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There was magic in the eyes of Fearne Calloway. In the way her eyelashes, miles long, fluttered when she wanted something. It was hypnotic, in a way…
To everyone but Imogen, at least. She’d gotten quite used to it by now.
“No.” Stern, with faltering confidence.
Another flip of her lashes.
“ No, Fearne, I don’t even care about pottery; Why would I waste a bunch of money on a class for it?”
Fearne’s eyes returned to their wide, natural state - twitching slightly like they do when she’s trying to come up with a plan B in the middle of plan A.
“It’s at my partner's studio, though!”
“Your weird old man partner? Fearne, darlin’, I love you, but I don’t wanna go hang out at some sketchy shack in the woods and make a bunch of pots.”
“It’s not just pots!”
Acting as if that was the biggest problem here, Fearne dug around in her pockets and retrieved a little clay figurine; a raggedy monkey-looking thing who’s head looked poised to snap at any moment, emphasized by the way Fearne waved him around in Imogen’s face. “Look what I made last time! He’s not a pot!”
The little guy was rough looking, to say the least. A piece of clutter only a hoarder like Fearne could love.
“…That’s not helpin’ your case much, Fearne.”
Her face turned slightly sour as she pulled back the piece of clay, and she went on to list a thousand different reasons why Imogen should join her at this stupid pottery class; All our other friends are going, it’ll be a party! It’s not that expensive! You get to take whatever you make home! The woman who runs the class is really cute and also single and also-
Wait. Wait, shit, go back.
“I thought this was at your partner’s studio?”
“He rents the room out sometimes for classes! The woman who teaches this pottery class is so cute , Imogen, and she’s always going on and on about love and crushes and all kinds of other sappy stuff, so she’s gotta be compensating for something.”
“That's not how that works at all, Fearne.”
“Oh trust me , if you heard her, you’d get it.”
Fearne placed the little figure back in her pocket and replaced its presence in her hand with Imogen's own, pulling her closer as they walked.
“Plus she’s, like, totally your type. All tall and dark and handsome~”
“Okay, okay, yeah. I get it, Fearne.”
“So you’ll come?”
Her eyes went droopy again, but this time with a sad, puppy-like quality to them that Imogen wasn’t as good at saying no to.
“Fine. Tomorrow night, right?”
————
Imogen had arrived at the dusty, gravel lined parking lot of the art studio just in time to get her ideal parking spot: one in the very back, tucked behind someone’s large, black, bumper sticker covered van, with a line of sight straight to the front door so she could scope out all the other patrons before going in. There weren’t very many to watch, given that it was 7PM on a Thursday at what was basically a cabin in the woods, but still. Clear expectations always made going to a new place easier.
The only real interesting views she had were the ones she was already familiar with; She was the first of her friends to arrive at the desolate little shack, but the last to actually get out of her car. She watched Orym and Dorian arrive first - ever the early bird and ever the follower - but got bored pretty quickly with watching them fawn over each other as they waited on the bench beside the front door. Her moment of respite came in the form of Fearne, arriving quite a bit later, with Ashton in the passenger seat beside her. She took a second, then - just enough for a few deep breaths and a few extra observations - to really savor the sights in front of her, knowing that she’d be ripped from her hiding spot soon if she gave Fearne’s eyes enough time to wander; She watched the way Fearne whipped her car nearly sideways between two parking spots, almost forgetting to turn it off with how fast she leaped out to go join her friends. The way each couple saddled up beside each other, hand in hand, arm in arm, hip to hip. She got a weird taste in her mouth then that made her interrupt her deep breath, rip her keys from the ignition and walk over to join them; Jealousy, maybe? Crippling loneliness? She didn’t think about it too hard.
Her friends welcomed her with cheers and open arms, but Imogen could tell pretty quickly that this was meant to be some kind of weird double date that Fearne, in all her odd, off kilter wisdom, had invited her to without thinking. She was the spare tire, currently: watching as her friends walked inside two by two as she trudged along behind. The wood floor of the entryway was creaky and the air was dusty and Imogen began to spiral, slightly, back into the thought that she knew she shouldn’t have come to this stupid class in the first place, and the teacher at the front of the room was- well…
Well, shit .
Imogen hated to admit it, but Fearne was right. The woman at the front of the room was stunning , in a way that she had never really seen before. Sharp features, but with a soft expression; wide eyes - not freaky, but warm - that fluttered around the room, taking in each new person as they took their seat. Her hands were fidgeting in her lap where she leaned on her stool, and Imogen found herself captivated by each and every wobbly knuckle as they twiddled. She found herself captivated by each and every strand of hair that unwound itself from her bun as she emoted, each syllable that danced from her lips as she introduced herself to everyone - each interaction personalized, carved to fit the person like a perfect mold.
