Chapter 16: The New Face
The clay was heavier than it looked. Fifty pounds of gritty, Georgia kaolin in a thick plastic bag that slumped like a body in Dee’s arms. She staggered back a step, her boots sinking into the soft gravel of Ruth’s driveway.
“Whoa, easy. It’s got a low center of gravity. Like a grumpy toddler.” Alex’s voice was close, amused. He adjusted his own bag on his shoulder effortlessly. “Just gotta get your hip under it. Here.”
He shifted, his shoulder brushing firmly against hers as he demonstrated the lift. The contact was brief, practical, and it sent a jarringly simple bolt of warmth through her. It was nothing like the electric, agonizing static of Matt’s accidental touches. This was solid. Sun-warmed flannel, the scent of clay dust and pine.
She hefted the bag again, finding the balance. “A grumpy toddler named Cecil,” she grunted.
“Exactly. Cecil the kaolin. He’s had a long journey and he’s not happy about it.” Alex grinned, a flash of white in his sun-weathered face. “Now walk him to the studio before he throws a fit.”
She followed him toward the converted milking shed Ruth let him use, the weight in her arms a satisfying anchor. She’d found him earlier, loading his truck at the community college shed, and the idea had been impulsive. Content, she’d told herself. This is just content.
She’d filmed a quick, shaky story as they loaded the bags: her hands, now permanently lightly stained, gripping the plastic; the flex of Alex’s forearm as he tossed a bag; a close-up of the dusty, pearl-grey material. She’d panned to his face, his concentration as he secured the load. “Local talent showing me the ropes,” she’d narrated, her voice slightly breathless. “Maybe I’ll trade shears for a kiln.” She’d laughed then, a short, real sound caught by the phone’s microphone as Alex made a joke about her first vase probably looking like a haunted boot.
Now, in the quiet dimness of his studio, surrounded by silent wheels and shelves of bisque-fired pots, the performance felt thin. He dropped his bag with a thud, and she let hers slide down beside it, a cloud of fine dust blooming in a sunbeam.
“You’re stronger than you look,” he said, pulling a bandana from his back pocket to wipe his neck.
“And you’re exactly as strong as you look,” she shot back, leaning against a sturdy table. “It’s annoying.”
He laughed. “Sorry. Years of hauling clay and ego-centric sculptors.” He gestured to a lumpy, slightly lopsided mug on a high shelf. “That was my first. The ego-centric sculptor was me.”
It was awful. The handle was a thick, sad worm of clay. She loved it immediately. “It’s grotesque. I’d buy it.”
“Not for sale. It’s my humility totem.” He filled a kettle at a deep sink. “You actually want to try throwing? Or was this just for the ‘cute farm girl’ aesthetic?”
The question was direct, without malice. It deserved a direct answer. “Both,” she admitted. “The line’s gotten pretty blurry for me.”
“Fair enough.” He plugged in the kettle. “The offer stands. Clay doesn’t care about your follower count. It only cares if your hands are centered. It’s a pretty brutal feedback system.”
Centered. The word reverberated in her hollow places. She looked at her hands, the short nails, the new calluses. Were they centered? Or were they just hiding?
Her phone, set on the table, lit up. Not a notification sound—she’d turned those off—but a silent, glowing pulse against the worn wood. She saw the preview. Another DM. From Matt. Just two words visible: Dee, please.
Her breath hitched. The cozy studio suddenly felt like a diorama, a dollhouse she’d built to play a part. Alex noticed her freeze. His eyes flicked to the phone, then back to her face, his expression softening into something she couldn’t quite name—not pity, but recognition.
“The ghost,” he said quietly, echoing Ruth’s word.
“How’d you know?”
“I’ve dated in the twenty-first century. Also, you’ve got that look. Like someone just called your name from another room in a house you don’t live in anymore.” He busied himself with mugs, giving her the dignity of not being watched. “You should answer it. Or don’t. But you shouldn’t just stand here holding your breath in my studio. The clay dust is bad enough for the lungs.”
He was right. This suspended animation was its own kind of prison. The kettle began a low rumble. Dee picked up the phone. The weight of it was intolerable. She opened Matt’s message thread, her thumb hovering over the digital keyboard. The previous message, It’s about us, glared beneath the new one.
Dee, please. Just tell me you’re okay. That’s all.
It was the “that’s all” that undid her. It was never all. It was the tip of the iceberg, the first gentle tug on a line that always, always led her back into deep, uncharted, desperate water. She could see the entire script: her careful reply, his gradual pulling, the eventual, inevitable mention of Elara, the resetting of the old, painful dynamic. She would be his port in a storm, his confessional, his friend. And she would crumble.
