Page 4 of Keep My Alpha

I lean my head on his shoulder. The hope and the fear tangle up together.

“I bookmarked the Festival submissions page,” I say after a minute. “I haven’t clicked submit. But I bookmarked it.”

“That’s a start.”

“And I’m going to sit here and smell this bench for a little while longer, and I need you to not make it weird.”

“I would never.”

“You’re already texting Callum about it.”

“I’m texting Callum that I’ll be ten minutes late. That’s completely different.” But he’s smiling, and I catch the edge of his screen before he tips it away from me.

We sit there in the warm dark, the oak rustling above us.

Eventually, Milo stands. He brushes off Callum’s hoodie and gives me a Look.

“For the record,” he says, “you’re allowed to want it.”

“That’s very wise for someone wearing his boyfriend’s hoodie as a dress.”

“It’s not a dress, it’s a look.”

“Goodnight, Milo.”

“Submit your poems, Soren.”

I watch him go, already talking into his phone, voice soft in that way that belongs to just the two of them. I let that be a good thing. It is. It’s also a little bit of an ache.

I sit on the bench for another minute. Run my fingertips over the new slat one more time, feel the grain smooth against my skin.

Then I pull out my phone and open the Festival submissions page. I read the guidelines, all of them, the way I’ve been avoiding for weeks. Submit three to five poems on a cohesive theme. Include a brief artist statement.

A cohesive theme. I have a year of poems about carved birds and anonymous gifts and the ache of wanting something I can’t quite name. That’s a theme. That’s the most cohesive theme I’ve ever had.

I don’t hit submit. Not yet. But I don’t close the page, either. I sit there with the screen glowing in my lap and the empty bench arm beside me and the whole quiet campus around me.

Then I stand up, hug the Tupperware to my chest, and head home. Fast, because I have blondies to eat and a whole evening of not thinking about the bench ahead of me. My bag knocks against my hip with every step, Keats in her little pouch bumping softly against my notebook.

Tonight I’m not calling it a jinx.

Wren

Three beats smooth, one beat catch. The fan in the corner has this hitch in the motor I keep meaning to fix and never do, because the rhythm’s good for working. My hands know the count even when my brain’s checked out completely.

Right now, my brain is definitely somewhere else.

Sawdust and linseed oil, that faint metal tang from the belt sander I haven’t cleaned. It gets into everything. My clothes, my hair. Mom says it was “the smell of a life,” when she’d come home from the studio with clay under her nails and kiln smoke hovering around her. I guess this is mine.

The bark texture on the lower trunk is almost right. I’m working with a V-gouge, making shallow passes, following the photo I pinned up weeks ago of a white oak from the east side of campus, one with this crazy twist in the trunk where it grew around a fence post someone left behind forty years ago. The tree just swallowed it. Made it part of itself. I like that.

My festival piece stands waist-high on the worktable, branches reaching up like open hands. Individual leaves on the first two layers, veined and thin enough that the overhead light comes through. The canopy’s going to spread wide when it’s done. Generous. The way a real tree is.

I set the gouge down and run my thumb over the joint where branch meets trunk. Smooth. Clean grain.

Behind me, the acceptance letter for the Summer Arts Festival is tacked to the corkboard. It’s been up there two weeks, pinned next to a photo of my mom at her potter’s wheel and an invoice for the Harmon Hall stairwell. I read it once, my stomach did this weird hollow flip, and I haven’t looked at it since. The tree will have to speak for me. People will either get it or they won’t.

What I’m definitely not looking at is the shelf.