Page 12 of HoneySweet, Part One

The ceramics shop on Lark Street was open. I could see the owner through the window, a woman with grey streaking her dark hair and an apron carrying the dust of clay, working at a table near the back. I got out of the car and went in.

The smell hit me first. Clay and water and something else underneath, something clean and mineral. The shelves were lined with work in various stages, pieces pale and porous waiting to be fired, finished glazes in colors that looked like they came from the earth itself. Browns and greens and a blue that reminded me of slate.

The woman looked up from her work. She set down the small wooden knife she had been using and studied me with an expression that was neither welcoming nor unwelcoming, just the assessment of someone practiced at reading people quickly. Her scent reached me a beat later: Alpha, but quiet, the kind that didn't push or assert, just sat in the room as a fact. I had not understood until that moment how much of myself I had been holding back, waiting for something to go wrong. "You were here two weeks ago," she said. Her voice was low, matter-of-fact. "Sat in your car for ten minutes and drove away."

I had not expected that. "I came back," I said, which was not much of an explanation, and I knew it.

She looked at me for a moment longer, unhurried. "You're looking for the room."

"Yes." I held her gaze and waited, watching her decide something.

"It's small. Kitchenette, bathroom down the hall. Month to month, no lease. I don't want trouble and I don't want noise." She folded her hands on the counter, clay dust marking her knuckles. "Do you cook?"

The question caught me somewhere I hadn't expected. I thought of Nana's journals in the car, the cast iron pan, the months of cooking in Vera's kitchen just to have something to do with my hands. "Yes," I said, tilting my head a bit as I looked at the Alpha in front of me. "I cook."

"Good. The kitchenette is terrible. Talk to Pearl Langston at the market if you need a real kitchen, tell her Margot sent you." She reached under the counter and produced a key on a plain ring, old metal worn smooth by years of handling. "Up the stairs, second door on the left. First of the month, cash or check."

I took the key. "Thank you," I said, and meant it in a way that felt larger than the words.

She had already picked up the wooden knife and turned back to her work. "Don't thank me yet. You haven't seen the room."

The stairs were narrow and wooden and creaked in a way that felt right, the kind of sound a place makes when it has been lived in for a long time. The second door on the left had a number two on it, the paint chipped, and the key turned smoothly.

The room was small. A bed with a metal frame, a window that looked out on Lark Street below. A kitchenette in the corner, a hot plate, a mini fridge. The ceiling slanted on one side where the roof came down. The floor was warm underfoot in a way that had nothing to do with the season, the heat from the kiln below coming up through the boards, and the afternoon light was coming through the window at an angle that turned everything gold, the particular gold of late afternoon in May, the kind that doesn't last. I stood in the middle of the room and watched it move across the floor.

Forty minutes, roughly, before it shifted past. I sat on the edge of the bed and waited it out. I did not know why I was here. I knew only that I had driven past a sign and felt a pull I could not name, and that I had thought about it for two weeks, and that I had come back. That was the whole of it. That was all the reason I had.

I went back down to the car and brought up the bag. The recipe journals went on the shelf above the hot plate, still wrapped in their cloth, the four volumes stacked in the order I had packed them. I set the cast iron pan on the hot plate. I put the good knife in the drawer.

I unpacked the red clip last, still in its sealed hospital bag, and put it in the nightstand drawer. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the room around me. The afternoon gold had gone, the light evening now, ordinary. Below I could hear Margot moving in her shop, the sounds of work continuing into the dark.

I was not leaving.

I did not decide this. I simply understood it, the way you understand something that has already been true for longer than you knew.

Haven's Rest.

Lark Street.

The room above the ceramics shop with its slanted ceiling and its forty minutes of afternoon light. I had not known I was looking for it until I was in it, and now that I was in it I could not imagine driving away again.

I stayed.