She could’ve stared for hours, if not for the other wide eyed smile burning a hole into her from the side - freaky, this time, in the way that only Fearne Calloway could be.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” She whispered, sing-song-y, into Imogen’s ear.
“No-“
“I was.”
“No, Fearne-“
“ I was~”
She was. Imogen had, in fact, paid an egregious portion of her paycheck to attend a pottery class in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, solely because Fearne told her the teacher was hot and single. She’d agreed to be the 5th wheel to a shitty double date for the slim chance that she’d get a shot at flirting with a woman she’d only heard a vague, secondhand description of until now. She knew this - and she knew it would be lofted above her head tauntingly for the rest of her life - and yet, despite it all, she showed up anyway. She cursed the desperate part of her brain under her breath, and added an extra one for Fearne for being its partner in crime.
Orym and Dorian had already taken their seats, with Ashton and Fearne in tandem close behind, and Imogen realized a few seconds past the point of awkwardness that her group had left her standing in the doorway brooding like an idiot. The room was arranged in a ring, with a large circle of old wooden stools surrounding a smaller ring of old wooden desks, and Imogen came to her second, more horrifying realization when she found that Fearne had saved her a seat directly in between the two pairs of doting lovebirds. Amazing, she pouted silently to herself. How kind of her.
By the time she awkwardly half jogged across the room and took her seat at her stool - which, to her relief, wasn’t unbearably wobbly like she thought it would be - the pretty woman she’d been daydreaming about just a few moments prior was finishing up her greeting with Fearne, giving Imogen the length of around one overly friendly shoulder brush to get situated. She tried to use her remaining few milliseconds to pick a non-awkward place to land her eyes, which promptly ended with her staring wide eyed and frozen at an old lump of clay stuck between two of the floorboards.
“You must be Fearne’s friend! Imogen, yes?”
The woman reached out and wrapped both of Imogen’s hands in hers; they were freezing and fiddly and oh, fuck, Imogen was not ready for this level of familiarity this soon. Her shock led her to overcompensate, and her eyes moved from the lump of clay to their intertwined hands right up to the woman’s wide, near black eyes in two rapid motions.
“Yeah, I, uh.. Yeah, I’m Imogen.”
Her southern-raised impulses caused her to try and shake the woman’s hand, which, when met with the fact that they were already pretty much doing that exact thing, led to her doing little more than an awkward, jolty shoulder jerk. The woman retracted her hands immediately, returning them to their natural resting place in two tightly folded L-shapes right in front of her chest.
“Oh! Yes, right, how rude of me - I’m Laudna.”
She untensed her shoulders slightly and hastily unfolded her arms from her chest, trying to make her body language match the wide smile on her face a little more.
“It's a pleasure to have you, Imogen.”
With a quick nod, she moved further down the line and began making her introductions with Orym, noticeably leaving out the hand grabbing this time. Imogen envied the lump of clay on the floor, because it surely must’ve been more comfortable than she was in that moment.
After a few more mumbled minutes of introductions, Laudna returned to her stool in the center of the room, her body language much more casual and calm now than it had been when she left Imogen’s side a few minutes prior. She clasped her hands together in front of her chest: the loud, hollow sounding clap that followed earning her relative silence from the scattered groups that had made themselves at home around the circle.
“So! I noticed a lot of new faces in the room today, so I thought we’d start off with one of my favorite little projects to get everyone a bit more acquainted with the medium.”
Much like Fearne had done the night prior, Laudna began to dig around in the front pocket of her apron, pulling out a small, intricately sculpted rat figurine from among the tools being stored there and holding it aloft for her audience to see.
“Animals! Isn’t that fun?”
She set her little gray friend on the table in front of her and dipped her fingertips into the small pool of water beside it, scooting her stool forward to get a better vantage point of the lump of clay lying in the center.
“Now; You all are free to follow along with me if you need some guidance, but you have total freedom with your clay! Do not feel constrained by the bounds of realism, because I sure won’t be.”
She punctuated her statement by brazenly ripping a chunk of clay off of her pile and rolling it around in her palm, and the collective sound of a dozen stools scraping across the wood that followed was enough to wake Imogen from the dazed state that Laudna’s introduction had left her in.
She eyed her own chunk of clay with a noticeable disdain. A few different animals spun around in her mind, but nothing quite landed right; they were all too weird or too outlandish, and Imogen had spent vastly too much money on this class to walk out with something that she wouldn’t even want to abandon on a shelf. So, she landed on what was, in her eyes, old faithful; her favorite animal, one she saw virtually everyday and knew every part of by heart.
