Page 17 of Kiln Me Softly

‘No, Mum, I’m not coming home,’ Juniper droned into her phone, biting down on her tongue to keep from saying something she’d regret.

The campus was already mostly in darkness, but she was on her way to the workshop studio to practice throwing, a fact that Mum was revelling in as an excuse to tell her she was better off at home before she burned out.

The line crackled on the other end with what was no doubt a passive-aggressive huff, Mum’s specialty.

Juniper could imagine her now, sitting on the sofa watching her TV soaps, socked feet curled under her and short blonde-silver hair pushed back by reading glasses.

Dad would be in his armchair, tapping away at the games on his phone and complaining about the ads, while the neighbour’s cat, Nutmeg, looked in through the window.

The twinge of homesickness surprised her. That had just been her normal, the ordinariness she’d been fighting against all her life. But it was home, comfort, ease, and maybe just for a moment, she wouldn’t have said no if offered a place on the couch again.

‘I’m just saying that it doesn’t sound very healthy for you, love,’ Mum said in that all-knowing voice.

She had a way of making even support sound like a scolding, like Juniper was one walking disappointment.

No hopes, no talent, no ability to take care of herself.

‘You know how overwhelmed you can get, and if classes aren’t going well then you’re throwing all this money down the drain for nothing. ’

Juniper collapsed onto the nearest bench, staring at the silhouette of Mags. With only the dim light of a few lampposts to illuminate her, her stone head looked like it was sagging on her shoulders, casting a shadow onto her chin that made her seem lonely, tired.

As lonely and tired as Juniper felt. After another disastrous late shift, her bones ached and her hands were raw from pot washing, a task she’d been given because she was less likely to mess it up.

Supposedly. A few plates and mugs hadn’t survived her shift, but she’d promised Gianna that, once she was a master on the throwing wheel, she would replace them with Juniper Originals.

Naturally, Gianna wasn’t all that sold on the idea.

But she was trying, and she had decided to continue to try tonight. With her sculpting work yesterday reminding her that she was capable of something, she was inspired to have another go at the wheel. Or, she had been before Mum’s call.

She was right, a fact that Juniper hated most. The effects of studying fulltime while trying to keep down a job she was terrible at were already taking their toll.

Maybe if she didn’t drag such emotional weight, so many doubts, into everything she did, she might have been better at coping, but she only ever felt snowed under. She wasn’t strong enough.

And whenever she was reminded that her mum believed it, too, it felt almost impossible not to let it bury her. ‘It’s not going down the drain,’ she said now, trying to convince herself as much as Mum. ‘It’s going into my future. This is what I want to do. I just didn’t think it would be so hard.’

‘Well, life is hard,’ Mum replied, a patronising edge to her voice. ‘We can’t always manage the things we want to. Part of being an adult is accepting your limits.’

As tears sprang to her eyes, Juniper tilted her head to the indigo sky.

The crescent moon hid just behind the spire of the library, hazy from the surrounding clouds.

She couldn’t keep doing this. She needed to get through this year, and if Mum didn’t believe she could, then maybe she just couldn’t talk to her about all this anymore.

‘I can manage,’ she decided sharply, finally. ‘I’m managing.’

‘It doesn’t sound like it.’

‘That’s because to you, everything I do is a failure,’ she blurted, and then instantly regretted it.

She loved her mum, truly, and knew she had Juniper’s best interests at heart.

It was just that she seemed to limit Juniper even more than she limited herself; even more than her neurodivergence did.

Instead of encouraging her to try, even if something was more challenging for her than for others, she expected her to just… stop.

She expected nothing from her at all, and how was Juniper supposed to feel like anything but broken, insignificant, incapable, if that was how Mum saw her?

Mum took a sharp intake of breath, and Juniper heard Dad muttering, ‘What bloody nonsense,’ in the background.

‘Well, that’s just not true. Dear me, Juniper, you do talk some rubbish!’ Mum exclaimed.

Juniper had nothing left to say. They didn’t listen to her, or at least didn’t hear her. ‘I’m going to practice throwing before they lock up the workshop for the night. Speak soon.’

‘Fine.’ Mum’s tight-lipped glower was practically audible in the terse word. ‘N’night.’

‘Night.’

