“I’m sure you didn’t, judging by the fact you’re still wearing your derby shirt from last night.” When a group of moms parked near us to chatter, Dakota leaned in closer to me and pitched his voice low so none of the parents nearby could hear him. “Now I’m trying to figure out who you went home with, because I thought you didn’t mess with Tinder anymore.”

Dakota’s smugness was heavy in his voice alone, and I made a pointed effort not to give him any more fuel by looking at him. “I don’t. My game is that real.”

The unimpressed huff I got in return told me without looking that an eye roll accompanied it. “Give me a break. If that’s true, you’re the worst fuckboy in history,” Dakota murmured so the moms couldn’t hear.

The conversation halted long enough to dissolve, but right after the mom group left, Dakota poked my upper arm a few times until I rolled my head toward him. He lifted an eyebrow expectantly.

“Spill. Is it that chick from the barbecue place that slipped you her number a couple weeks ago?”

I shook my head and allowed him three more guesses before finally cutting him some slack. “You don’t know him. I met him at that restaurant opening I was invited to.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Nik.”

“Does he have a last name?”

“Seeing as that’s the only way to get a birth certificate in this country, I would assume yes, he does. But his mouth was pretty occupied, so I didn’t really have time to ask.”

“Wow, eloquent. I really love watching you go through this one-night stand journey,” Dakota said, thickly coated in sarcasm.

I shoved him with my shoulder and whispered for him to fuck off. Dakota laughed, and I couldn’t stave off a smile and said, “Well, it’s turned into more than one night, so take from that what you will.”

Evelyn came over with her friends to announce they were hungry, and Dakota stood to head toward concessions. After the kids settled at nearby tables to eat, he held out a mammoth cup of soda.

“When do you see this guy?”

“When the mood hits.”

Dakota hummed. “So basically, whenever you don’t want to think about your feelings.”

I leaned back, thrown. “What the hell does that mean?”

Dakota leveled me with a flat look. “You know what it means. I’ve seen you drown your feelings with a hookup before, and you’re doing it again.”

“That’s absolute bullshit.”

“Oh, you’re not fucking this guy as a distraction when you’re stressed about your sister?”

I wrapped my arms around my middle, the volcanic heat of anger making my eyes burn. Nik was more than a distraction. He made me insatiable, and I couldn’t get my hands off him whenever he was close by. It took every cell in my brain to concentrate on not throwing him against a wall and kissing him when I saw him. He crossed my mind at least a dozen times a day from the moment I woke up, especially when I was driving between stops on my route. Being with him was thrilling and addictive.

“That’s not what’s happening,” I said, my lips tight against my teeth.

“Okay,” Dakota said easily as he took the drink from my hand, took a sip, and handed it back. “You said that you met him at a restaurant opening. What do you know about this guy?”

I played with the straw of our drink, struggling to figure out all the things that I’d discovered about Nik that weren’t about his lean body and full lips. “He coaches kickball and does pottery. He works for the co-op in town. Has a brother.”

“Since you guys are pals, I meant to tell you that a couple people dropped out of going to Astral Motion, and y’all should come. Now stop hogging the soda. This place doesn’t offer free refills, which is a crime.”

Just like that, the conversation was done, and Dakota didn’t bring up anything about Nik again. Nik didn’t say when we’d see each other again, and the likelihood of him actually agreeing to go if I invited him was pretty slim. The rest of the day, a question drummed against my pulse.

What if Dakota was right?

NIK

Iheaded to a pottery studio in North Knox. Originally, I’d found out about it from the bulletin board at the Collective when I was desperate for a place that had nothing to do with support groups, therapy sessions, or work.

The first time I’d stepped into the place was wild. I’d half expected some fancy place that let people paint by numbers on some bowls. But it wasn’t like that at all. Once upon a time, it’d been an auto repair shop, and the owners kept the building very similar to what the previous owners had, with its high ceilings and cement floors that were now constantly covered in a thick layer of dust.

Jesus, if I’d told twenty-year-old Nik that I’d be clean and throwing pottery, he would’ve looked at me like I’d been possessed.

Tonight was a limited-seat class. The table had a colored clay pot on top of a towel, and there was a row of hammers in the middle. People were already seated at tonight’s class table, and I recognized a lot of them from other classes I’d taken with them.

I didn’t recognize the woman running the class. Her long, curly hair was in a bandana, and I almost couldn’t see the chair she was sitting on because her skirt was so long. She was working with that hippie chic that was in, and it should’ve looked ridiculous, but she made it look elegant.

She picked up a stack of small boxes and handed them out as she introduced herself. “Today we’re doing a Japanese style of pottery called kintsugi. Follow my lead.”

She wrapped her bowl with the towel, grabbed the hammer, and hit the bowl. The crack of clay made me wince, a sound no one wanted to hear in this place.

“The philosophy behind kintsugi is finding beauty in the cracks of imperfection. The cracks are held together with gold dust and lacquer, with the purpose of showing every line that was mended.” She unwrapped the bowl, which was broken into several pieces. A grin stretched across her heart-shaped face. The woman waved an open palm to us and grinned. “Now you do it.”

We all waited to see who would go first. I ran my fingertip along the smooth edge. It was pretty, glazed in deep blue, perfectly spun into an even shape.

Perfection was a scam. If I learned anything in my life, it was that ain’t no one getting out of this alive without falling apart a few times. This time, it wasn’t my family or friends or me. It was a forgettable piece of ceramic.

I wrapped the towel around the bowl and cracked the hammer on top of it.

Everyone else joined after me, the tinny sound of ceramic splitting in half weirdly mesmerizing.

The boxes had all the supplies we needed to glue the bowls back together again, and we were instructed on how to mix the epoxy and gold mica powder and how to apply it to the broken pieces.

It took a helluva lot of coordination that I had none of. The brush was thin, and the epoxy had a short window to work with, so I had to think fast. A couple of times, I didn’t hold on to the pieces long enough because I got carried away with trying to get to the end.

“This process isn’t just about repairing. It’s an art. It requires patience and constant attention,” the teacher said as she walked around to check on us. “It’s an evolution of beauty. Take a moment to hold on to that. Give it the time and attention it deserves.”

Well, it wasn’t like I was getting anywhere with this, so I might as well do as the lady said. I stared at the gold lines that bound the bowl in my hands, cupped the weight of the ceramic in my palms. I gave it the attention it deserved and the love it didn’t know it needed.

I made it whole again.

We took our finished products to the storage shelves so they could settle overnight. I stared at mine, a knot in my throat. When I came into this place tonight, I didn’t expect to nearly be in tears, but here I was.

The instructor walked toward me. “You have a gift for it.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Are you kidding? The thing fell apart on me three times.”

The woman bobbed her head back and forth in consideration. “You didn’t force it back into what it was before. You accepted its imperfections. Few people can do that.” She pulled a sheet off a stack of papers behind a nearby desk and handed it to me, her dark eyes tender. “I have an advanced class coming up that involves breaking something you’ve already made. If you have something, sign up for it.”