And oh, dear god, was choosing to make a horse the wrong fuckin’ move. Imogen hadn’t really thought about the fact that four spindly little legs and the inherently quite soft medium of clay wouldn’t mix well together, until she went to place the damn thing on the table for a second and watched it fall over limp into the shallow bowl of water beside it. Its body was a shape Imogen couldn’t even begin to put a word to; ‘rectangle’ implied sharp edges, which there were absolutely none of, but ‘cylinder’ implied a roundness that the clump was, well… a bit too clumpy to really fall in line with.
Imogen turned to seek comfort from her friends, but found no such thing in their own creations. Ashton’s was.. well, it was something. It didn’t quite look like a bear and it didn’t quite look like a wolf but Imogen thought she recognized aspects of both, though the way they were using brute force to shove their different pieces together rather than any real technique was maybe helping to muddy the features slightly. Fearne was staring at her original monkey intently and Imogen thought for a second that she might be trying to fix a few of her past mistakes, until she noticed the cartoonishly disproportionate set of clay balls that were in the process of being stuck onto the new one’s chest. She turned her magnum opus to Ashton and, after a brief stint of laughter that overtook the relatively quiet space, they both began to plot further ways to desecrate the poor little figurine.
Her other side was faring slightly better, which did absolutely nothing to calm her insecurities like she thought it would. Orym had made a small, simple dog figure - indistinguishable breed-wise and cartoony, yes, but also a hundred times more recognizable than anything that was happening to his left. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that Orym had rushed through his end of the project so that he could help Dorian with his, seeing as they were both working on attaching dozens of tiny, intricately sculpted feathers onto what kind of looked like the vague silhouette of a bird, if you squinted and tilted your head pretty far.
She turned back to her own creation in the hopes that maybe it had fixed itself in the minute or two she’d been looking away, but was instead met with the sight of two wide, black eyes peering over the edge of her table where she’d crouched down. Laudna was staring at her horse - well, “horse” - rather quizzically, and when Imogen’s abrupt eye contact broke her concentration with it, she began to stare at Imogen quizzically instead.
“I certainly admire your bravery, Imogen. A horse, as your first venture into sculpture! That’s so exciting.”
Laudna’s smile was the widest she’d seen it, but there wasn’t any malice or sarcasm behind the words like Imogen thought there’d be. She watched her dig her hand around in the small cubby beneath the desk and eventually place a small spool of wire down on its top, unwinding it bit by bit and measuring alongside Imogen’s crude approximation of a horse as she went to obtain an accurate scale of its legs.
“Now, I may be getting a little advanced here, but I would love to see your little friend flourish, so I’m allowing myself to cheat slightly.”
She began to wrap the wire around itself a few times, pausing occasionally to stare off into space, and then making a new bend or adjustment once she’d completed her visualization. She eventually slid the rather sturdy base closer in front of Imogen, fixing her posture slightly as she realized that she should perhaps be using this as a teaching moment instead of just futzing around silently by herself, as she was prone to do.
“Now, it looks a bit crude at the moment, but this is an armature wire. Helps keep all your little fiddly bits a bit more sturdy and, well… safe from water-based hazards like your friend here is currently experiencing.”
Imogen, grateful for the help, but unsure really of what to do in this situation, moved her hands from where they rested at her sides up to do… something , on the table. She wasn’t really sure what to do under Laudna’s watchful eyes, but luckily she wasn’t left floundering for too long. One of Laudna’s hands reached out - tentatively, this time, with a bit of hesitation to its movements - and led hers over to the sad, horse filled puddle of water on the corner of her desk. Her other smushed a small ball of clay into Imogen's more dusted palm, before leading the two to meet in the center. Laudna’s practiced fingers helped Imogen’s more inexperienced ones work their way around the lump, forming it into a rough cylindrical shape that was slightly more horse-like than before, at least when placed atop the four wiry legs on the table.
“If you use a bit of water, it helps the clay smooth down easier. It’s a combative little medium, and you have to placate it slightly sometimes.”
She helped glide her fingers up and down the base of the horse, smoothing out all the rough patches along its back, and just as she was about to start the same guiding process with the legs, one of the other patrons from the far side of the circle flagged her down, yelling something about how he’d dropped wet clay on his shoe and couldn’t get it off. Laudna excused herself, and Imogen wished she’d had some sort of psychic powers in that moment, cause she would’ve blown the guys head off then and there.
She just sat there, instead: staring at her now helpless hands as they gripped the edge of the table. She tried to follow all of the sweet, guiding words that Laudna had left her with, but it wasn’t the same: and it sure wasn’t looking the same, either. The legs were just as spindly and tube-like, but now with about 5% less bumps to their name, if that meant anything. It stood up by itself, just barely, but each time she tried to shove the head onto the body, the wires underneath would shift a little more and she’d have to stop whatever she was doing to knock the thing upright again.
