Page 14 of Center of Gravity

After scanning the schedule for the rest of the day, I did some quick mental calculations and texted Rob with my availability. He pinged me back immediately with anokayand I couldn’t resist a reply:Have a good rest of your weekend. Enjoy some Pride and Prejudice.

Twenty minutes later and still no reply. I guess he was serious about that straight and narrow business.

* * *

After dinner,I stood in the garage, contemplating the pieces I had so far: experimental figure studies in bronze, a ton of discarded plaster casts, polished wood replicas of body parts. All of it was as directionless as I was. For weeks I’d been avoiding coming in here. Boxes of stuff from my dorm room were crammed along the back wall amid bikes, rakes, and shovels.College interruptus.

I picked up a chisel and considered taking it to the naked hunk of wood I’d put on one of the work tables a month ago. Then I put the chisel back down. Every one of my teachers had something to say about inspiration, mostly along the lines of keep showing up and it would come. I didn’t know if mine was going to come back, especially now that there wasn’t a fire under my ass in the form of classes. To me, art was about making sense of the senseless or the reverse. But I was struggling to make sense of anything when I was in the middle of it. I wanted to fix what was broken back inside the house, not carve some wood blob that didn’t fucking matter anymore.

I flicked off the light and left the garage behind, returning to my basement room and crawling in bed to stare at the ceiling. In spite of having gotten off last night with some rando outside The Tap House, I was still stressed and horny. They went hand-in-hand for me, one feeding the other. I thought of the frat boy from a few weeks ago, but Rob kept showing up in the picture, unkempt and put together all at once: flashes of his head thrown back in the club, the ecstatic parting of his lips juxtaposed with the guy who’d debated a stack of encyclopedias while wearing a studious frown, one fist pressed to his mouth. Was he a take-charge kind of guy in bed or more of a sedate passenger? In the club, he’d hinted he was the former.

I thought of his thighs, how the dark hairs laid slicked flat by sweat against them when we’d shown up that morning, the way the muscles shifted and popped into relief when he bent. Over a table, a box, a chair. Whatever. Sliding my boxers from my hips, I started to drift into a nice fantasy that involved a box cutter and Rob’s clothing.

Then my phonepinged.

The text from Rob was simple:Have a good weekend.

Or maybe he was just an average guy trying to get on with his life and I needed to quit trying to make him into something else.

5

Rob

Ididn’t know what had possessed me to send that text. There wasn’t anything even substantial about the message, aside from vaguely suggesting I’d been thinking about him enough to finally reply to his earlier text. All of which was true. I’d spent the early evening overthinking everything, including my non-response to his perfectly normal, if a bit teasing well-wishes for the weekend. God, was this what I was coming to? Specious analyzation of a fucking text? For that matter, why had I even agreed to hire him?

Alex was flirtatious, yes, but seemed harmless. And didn’t I enjoy it a little? The way he’d looked at me, the little verbal jabs he’d aimed at me here and there? In the late afternoon stuffiness of the house, his presence had suffused me with a sense of normalcy. I’d felt alive. Not to say I was feeling dead inside and I was nowhere near as hopeless as I’d been a few months before, but between Sean and my parents, I’d been feeling eroded, as if the vividness of life had been dulled at the edges by a gray fog that had crept in and dampened everything. Nothing penetrated. Alex, inexplicably, was a shaft of light burning through that fog.

My finger hovered over the keypad as I composed twenty different retorts to his comment aboutPride and Prejudice. I’d deleted all of them and sent that banal reply instead, as if by adhering to politeness, I could squash the buzz in my stomach I got when I was around him. It was almost funny. Absolutely sad. And likely didn’t matter in the end. We’d work together the next week or so, and I could allow him to add a little color to my world before returning to my gray miasma. That last part was perhaps a bit dramatic, but being around Alex made for a striking comparison to my days spent in the office.

An electric undercurrent of possibility and momentum had run through my twenties. From college to my first job, I’d been filled with an insatiable desire to climb whatever ladders were put in front of me. I’d left lovers on rungs below me if they couldn’t keep up. Even Sean, I’d fit into whatever nooks of time were free around my job over the past year. But he’d done the same thing, so it’d balanced out.

My thirties were more akin to the settling of a foundation. I knew I was in a good place, career-wise. I’d been moving up the ranks for years, driven by this vague notion of ambition that, when I looked hard at it under bright light, I couldn’t really place the origin of.

In between Alex leaving and my text, there’d been two calls from Sean that I’d refused to answer, some wine that I’d judiciously self-imposed limits on, one much-needed shower, and the inkling of an idea that I was starting to question where I’d chosen to lay my foundation in the first place.

I spentSunday morning collecting paint chips and supplies and piling them in the living room, then spent the rest of the day cleaning the house.

“I’m one hundred percent sure I’m overthinking this, but why the hell are there so many whites?” I called over my shoulder as I heard Alex arrive the next day.

On the wall in front of me, I’d taped at least ten different versions of white paint, each with its own poetic, aspirational name: Dove White, Milk Cream, Marshmallow Fluff, Wave Froth.Wave Froth?

“Easy there, Picasso.”

I shot a frustrated glare over at Alex and his grin erased itself. He came to stand beside me, studying the paint chips.

He wore a white T-shirt and some jeans spackled in what looked like paint and cement. It was the T-shirt where my gaze stuck, as if by some of that same cement liberally scattered across the thighs of his jeans. Over his pecs, rather than the flatness of nipples were the hard-edged lumps of piercings. Dear God. How had they gone unnoticed to me before? Or hadn’t they been in, then? Now that I’d noticed them, I couldn’t un-notice them and had trouble tearing my gaze away, let alone stifle the slow sludge of dirty thoughts that started swirling in my mind. They came in tortuous little flashes: his nipple puckered around the silver, an arch of his back, a twist, a flick.For fuck’s sake.Snapping my gaze back to the wall as he approached nearly gave me whiplash.

He smelled fantastic again, like laundry detergent and sunshine. Someone must have done his laundry because I didn’t remember any guy’s laundry ever smelling that good in college.

“They’re all whites, yeah, but there are different undertones you can pick up on.” He canted his head as he surveyed the chips. “Right here you’ve got some pinks.” He flicked at a chip labeled Sunset White, the name of which originally made no sense at all to me. “Right here is green.” He pointed at the Wave Froth chip. “Sometimes it helps to see them if you don’t look at them straight on, or if you put two next to each other and look for the contrast.” He glanced at me to see if I was following, which I was, then continued. “So I’m sure you know white is just a reflection of all of the primary colors, yeah? But they can be weighted differently so that one of those colors is just a fraction stronger than the rest, and that’s where you see the undertones.”

“Mm-hmm.” I squinted at the chips until they blurred. I wasn’t too certain about undertones, but the confidence in his voice, the authoritativeness was a total turn on.

I took a couple of steps back, repeating the process, and started to see what he was talking about. That didn’t make the choice between colors any easier, though.

“If you’re hell bent on white, just go with Decorator’s White. It’s basically an inoffensive classic.” Alex picked up my stack of chips until he found it, then flicked it with his fingertip. “But I wouldn’t do white in here.”

“No?” I was lost and mesmerized at once, the same way I’d been when he’d picked up the imitation Lladró and began spouting off about the artist.