She didn’t type a reply. Instead, she tapped his profile, went to the three dots in the corner, and selected Restrict. The action was clinical, quiet, and it felt like performing surgery on herself. He could still message her, but now his messages would go to a hidden requests folder without notifying her. He wouldn’t know. The digital equivalent of moving to a new town and leaving no forwarding address.
She set the phone down, screen dark.
The kettle shrieked. Alex poured the water over tea bags in silence. He handed her a mug—a beautiful, simple one, glazed in a deep, running blue that pooled in the bottom.
“Okay?” he asked.
“No,” she said. The honesty was a rasp. “But I’m here.”
They drank their tea. He showed her a cracked plate he was trying to repair with a technique called kintsugi, using gold lacquer to highlight the breaks instead of hiding them. “It’s the flaws that give it a new history,” he explained, his fingers careful on the sharp edges. “Trying to make it look like it never broke is pointless. It’s always a broken plate. You just have to make it a different, more interesting broken plate.”
The metaphor was so obvious it should have been painful. Instead, it felt like a permission slip.
Dusk painted the studio windows in oranges and purples. She helped him tidy up, their movements falling into an unspoken rhythm. As she shrugged on her coat by the door, the space between them hummed with something unclassified.
“Thanks,” she said. “For the tea. The clay. The lack of interrogation.”
“Any time, Cecil thanks you for your service.” He leaned against the doorjamb, his silhouette dark against the fading light. “You know where I am. If you want to get your hands dirty for real.”
She walked back to the farmhouse through the crisp twilight, the image of the gold-veined plate in her mind. Ruth was already asleep, a single lamp left on in the kitchen. The house was a vault of quiet.
She took her phone to her room, to the narrow bed under the sloping eaves. The silence was loud. She opened her contacts, scrolled past Matt (Salon), and found Alex (Pottery). The cursor blinked in the new message field.
Her heart was a frantic, trapped bird. This was a choice. Not a reaction, but an action. A message sent here could not be unsent. It would create a new path, one that forked definitively away from the old, worn groove of longing.
She typed four words. Then deleted them. Typed three different ones. Deleted them too.
Finally, she settled on the simplest, most terrifying truth she could muster. She let her thumb hover for one last second, feeling the weight of the past and the terrifying lightness of the future in that single tap.
She pressed send.
The message, now irretrievable, read: I’m not okay. Coffee tomorrow?
Coffee tomorrow? The reply came back almost instantly, just two words. See you then.
The diner was all chrome and cracked vinyl, smelling of old grease and strong coffee. Dee slid into a booth, her knees bumping the table, and wished she’d worn something less like armor than her black jeans and leather jacket. Alex arrived five minutes late, a curl of cool morning air following him in. He had a smudge of what looked like slip trailing down his forearm.
“Traffic was a single tractor,” he said, dropping into the seat opposite. “It was a moral standoff. I lost.”
The waitress poured coffee without asking. Dee wrapped her hands around the thick mug, the heat almost painful. She realized she was holding her breath, waiting for the familiar, aching phantom limb sensation of missing Matt. It was there, a dull background thrum, but it was muted today, buried under the immediate reality of Alex’s expectant silence.
“So,” he said, stirring sugar into his cup. “Not okay.”
“Observant.”
“It’s the clay. Makes you notice cracks.” He didn’t push. He just waited, his eyes a calm, unpressured grey.
She told him. Not everything, but the shape of it. The years of friendship, the careful styling, the way she’d catalogued every laugh and accidental touch. The kiss. The promises of building future together. The part where he found him in bed with his co-star. Her voice stayed surprisingly steady, a professional recitation of a wound. She focused on the way his hands rested on the table, solid, unmoving, listening.
“So you built a whole life in the basement of someone else’s house,” he said finally, not unkindly. “And then they decided to finish the basement.”
The analogy was so perfectly, devastatingly accurate she let out a sharp, shaky laugh. “Yeah. And now I’m standing in the yard with all my weird basement furniture, wondering what the hell to do with it.”
“Sell it for scrap. Build new furniture.” He took a long sip. “Or burn it. Ceremonially. I’ve got a kiln that gets plenty hot.”
They talked about other things then—Ruth’s stubbornness, the failed garlic crop, his upcoming studio sale. The conversation was a life raft, and she clung to it. When the bill came, she felt a plunge of dread. The morning would end. She’d go back to the quiet house, to the restricted folder, to the silence.