She contemplated for a bit on whether or not she should just drop a bunch of wet clay on her boots, too, but she decided against it on account of the fact that she’d already thrown entirely too much money down the gutter today. She just stared down at her sad horse’s eyes while the rest of the class finished up, and watched as one of the crooked little circles slowly slipped off and rolled down the side of its neck. She didn’t bother sticking it back on: choosing instead to just roll it back and forth between her index finger and the table while she waited..
Eventually, Laudna came around with a few large, flat bins, each with a peeling duct tape label marked “Ready for Kiln.” Her perpetually wide smile softened slightly as she spotted Imogen’s horse, and she picked it up with a level of reverence that the poor creature did not deserve.
“Oh, This is exceptional work for your first time! I’m sure it’ll fire beautifully, Imogen.”
Laudna turned the figure around above her head, taking in each and every angle, and Imogen believed, somehow, that she was being genuine in her praise for it. She laid it gently on its side in the corner of the bin, right beside a wolf that was so beautifully posed and articulated that Imogen could only assume it was hers, before propping the box back up between her hip and her arm to continue around the room.
“I can’t say exactly how long it’ll take to get through your little friend specifically, but you’re free to come back anytime to check on it. Everything should be fully done by the next class, though, if you’d rather not risk it.”
Shit.
There was a heavy commitment dangling in front of her, right in between Laudna’s big, beautiful, gleaming eyes, and Imogen did not have the same level of resistance to those that she had to Fearne’s.
“Yeah, I, uh..”
She looked back down at the one lonely eye of her horse where it laid, and the way it stared back at her made that weird taste in her mouth bubble up again. She felt her hands get clammy, and she wanted nothing more than for Laudna’s freezing cold palms to glance across them, even for just a second.
“I’ll be there, Laudna.”
The woman’s wide smile returned, and her posture straightened once more.
“Then I look forward to seeing you, Imogen.”
————
She fucked up. Coming back for a second pottery class sounded real good a week ago, but now, sitting in a front row parking spot right by the front window - without Laudna’s pretty little batting eyelashes there to hypnotize her - she was beginning to have second thoughts. It didn’t help that her past self had a vendetta against her too, apparently. She’d purchased her ticket for tonight’s class mere seconds after leaving the last one, likely recognizing just how flaky and non committal she’d start to get as the date approached. She hated being right.
She took a deep breath and watched a parent and child duo enter the building. Another, and a couple sauntered through the door, followed by a few more close behind. Another, and a group of rowdy college aged kids shoved each other through the entryway, laughing and screaming so loud that she could hear their conversation clear as day through the rolled up windows of her truck. Each deep breath she took in an attempt to hype herself up only served to heighten her anxiety, as she watched the volume of both strangers and noise in the room rise with each figure that passed by the large front window. Eventually, pushing it as close to 7:00 as she reasonably could, she bit the bullet, shoving her keys into her pocket and huffing it to the front door before her brain caught up with her legs.
When Laudna saw her enter the room, Imogen swore she could see her eyes light up all the way from the door. She set down the wolf figurine she was using to entertain one of the children in the room and bounded over, taking no notice as to how the poor kid backed away from the gnashing, fangs-bared sculpture as she left.
“Imogen! I was worried you weren’t going to be joining us tonight. It’s a pleasure to see you again.”
“Yeah - Hi, Laudna. Sorry about being so late, traffic got pretty rough comin’ out of the city.”
It hadn’t. She’d been sitting outside for a good hour and a half at this point, and she hoped Laudna hadn’t been staring at the window hard enough to notice that.
“Oh, it’s no problem at all. You’re just in time!”
Her smile beamed even brighter, almost blinding.
“And you’re little horse friend turned out amazing, I promise. Not a broken limb or crack to be found! I’ll go and grab him for you after class so that he doesn’t get dirty in today's project.”
She couldn’t care less about the stupid horse, but the way Laudna raved about him made her heart skip a few beats. She almost found herself left behind in the doorway again, but luckily, her mind took control before her body shut itself down completely.
There weren’t any seats available in the circle that weren’t tucked between groups of strangers, so she decided to cut her losses and just go with the same seat she’d taken last time - one she knew was sturdy, at the very least, and wouldn’t wobble under her incessantly over the next few hours. Laudna also took her normal seat in the center and did the same resonant clap as last time to gather everyone’s attention.
“I’m happy to see so many familiar faces in the room today! I’m sure your poor stools appreciate it, too; They must get so lonely during the week.”
Her sad attempt at personifying the stools earned her a few half hearted laughs from around the room, but it made Imogen smile as she stared into the large, gray void of clay in front of her.
“Because I recognize so many of you, we’ll be doing something a little different today. More complex, but with just as much creative freedom as your first few projects, I promise!”