Juniper hung up, chin wobbling as she wiped her cheeks. She wished there was someone who believed in her, someone who didn’t just see her for all of her flaws.

Better yet, she wished Mum would call her back to apologise. Tell her that she was proud, that Juniper was doing a great job.

But that had never happened before, and it wouldn’t now, so Juniper threw her phone in her bag and made her way to the workshop. She would be a good potter. She’d prove to everyone that she wasn’t a joke or a failure.

She would.

Juniper’s first port of call was the drying room to check on the piece that was due to go into the kiln tomorrow. After all her experimentations with jewellery, she needed something to hold all of her earrings and necklaces in, so she’d made a stand for their hand-building task.

She allowed herself a smile when she found her shelf, glad to find the clay hadn’t collapsed.

She’d surprised even herself with this one, sculpting Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of life, into curling branches that would hold earrings and necklaces, upon a smooth plate for smaller accessories.

With any luck, she’d be able to glaze it to show the different mythological realms in each segment and branch.

‘You’re here late.’

A voice from behind made her jump, and she tore away from her shelf. Aiden leaned against the doorframe, that permanent smirk on his face – the one that made him look happy to see her, but only so he could torment her.

She felt her guard rise, but the heat inside her, too.

Seeing him react to her in class yesterday hadn’t helped her forget about their little encounter.

Though it brought her a satisfaction she’d never felt before to turn him on so visibly, it had also left her feeling restless, and no amount of orgasms alone under the covers of her single bed or in the shower of her ensuite would remedy it.

Maybe she would have to invest in a toy with her next paycheck.

She’d never dared to before, living with her parents, but something had to be done about all of…

this . She needed to become self-sufficient, because she sure as hell wasn’t turning to Aiden for pleasure again.

‘Are you following me now?’ she accused curtly.

He pushed off the frame to join her inside the drying room. ‘No. I saw someone in here, figured I’d say hi.’

‘Hi. Bye.’ She gave him a wave, which he ignored completely in favour of bending to look at her project.

‘Shit, Hodge. Is this one yours?’

Her stomach fluttered, certain he was about to tear apart the only decent thing she’d made since getting here. She took a subconscious step back. ‘Yup. And?’

Silence ticked through the warm space as he assessed it more closely. She hadn’t noticed before, but from the side, his nose was a perfectly straight line, raised just slightly at its peak. How completely predictable that he had no bad angles to speak of.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said finally, quietly. ‘So this is how you got onto the course.’

When he reached to touch it, she slapped his hand away, afraid so much as a jostle could send the tree collapsing like her poor vase. He flinched back, shaking out his fingers with an, ‘Ow. Sorry. It’s just so detailed, so intricate. It almost looks real, even without glazing.’

‘I’m not bad at everything,’ she snapped. And then, with the phone call in the back of her mind: ‘Just most things.’

She hoped it sounded like a joke, something he would inevitably bounce off so that they could resume their usual jabs, but his eyes snapped to her, dark brows bunching. ‘That’s not true, Juni.’

She tried desperately to change the subject before he saw the cracks in her. ‘Why are you here?’

He gave half a shrug, a shadow flitting across his face for just a second. Maybe she wasn’t the only one cracked tonight, because it penetrated his usual confidence, revealing something hidden beneath, but it was gone too quickly for Juniper to decipher it.

‘I’m not getting anywhere on my sculpture. I keep changing my mind about it.’ His attention was pulled back to her piece. ‘Is it based on something, or is it just a creepy tree?’

Great. They were now in a ‘changing the subject’ tennis match.

‘It’s Yggdrasil, Norse tree of life,’ she explained, because she would never pass up the opportunity to talk about her beloved interest in mythology.

Not even with him. ‘Each of the branches represent one of the nine realms. Asgard, Alfheim, Midgard…’

‘Oh, you mean like in Thor . Love those movies.’

She raised a brow. ‘Oh, god. Don’t say your only knowledge of mythology is based on Marvel films.’

He dipped his head in what was clearly admission, at least having the decency to look embarrassed. ‘They’re good!’

‘They’re fine , but they don’t exactly stay true to the original material.’ A small grin tugged at the corner of her mouth, try as she may to conceal it, and he chuckled in response.