Sketches

Paperweights and Ballerinas

Nolan's POV

The cat stone sat on my desk. It was a small, smooth, grey lump of polished agate, shaped into a sleeping feline curve, utterly pointless. I had bought it the day after the stationery shop encounter, on my lunch break, walking a full ten minutes out of my way to retrieve it. I told myself it was just a paperweight, a functional object to justify its presence in my meticulously ordered space, but the truth was I never had loose papers. My desk was a monument to efficiency and minimalism, a direct reflection of the mind that worked at it. Blueprints were stored in designated tubes, contracts in colour-coded folders, and my current project—the sprawling, complex blueprints for the new municipal library—lived exclusively on my large-screen monitor and in the precise, disciplined pages of my A3 sketchbook.

The stone, therefore, was an anomaly. A pebble in the smooth gears of my plans. Literally.

My business partner, Ben,a very good friend of mine- though i wouldn't like to admit that- noticed it almost immediately. He’d barged into my office, as he always did, with the force of a minor hurricane, a half-eaten sandwich in one hand and a new, wildly impractical idea for the library’s atrium in the other. How do I know it's impractical. because that's what Ben does, intentionally rage baiting me with terrible ideas. His eyes, sharp and perpetually amused, landed on the stone within seconds.

“Since when are you a knick-knack guy?” he’d asked, picking it up and turning it over in his hand as if inspecting a piece of dubious evidence.

“It’s a paperweight,” I’d said, my tone carefully calibrated to be flat and discouraging, a verbal ‘Do Not Enter’ sign.

He’d snorted, a short, explosive sound. “Right. And I’m a ballet dancer.” He’d placed it back down with a definitive clack, but I’d caught him glancing at it several times since, a knowing, irritating smirk playing on his lips.

I didn’t know why I’d gone back for it. It wasn’t a conscious, romantic gesture. It felt more like an engineer’s need for closure. I had presented a lie—that I would purchase a cat trinket—and then the evidence for that lie was absent. It created a loophole in the narrative of that interaction, a variable left dangling.

And my architect’s brain, which thrived on closure, needed to tie it off. So now the cat sat there, a silent, stony witness to my uncharacteristic behaviour, a monument to a fib told to a woman with a charcoal smudge on her cheek.

Work was relentless, a welcome and familiar pressure. The library project was in its most critical phase; we were finalising the structural blueprints, and every line I drew, every calculation I ran, had the weight of public money and future generations behind it. It was a whirlwind of stress and deadlines, the immense, intangible weight of concrete and steel and so many expectations. My days were a blur of consultations with engineers, tense calls with surveyors who argued about land gradients, and meetings with city planners who worried about aesthetic conformity rather than structure.

It was during one such call, a particularly frustrating debate about the specifications for the grand reading room’s glass ceiling, that my gaze drifted from the complex stress-diagram on my screen to the simple, smooth lines of the cat. For a split second, the numbers and lines of force dissolved. I wasn’t looking at the immense responsibility of the library; I was back in the quiet, paper-scented aisle of Pen & Parchments stationery shop, seeing a smile that could power a small city, feeling the brief, warm weight of a box of pencils being taken from my hand.

It was… distracting. Profoundly so. The surveyor’s voice on the phone became a distant buzz. The feeling was alien. My focus was my greatest asset; it was a laser, unwavering and intense. Yet this memory, this phantom, had the power to diffuse it, to soften its edges into something less precise. I shook my head slightly, forcing my attention back to the call, a faint sense of unease settling in my gut.

I hadn’t been back to that particular stationery shop. My subconscious, it seemed, had already cordoned it off, designating it as her territory. It felt intrusive, almost predatory, to loiter there in the hopes of a repeat encounter. That would be illogical. Presumptuous. It would be introducing a variable with no guarantee of an outcome, a messy, emotional gamble that my rational mind rejected.

Instead, I had, without any explicit decision-making process, started taking a longer, more convoluted route to the office. My new path cut directly through Willow Creek Park. It was a good place to think, I reasoned, to clear my head of the night’s accumulated static before the day’s chaos began. The morning air was fresh, the gravel paths were quiet, and the green expanse provided a blank slate for my thoughts. I told myself that was the only reason. The fact that she—the girl at the stationary shop, with her vibrant energy and creative chaos—had struck me as the exact type of person who might also find inspiration in a quiet, green space at the start of her day was a correlation I was deliberately, forcefully ignoring.

The park became a new part of the routine. A calculated, yet unacknowledged, risk. I would sit on a specific bench, one that offered a clean, architectural view of the old bandstand, and I would sketch. Not blueprints, but the bandstand itself, its Victorian-era filigree and sturdy posts a pleasing exercise in perspective and form. It was a way to keep my hand in, to practice drawing for the sake of beauty rather than function. And if my eyes occasionally scanned the other benches, the walking paths under the oak trees, for a flash of honey-coloured hair… well, that was merely a product of an observant nature. Nothing more. I hoped.

And yes, I tok the cat stone with me. I needed a paperweight of course. What if I took part with me one day? or needed to hold down my napkins. I had to take it for unforeseen circumstances.

It was always in my hands, smooth to the touch and glossu, it was interesting to carry around.

It watched me from my desk, its polished surface catching the light. It knew. It knew that my carefully ordered world had been subtly, irrevocably tilted, and that the axis of that tilt was a woman I had spoken to for less than two minutes, whose name I didn’t even know.