Just like before, Laudna ripped a sizable chunk of clay off of her mound, and began to roll it around between her palms.
“Now, I thought pottery veterans such as yourselves might enjoy making something with a bit more practicality to it, so we’ll be working on some vessels today! Any vessel, really, they’re all made the same; pots, vases, cups, bowls - Any holder that your heart feels drawn to.”
The ball she’d been rolling around in her hand had turned into a sizable rope at this point, which she laid on the table behind her mound. She then took another lump off and began to roll it out flat, and it was at this point, through the silence of her presentation, that Imogen realized she was supposed to be following along step by step, and that she should probably get her act together before she got completely lost.
Imogen hadn’t really learned her lesson with the horse fiasco, and opted again to try and make the hardest option out of the ones Laudna listed in her introduction: the vase. Sure, a cup was a thousand times more practical, but she thought about how impressed Laudna would be to see her take a risk again. The way her eyes lit up whenever she talked about how proud she was of Imogen’s dumb horse was an image that hadn’t left her mind all week, and seeing it again would bring her a thousand times more joy than any stupid mug or lopsided fruit bowl.
Still sucked shit to make, though - and was still turning out kind of lopsided, actually. She had managed to scrape out a vaguely circle shaped base, but the coils she laid on top of it to form the body were looking about as smooth as the grooves on the bottom of her boots. She tried to use the handy little water technique Laudna had shown her last week, but all that really served to do was make her vase all wet and the clay dust on her fingers all sticky.
She saw a hand creep into her field of vision as she was laying the next coil of clay on her vase. Its nails ran up the side of it, starting at the base and ending where Imogen had lost control of its shape and it had started to bow out into an odd, off center ellipse. She heard a laugh - pure, not malicious - emanate from just above her head, before the source of it crouched down to lay her head on the edge of the table.
“I think your vase might be getting away from you a bit.”
Well, at least she could recognize it was a vase. That’s something, right? Imogen felt her face starting to turn red anyway, her blood obviously not convinced. Laudna’s nails returned to the top of the stack of coils and began to rake across it, just light enough to not leave a scratch.
“I think it’s cute, though. Abstract. I’m sure it’d look lovely with some roses in it. Maybe even some delightful little poppies.”
“You don’t have to fake the compliments, Laudna; I know it’s lookin’ pretty busted.”
Imogen started to laugh, but stopped once she saw that Laudna’s face had fallen slightly, much like it did when she had ripped her hands away the first time they met. She removed her hand from the top of the vase and her chin from the table, forcing her crouching position up slightly straighter.
“I’m not lying… I think the shape is wonderful. It’d leave all the flowers in a neat little line, and you’d be able to see each of them so clearly - much clearer than you would in a normal bouquet, honestly. You might be onto something here, Imogen.”
Imogen never failed to be shocked by how genuine Laudna was. Something that would undoubtedly read as sarcasm from anyone else always sounded so real coming from her, and it made Imogen’s chest get heavy every time.
“I think it’d be nice for you to just embrace the lines, as well. Gives it some character, and you don’t have to worry about fiddling and smoothing when you could be having fun rolling things around instead.”
She proved her point by absentmindedly forming a long rope of clay as she talked, which she rolled over to Imogen’s side of the table after finishing her thought. Imogen took the rope, which promptly broke in two the moment she laid her hands on it, and attached the pieces to the top of the vase. The silence from Laudna was disconcerting for a bit, but eventually they fell into quite the streamlined rhythm: with Laudna forming each of the tubes and Imogen attaching them to the stack. This went on for a while, sometimes interplayed with a quick glance or a slight overlap of their hands, which Imogen relished in, but the coils eventually began to taper themselves in and they reached an opening that could comfortably hold a few flowers relatively upright.
The vase that resulted wasn’t pretty, necessarily, but it was theirs; the combined effort of it all was Imogen’s favorite part, and she could tell Laudna had enjoyed it as well by the way she looked up at the finished product, her expression half lidded and smiling gently. Imogen thought about all the roses and poppies and other romantic flowers it could hold, and she felt her face flush again. She selfishly hoped that Laudna might be thinking something similar, as she remained silent on the floor for a bit, still keeping her eyes locked on some of the spare bits of clay that had accumulated across the surface of the table. Her lips pursed slightly before she eventually spoke up.
“…I’m glad you came tonight, Imogen.”
If Imogen’s face could’ve gotten any hotter, it would’ve. She felt her brain stop working for a minute, and all she could do was stare at Laudna dumbfounded.
“I mean, yeah, of course… had to come pick up my horse, after all.”
God dammit. She was so fuckin’ stupid it made her head hurt. Laudna rose from where she was crouching and dusted the clay off of her apron.
“I suppose I should go grab the little guy, shouldn’t I? My apologies, Imogen, I got lost in thought for a bit.”