“What now?” he asked, as if reading it.
An idea, half-formed and desperate, clicked. A performance. A thing she could do. She looked at him, really looked. His dark hair was tousled, falling a little too long over his collar, his beard rough in a way that was more forgot to trim than intentionally rugged. He was handsome in an unpolished, entirely un-Matt-like way.
“I have a proposition,” she said, her influencer voice clicking on like a lamp. It felt both foreign and familiar. “Let me style you.”
He blinked. “Style me.”
“Yeah. A haircut. A shape-up. Right now, at Ruth’s. I have my kit.” She leaned forward, the act fueling her. “You have fantastic bone structure. You’re hiding it. Let me show you. We’ll film it. My followers think I’ve joined a pottery cult. I need to remind them I have other skills.”
He rubbed his jaw, skeptical. “Film it.”
“Yeah. A transformation. I’ll show them that the hot potter next door is actually, objectively, a red carpet-level knockout.” She was selling it hard, her words tumbling out. “It’ll be fun. And you’ll look incredible.”
He studied her face, seeing the frantic energy beneath the pitch. He saw the act. And he nodded. “Okay. But if you give me a fade, I’m smashing a vase. A ugly one, but still.”
Back at the farmhouse, she draped a towel over his shoulders in Ruth’s bright, cluttered kitchen. She set her phone on a stack of cookbooks, framing the shot. Her professional hands were steady as she sprayed his hair with water, the fine mist catching the light.
“Just act natural,” she murmured, starting the recording.
“What’s natural when someone’s armed with shears behind you?”
“Compliment me. It’s natural.” Her scissors snipped, precise and sure.
The video flowed. She narrated, her voice sliding back into its easy, confident online cadence. She explained texture, shape, how to frame the face. Her fingers moved through his hair, combing, lifting, assessing. The physicality of it was a script she knew by heart. She was good at acting.
She pushed herself to feel the texture of his hair, the warmth of his scalp under her fingertips, the solid line of his shoulders. She focused on the details: a fleck of grey at his temple, the way his hair curled slightly when wet. She tried to feel something, anything, besides the hollow echo of all the times she’d done this for Matt.
Alex relaxed into the chair, making dry comments about his last haircut involving garden shears. He was a good sport. When she switched to the trimmers to clean up his neck and jawline, her other hand cradled his head, tilting it. His eyes were closed. The trust was absolute, and for a second, it stole her breath.
She finished with pomade, working it through with her fingers, sculpting the final look. “Okay,” she said, her voice softer now. “Ready for the reveal?”
She handed him a small mirror. He looked. A slow smile spread across his face, transforming it. The cut sharpened everything, highlighting the strong line of his jaw, the cut of his cheekbones. He looked like himself, just… unveiled.
“Damn, Waldorf.”
“Told you.” She picked up her phone, pivoting to sit on the table in front of him, capturing them both. She grinned at the camera, a genuine spark of pride cutting through the performance. “See? Local talent. Red carpet ready. Thanks for being my model, Alex.” She bumped her shoulder against his. He rolled his eyes, but he was still smiling.
She posted it. Reclaiming my title. Sometimes the muse needs a shape-up. The video was cute, fluid, professional. The comments exploded within minutes.
OMG HE’S GORGEOUS???
Dee’s back! And she brought a SNACK.
The way she looks at him though…
What happened to Matt??
Wait isn’t that the potter guy? I ship it.
Seriously where is Mr. Blue-Eyes?
The questions about Matt came in a relentless wave, a tidal force of memory. Dee watched them pile up, her heart rate ticking faster. The phantom limb throbbed. She could ignore it. Or she could define it, on her own terms.
She typed a reply, her thumbs moving quickly, her signature grin practically audible through the text. She hit post.
Her comment pinned to the top: Come on guys, Mr Blue-Eyes is taken, you found it out during our last video, I am just enjoying my +1 for potential best woman toast😉
The replies to her reply came even faster, a mix of crying emojis, heartbreak, and supportive fire emojis. She put her phone down, screen against the table. The kitchen was silent. Alex was washing the loose hair from his neck at the sink.
He turned off the tap, the silence deepening. He looked at her, his new haircut making his gaze seem more direct. He’d seen the screen, the comment, the flippant bravery of it.
“Best woman toast, huh?” he asked quietly.
“Maybe,” she said. The word hung there, fragile and full of terrifying possibility.