Page 33 of Jax
And that was it. She was gone. Not out of the room, but somewhere deeper. Somewhere internal. She tied her hair tighter. Pulled gloves from a shelf, and rolled up her sleeves. Grabbed some scrap metal from a stack to one side, and wire-brushed off the layer of rust that had accumulated. She touched the equipment like she’d missed it. Like it had once been hers.
I leaned against the wall and watched.
She moved with rhythm, not finesse. Not for show. But with focus. She measured by eye, not ruler. Drew a line in chalk only after narrowing her gaze like she was tuning a scale. When the tack-weld didn’t sit right, she muttered, shifted the piece, and set it again with calm precision, as if steel obeyed her.
Where most people went quiet in doubt, she went quiet in clarity.
I didn’t interrupt. Not at first. But I watched the soot settle against her skin like it belonged.
“Pretty passionate about welding, huh?” I asked, voice low.
She didn’t look up. “I mean, it’s my business, so yeah, I guess you could say that..”
“That’s right. You own some sort of an art studio.”
“I hope I still do.” She nudged the steel into position without glancing up. “I hope I can go back to some version of my life after all of this is over. I hope I don’t forget how it feels.”
I wanted to press her about her business, about what made her choose welding, but something in the tight set of her shoulders warned me off, and I fell silent. The air between us held a kind of pressure that didn’t need language. Her jaw was locked, spine braced like she was daring me to try. Whatever edge she was walking, between control and collapse, it wasn’t one she’d cross with an audience.
She struck the tip of the rod to the metal.
The crackle of electricity filled the room, sharp and bright, like a memory exploding backward. The arc caught, and she stilled, suspended in that breath before the first cut. Then came movement—steady, smooth, and dialed in. Her shoulders rolled under the hoodie, spine curving, chin dipped behind the helmet. Sparks scattered across the bench in bursts of brightness, too fast to track. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t move. I’d seen people fracture under pressure. She turned it into an alloy.
Something inside me wound tight. Not attraction. Not admiration. Something quieter. Harder to name.
By the time I handed her a water bottle, almost an hour later, she was kneeling on the floor surrounded by the stubby end of spent welding rods, chalk gripped in her glove, sketching lines on the surface of the rusted bench that held the sculpture she was making. No plan. No diagram. Just instinct. Arcs and angles that refused symmetry. A jagged spine of steel shaped like a blossom in heat. Ugly. Fierce. Beautiful in a way that didn’t ask permission.
She didn’t look up, tongue caught between her teeth, one knee bouncing like her voltage outpaced her wiring.
I set the bottle near her elbow. “You sell this stuff?”
She looked up, startled. Not scared. Just like she forgot I existed for a second.
“When someone will buy it,” she said. Then she shrugged. “Not as often as I would like. But money isn’t why I weld.”
She sat back on her heels and peeled the glove off her right hand, revealing fingers marked by old burns and calluses that didn’t come from softness. She gestured toward the chalk lines like they weren’t a big deal.
“Mostly I just needed something that didn’t ask me to be soft.”
That line landed harder than I expected.
Not defensive. Not bitter. Just true.
I nodded, eyes still on the sketch. “Looks like something that could cut you if you looked at it wrong.”
A faint smirk tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Exactly.”
She reached for the sketchbook she’d left on the bench and flipped it open without ceremony. Pages of chaos greeted me—half-weld ideas, mechanical creatures, strange copper shapes woven through barbed wire designs, all scribbled in a mix of pencil, ink, and what looked like charcoal smudged from the heel of her hand.
She stopped on a sculpture. Metal wings exploded into geometric shrapnel. I didn’t even realize I was leaning in until I caught her watching me.
“I made that one for a gallery showing in Minneapolis,” she said, voice flat like she was listing groceries. “Sold it for four grand.”
“That one?” I nodded toward it.
She gave a humorless laugh. “Yeah. Didn’t see a penny. My boyfriend at the time handled my business side. Managed to spend every cent before I could even ask.”
My hand curled around the edge of the bench, slow and deliberate.