Before Imogen could respond, Laudna spun around and went digging in one of the back rooms of the studio, eventually returning with Imogen’s trusted, busted horse sculpture. She’d been right in the fact that it hadn’t lost a limb in the kiln, but it still looked about as good as Imogen remembered it looking, which wasn’t great. Both their hands lingered for a moment as it passed between the two of them, their fingers like magnets in how they avoided each other’s touch.
“Your, um… Your vase should be ready in a few weeks. My apologies for making you wait so long for it, but there’s a lot of pretty large projects tonight and I’d rather not cram too many things in the kiln at once.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s totally fine, Laudna. No worries.”
Their shared grasp of the figure lasted a second longer, before Laudna conceded and let the full weight of it fall into Imogen’s hand. She could feel her heart get crushed under the weight of it as it settled.
“Thank you again, Laudna. For all your help tonight, I mean. I appreciate it”
Laudna’s trademark smile returned, though its brightness had dimmed slightly.
“Oh, it was no problem, really.”
Her hands started fidgeting with her apron strings, gripping them quite tightly.
“Thank you for coming, Imogen.”
————
If there’s one thing these past 2 weeks had taught Imogen, it’s that she’s an idiot. She learned this when she first decided to make a stupid little horse, when she came all the way back to pick up her stupid little horse, when she lied, straight to Laudna’s face, and said she’d only come back to pick up that stupid little horse, and now, most especially, when she was waiting for the advanced pottery class she’d signed up for, solely to apologize to Laudna on her stupid little horse’s behalf. She stared at the aforementioned stupid little horse that she still kept buckled into her passenger seat and couldn’t bear to curse its poor, one eyed face, even though the bastard probably deserved it for causing all her current problems.
She didn’t bother with the deep breaths this time, nor the borderline stalking she normally conducted from her car. She got her shit together, keys in her pocket and a very unfounded confidence in her heart, and power walked her way through the front door at a prompt 6:45, with only a few sporadic couples and the annoying little wet-clay-on-his-boots kid from the first class she’d taken having beaten her through. When Laudna noticed her, Imogen thought she might drop the large bucket full of clay she was using to distribute the various mounds to all the tables, but she managed to wedge it between the table, her hip, and the very edges of her grip just in time. The loose clump in her hand wasn’t as lucky though, and landed on its intended desk with a deep, resonant thump. She managed, through some minor gymnastics, to get the bucket to the floor unharmed, and walked over to the doorway where Imogen was standing with a mild hesitance to her steps.
“Imogen! I didn’t think you’d be here tonight. My apologies if you came looking for your vase, I don’t think it’s quite done in the kiln yet. I can certainly go and check though, if you’d like-“
“Oh, no Laudna, it’s fine. I’m here for the class, actually.”
Her face went wide with a shock that she couldn’t quite cover up before she spoke, leaving her voice raspy and on the edge of laughter.
“Oh! Oh, yes, of course. I hadn’t even checked the roster for tonight, how careless of me.”
Laudna scrambled back to her abandoned bucket and Imogen, having fallen into a bit of a routine at this point, followed dutifully behind to her normal table. She came to realize, with a bit of dawning horror, that the setup of the desks around the room had changed; in the place of many of the normal tools sat an old, weathered pottery wheel, each complete with its own squeaky pedal. Her initial thought was a resounding ‘ fuck ’, followed by a gradual acceptance as the ‘advanced’ part of the class description flashed back into her head. You get what you pay for, she supposed.
After a few minutes of the two awkwardly avoiding eye contact as Laudna scurried around the room, she eventually took her seat in the center and silenced the room with a slightly less hearty clap than normal.
“So! I know we normally do more hand sculpting based projects in my classes, but I found these darling little used wheels for a good price and I thought it might be fun to splurge a little bit this time around.”
She adjusted her wheel so it was more central to her table, and grabbed a sizable portion of clay off of her mound.
“Like always, you have total freedom over what you make. I’ll do a quick little tutorial on how to use the wheels, but you all are quite capable, and I have full confidence in your ability to improvise as you go.”
Imogen appreciated the vote of confidence, but it was so horrendously misplaced that it almost made her feel worse than before. She tried, truly, to follow along with Laudna’s tutorial, but she could’ve gone over those steps a million times and it wouldn’t have mattered; her hands lacked any and all precision that Laudna’s had, and she could barely get a few inches high off the stupid wheel before her tower of clay came crumbling down. She tried, and tried again, and tried again , but all she got out of her attempts was a mess that sprawled farther and farther across the table each time.
