fuck?” I asked.
“That would be the one,” she said, and she looked tired and not at all happy about it, but you know what? That was okay. Slow progress was better than no progress. I knew she was likely to knuckle under when Christen came crawling back for help – which she would. She would have to, and that was going to be okay too.
Aspen was right. It was about her but in this case and more importantly, it was about what was best for her nephew, who was an innocent child in all of this.
We left the coffee shop; Christen looking so pissed she was about to cry and honestly, fuck her. Again, she wanted to fuck around and now she was finding out. Hopefully when she did come crawling back, it would be with some fuckin’ humility but I doubted it.
I put my arm around Aspen as we made the walk back to her shop. She was in the middle of pricing things to sell and making more to come up with the money to break her lease so she could close down.
Her landlord had been good to her all this time, she said, so she wanted to at least do this right and I was all for it.
Turned out, she was a go for selling all her equipment and shit to me for a stupid low price. It wasn’t going to be a dollar, there was a minimum threshold that would be acceptable according to the courts, but her hubby wasn’t going to get near what he hoped out of it and that was going to be one hell of a shock and surprise.
We went in the back door and she called out to Amber that she was back before hanging her coat in the office and lifting down her apron, green eyes sightless and far away as she lost herself in thought.
I took a seat on one of the metal folding chairs and watched her as she moved around her shop, unwrapping a wad of clay, taking it over to the slab roller against the wall between two shelves. That thing was, by far, the biggest piece of equipment aside from her kilns.
I let her find some peace and solace in her work. I didn’t need to be front and center in her attention all the time. It was just enough that I was here in her presence.
“I don’t understand why I’m just so unlikable,” she murmured.
“It’s not you, babe. It’s them,” I said.
“How can you be so sure?” she asked, rolling the clay flat, turning the great wheel on the slab roller, making adjustments to it to get things the thickness she wanted, all automatically without thinking. I smiled a little to myself. She was a well-oiled machine when she created her things.
“Just going to have to trust me on this one, baby. I think I may have a little clearer perspective,” I told her.
She stopped and stared at me and nodded slowly. “Maybe you’re right,” she said quietly.
“Not always,” I promised her, “but on this one, yeah.”
“God, we citizens are so fucked up,” she said and came over, dropping into a seat around the worktable. Her hands hung limp between her thighs in the hammock made by her clay stained apron.
“Just starting to come around to that fact, huh?” I asked with a grin.
She looked up at me and shook her head and let her breath out of her lungs in a woosh. “They sit there acting like spoiled entitled brats all the while looking at you with disdain like you’re somehow in the wrong and I just don’t understand it.” She stood up forcefully and went back to the slab roller to collect her clay.
“It’s sheer madness,” she muttered. “The whole world’s gone mad.”
“So, fuck ‘em,” I said. “Let ‘em go crazy. Let ‘em try and live up to unattainable expectations, constantly running the fuckin’ rat race tryin’ to get where they’re going without even knowing what the destination actually is.”
She turned around and looked at me and I smiled. “You know better, Leaf. Don’t fall into their fucked-up rat trap.”
She sighed. “Well, I feel like I am stuck in it for as long as it’s going to take me to clean up this damn mess of everything.”
“We’ll get through it,” I promised.
She brought her slab of clay over to the worktable and laid it over one of her wooden forms. She put her hands on her hips and looked at me, an