It’s done,” he says. “Should come through in the next few hours.”
“Thanks.”
Chuck hangs up and I let out a shaky breath. I know I’m rich and I’ll probably be that way for the rest of my life, but it’s still bizarre to discuss huge amounts of money like it’s a tip on a pizza delivery. Yet I don’t feel guilty the way I usually do when I call Chuck. Maybe because I’m not buying a new car or some big present my parents don’t want. This is a positive contribution to the world. Thanks to me, Marley Ellis is going to keep making people’s hearts explode. In a good way.
My phone buzzes. It’s a text from Marley. For a wild moment, I think she knows what I’ve done, then I process the message.
“I’m sorry but we might have to reschedule. My car won’t start.”
“Shit.” I glance at the box of doughnuts and an idea occurs to me.
“What if I come and get you?” I text back.
Instantly, the three pre-message bubbles flash. I hold my breath. Want to see me...please want to see me...
My phone buzzes. A heart-eyes emoji and an address. I punch the air.
“Good news?” the saleswoman asks.
“Great news. I’m going to change Marley’s mind.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Are you now?”
“Yep,” I say, standing up. “Got it all figured out. Could I please have a coffee to go?”
Chapter 5
Marley
I exhale and watch my breath swirl through the frosty air like cigar smoke. I usually skip breakfast, but today I couldn’t eat if I wanted to. I’m too wired on possibilities and lust. I’ve made a plan. Or a plan to make a plan. When Will arrives, I’ll decide whether I can be his friend or if the attraction that kept me up all night will make it impossible. If it’s the former, I’ll
give Will his clay throwing lessons, if it’s the latter...
I check my phone—it’s been fifteen minutes since I sent Will my address. He must be close.
As if on cue, a massive, glossy black Chevrolet turns the corner. I spot Will behind the wheel. I burst out laughing. How many times have I judged a tech bro for driving a big ugly truck? Now I’m stupid for the guy inside this one. Isn’t that just like the universe; to take what you know and prove you don’t know anything?
Will parks beside me and rolls down his window. “What’s so funny?”
In the morning sun, he’s even lovelier than I remember with his sandy hair and friendly smile. Warmth spreads through my middle like melting butter and I make my decision, though the smartest bits of me already knew what it was. I wish I had more money and I don’t want to be a manic pixie cliché—but there’s just no way I’m not going to fuck Will Faulkner. No goddamn way.
“Nothing,” I say. “Thanks for coming to get me.”
“Anytime. You look gorgeous.”
I smile. I’m pretty sure I look like shit, but maybe the chemicals surging through my body are doing nice things to my eyes and skin. “Thanks.”
“I’ve got doughnuts and coffee,” he says. “Shall we get going?”
Doughnuts? God, even if we went to the studio, I’d just lie back on the workbench and let him do his thing. “That’s super nice of you, but do you, um, want to come in to my place first?”
Will’s eyebrows pull together. “Is everything okay?”
“Of course! I just think we should hang out. In my house.” I know I sound deranged, but I can’t tell him we should scrap the art lessons in favour of sex while he’s sitting in his fuckboy truck. Who knows who’s watching? What if he rejects me and drives off and all the neighbours see?
Will parks, opens the driver side door, and gets out. In addition to being handsomer than I remember, he’s also taller. He’s just more than my fantasies made him out to be, which is saying a hell of a lot. He hands me a takeaway coffee. “All yours. So, what’s wrong with your car?”
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