She didn’t even know what she was trying to make, honestly. Just something , anything that stood upright and didn’t bow out to one side the moment she took her eyes off of it. Maybe even another vase, if she got her act together quick enough. One that she could give to Laudna with a bouquet of roses or poppies bundled up inside, all poised and perfect and-
Ok, no, get it together Imogen. She looked back up at Laudna and swore she saw the woman’s eyes dart back down to her own wheel as she did. She wanted desperately to flag her down for help - she did have wet clay on her boots now, after all her collapsed attempts, so perhaps she could justify it that way - but she refrained. She didn’t want to seem so utterly dependent, and she knew Laudna was probably already bubbling over with all kinds of annoyance towards her after the last few classes. The vase she was spinning was perfect, too - straight and even - and she’d hate to interrupt her work on such a masterpiece.
So she struggled - again, and again, and again - to the point where she had more clay scattered across her table than in her mangled, half reformed pile. She looked back up towards the center of the room to see how Laudna’s own project was going, but was instead met with the sight of an empty stool, which shocked her so bad she almost sent her most recent attempt careening off into the floor. A deft hand reached around and caught it just in time, the other moving to hover just above her lower back, nails just barely scraping through the sheer fabric of her button up. Imogen could’ve chased that touch forever; Could’ve fired herself in that position and become a statue, a sculpture; her body just a handhold, made for nothing but the soft, gentle grip of Laudna’s fingers.
She felt Laudna crouch down behind her; both her hands tensing slightly as she leaned in closer.
“I think your clay might have a few too many air bubbles…”
“Is that it? Was wonderin’ why it wasn’t turning out as pretty as yours.”
That made her blush, and she froze solid for a moment before continuing.
“If you knead it slightly before dropping it on the wheel, it helps a bit.”
Just as she had done that first week, she grabbed one of the mounds of clay off of the pile and placed it in Imogen’s palm, then began guiding her hand into a firm, constant kneading motion. The rhythm was comforting - numbingly so - and Imogen found herself slipping in and out of focus though the process, focusing on Laudna’s furrowed brow more often than the clay itself. The rhythm fell silent eventually though, as Laudna deemed the clay sufficiently wedged and began to move it over to the wheel itself.
“This is the hard part, I’m afraid. I don’t blame you for struggling with it. It’s quite difficult to get a grasp of at first.”
She stood from her crouched position and moved to Imogen’s other side, taking control of the small pedal on the floor.
“You also have to be quite rough with it. Sometimes force is the only way to tame such a vicious beast as clay.”
With that, she slammed their kneaded wad of clay onto the wheel with a force that Imogen had no idea she’d possessed, which made her feel some complicated feelings for a moment. She placed both of her hands around Imogen’s again and led them to either side of the clay, before retracting them - much to Imogen’s dismay.
“If I go too fast, let me know, alright? Just keep your hands steady. Any sudden movements could cause the form to tilt one way or another.”
She tried to keep steady, she really did, but every time she felt the static-y attraction growing stronger between Laudna’s fingers and the back of her shirt, her hands jumped and the pot in front of her staggered into a different angle. It didn’t help that Laudna was being quite liberal with the speed at which she spun the wheel, and Imogen didn’t actually have the heart to tell her to slow down at all.
“I don’t think I’m doing very good, huh?”
Laudna eased up on the wheel, just slightly.
“I think for your first time, you’re doing wonderfully. You're learning quickly, at least, which I think you should be very proud of.”
Imogen doubted how much of this skill she was actually absorbing, but took the compliment nonetheless. She knew better than to question Laudna’s sincerity. Laudna’s hand returned from her right, and began to guide Imogen’s hand up to rest on the top of the tower they’d spun.
“Now, you don’t want to apply too much pressure here or else it’ll all go sideways rather quickly. Just enough to push things outwards a bit, and form some walls.”
Imogen followed her instructions as closely as possible, taking care not to shove too fast or too deep as she began to build some rather crude, thick walls around the top of her vessel. Eventually, as Laudna gradually slowed down on the pedal, they had… something, to show for it. It had a small, cup-like basin at the top that Imogen found rather successful, but she’d clearly quit while she was ahead, and the bottom two thirds of it were clearly just as ragged and curved as the original tower they’d formed. Laudna came around her side and began to move around the table, inspecting their combined efforts.
“Well… I don’t think it could hold a flower, really, but I’m sure it’d make a lovely little jewelry holder. Or perhaps a little key cup for a front table.”
Imogen laughed at that.
“I don’t know if I’d want this thing to be my apartment's first impression. Might scare all the pretty girls away.”
With that, she earned a laugh out of Laudna, though she couldn’t tell if it was one born out of awkwardness or genuine comedy. She assumed the prior, with how it shook towards the middle and trickled off rather quickly. Laudna nodded in her direction, and ran off to begin her various clean up duties around the room as the other patrons began finishing up their own rather unshapely vessels. Imogen waited for a while, unsure of the appropriate time to leave, until it was just her, Laudna, and about two lingering couples still finishing up their projects. She braced herself to get up off her stool, but stopped once she saw a familiar hand creep into her field of vision.
“Imogen, um… If it’s not too much trouble, would you mind staying for a bit after class? Not long, I promise, I just… want to talk to you, for a minute. One on one.”
Holy fuck. Imogen would’ve collapsed if not for the fact that she was still mostly leaning on her stool.
“Yeah. Yeah, of course. Can I, uh, help you with anything? Clean anything up, in the meantime?”
“Oh! Well, sure if it’s not too much trouble. You can help grab all of the leftover clay, if you don’t mind.”
Of course she didn’t. She would’ve scraped the clay dust off the bottom of Laudna’s flats, if she’d asked her in that moment. She grabbed the designated clay bucket from the corner of the room and began scraping all the excess into it, and, after a while, the remaining patrons filtered out and the pair were left alone in the studio. Imogen swore she could hear their heartbeats overlapping in the silence.
They worked for a little while longer - dusting and organizing, moving things from one room to another - before they both settled down; Laudna in her normal spot, and Imogen standing weak-knee’d in front of her.
Laudna was leaning on the edge of her stool, legs curled between the beams and hands fiddling with the loose apron strings in her lap. Her expression reminded Imogen a lot of when they’d first introduced themselves; eyes wide and mouth shaking, just slightly. Nerves, she presumed.
They both stood there, dead still, for a moment, fighting hard not to be the one to break the silence.
Laudna lost.
“You can pull up a stool, too, you know. That’s what they’re there for.”
Imogen, ever the noble servant, obliged, grabbing the nearest seat from the circle. It was more wobbly than the one she’d been getting used to these past few weeks, and it showed in the way her body fought hard to keep it level, her brain doing the same for her expression. Laudna either didn’t notice her unease or was simply too focused on her own stability to care, as her own expression never wavered. She continued with her point a moment later.
“I hope you know you don’t have to come here every week, Imogen.”
Shit.
“It’s not a job. You’re not obliged to be here.”
Shit.
Laudna finally noticed the way Imogen’s demeanor was faltering, and her eyes widened a little more, somehow. Her hands put down her apron strings - now tied in a rather thick, sturdy knot - and went still in her lap.
“Don’t get me wrong - I do enjoy your presence here. Quite a bit, actually. But I don’t want you to come here just because of that…”
She unfurled her legs from where they were tucked between the banisters of the stool and scooted closer to where Imogen was sitting, her hands starting to fidget again as she corrected herself on the seat. She took a deep breath, then another; just as Imogen did each time she was working up the courage to leave her car.
“You don’t have to pity me, Imogen. I know I’ve probably crossed quite a few lines, at this point, and if that has made you feel the need to… to entertain me, or feel bad for me at all, then I don’t want you to feel burdened with that.”
“You’re not a burden to me, Laudna.”
Another pause. Thick and palpable this time, like both of their lungs had been filled with mounds of clay.
Imogen evened the score between them.
“I mean it. I don’t feel bad for you, Laudna, I’d never. I…”
She paused again, and found her eyes drifting back to one of the clay lumps on the floor - the same one Laudna’s eyes were currently burning a hole through, as well. Another deep breath, shared between the two of them.
Their tie, by some miracle, persisted.
“I like you.”
Childish, yet simultaneous; they both just stared at each other wide eyed for a moment before the anxious tension snapped and laughter filled its void. They laughed, unable to form words, for a while: just them and the clay-dusted air and the joy. Imogen reached out and wrapped both of Laudna’s hands in hers, and the combined shift in temperature was enough to calm them both down, eventually.
“I really do mean it though, Laudna. You’re incredible. As an artist, as a teacher, as a person . And honestly, I do come here just for you each week, but not like that.”
She began to run small, smooth circles over the back of Laudna’s hand, relishing in the cold.
“I come because I like you. And I like the way you compliment me, and the way you make my dumb little pots sound all nice.”
“They are nice!”
Imogen fell to pieces at that, laughing.
“Like that! I mean, god, you are just magical, Laudna.”
They stared into each other’s eyes for a bit, both of them taking in the relief that came with all their pent up feelings leaving their bodies.
“You really are too kind, Imogen… I hate that you’ve been wasting so much money to come here each week, just for me.”
“It’s not a waste. Besides, I got a sweet little horse out of it. And I’m sure my vase is pretty kickass, too.”
That earned her a hearty laugh - genuine, this time.
“How about I make it up to you? My treat, anything or anywhere you’d like. I’ll even bring some flowers for your ‘kickass’ vase.”
Imogen smiled, taking in how unbelievably in debt she’d be to Fearne after this.
“It’s a date, Laudna.”