Hardly daring to make a sound, Phineas peered in through the art room door, hoping against hope that, for the time being, he would remain unseen. His knuckles were clenched white on the door frame as his gaze swept the room... and sure enough, there was his target.

Django was seated near a corner, his back mostly to Phineas. Phineas supposed that Django wouldn't have noticed an intruder anyway, given how intense he was about his work. And for a moment, Phineas was mesmerized too. The young artist was seated before a pottery wheel, his foot pressed against the pedal that kept the wheel spinning. His hands played over the gleaming hunk of wet clay, and the way his deft strokes shaped the blob was almost magical to behold. The simplest touch altered the clay in precise ways, either by hollowing it out or changing the overall figure. Soon, the once-indistinguishable lump was transformed into an elegant vase.

So engrossed was he by the process that Phineas didn't realize just how far he had leaned through the doorway. With a sudden swoop of instability, he lost both his grasp on the doorframe and his footing, and he stumbled sideways, banging into the door with a huge racket and staggering into the room.

Django's head shot up, and he whipped around, eyes wide. At seeing Phineas, however, his look of alarm melted into one of pleasant surprise. "You don't have to spy, you know. I don't mind if people watch me work." His casual smile was almost too alluring to trust.

Phineas, cursing the red-hot blush that was creeping up his face, attempted an offhand grin and sauntered over to Django, careful not to appear too eager. When he was at the young man's side, just close enough to observe the pottery process in detail without getting too close, Phineas felt his heart almost tripping over itself. Being so near to Django was making him sweat, and he withstood the urge to stuff his trembling hands in his pockets. Suddenly, his best-laid plans seemed fruitless. There was no good way to go about telling him—it was stupid—it would never work—

His mental assault was interrupted by a voice: Django's voice, both rough-edged and disarmingly lulling at the same time, just like his brush strokes.

"Do you want to try?" he was asking. Without waiting for an answer, he gripped one of Phineas' hands in his own and brought it to the wheel. The touch made Phineas' breath catch in his throat, and he prayed that the artist couldn't hear the thunderous pounding in his chest.

He soon discovered that Django didn't, in fact, have magical powers that controlled the clay. The malleable goo beneath Phineas' fingertips melded at the lightest contact, just as it had for the artist. For a moment he was in awe over both the clay shape forming at his command and Django's grasp. Django's fingers were slick with water and liquid clay, and Phineas soon felt the silt covering his own digits.

"What do you think?" Django questioned. Phineas almost didn't dare to think it, but Django's tone bore something, a hint that there was a hidden meaning disguised in the nonchalant words. He tried to stop the train of thought, but it barrelled along at about a million miles a second, leaving no room for scepticism or doubt.

Phineas struggled briefly with a hundred different responses. He turned to Django, who was looking up at him expectantly. As their gazes locked, there was no mistaking the fire in those molten brown eyes, and Phineas knew that there was subtext. Whether it was an interested inquiry or a condemning demand, Phineas couldn't be sure. For a split second, he felt as if he was dangling over a great precipice, where the outcome of everything would depend on just how he answered the question.

Distracted by Django's continuing grip on his hand, Phineas hesitated before speaking, then took the plunge. "I... like it. A lot." His gut wrenched in anticipatory agony as he stared into those painfully enticing chocolate irises.

After a second that seemed to span over countless millennia, the tiniest grin cracked Django's calm expression. "Yeah," he said, "I like it too." He returned his gaze to the pottery wheel, the small smile still playing on his lips. "I've liked it for a long time. It's great that someone else can, you know, share that interest."

"Y-yeah, it's great," Phineas stammered, his heart beating no less fast—although, this time for a different reason. He could hardly believe... but Django had just said... unless he meant... but it had to be...

Again, his blind tumbling of thoughts was interrupted by Django—this time, by Django's other hand grabbing his. "So, where do we go from here?" he asked matter-of-factly.

Phineas finally felt an enormous grin splitting across his face. "I don't know—you're the artist, you tell me." He placed his other hand on top of Django's, their digits now completely covered in the gritty silt of the clay.

Django laughed. When the chuckles died down, he stared at Phineas with an unusually serious expression. "So, the reason you broke up with Isabella..."

"There was someone else," Phineas finished for him. "I lied. Sorry." He grinned again, this time sheepishly. "I'm normally more honest than that, I swear."

"We'll see about that," Django said, though he accompanied it with a wink. He leaned back, a pleased yet incredulous look on his face. "So you really like it... me, I mean."

And in that moment, there was no more need to hide the truth. Phineas smiled to himself, finally acknowledging the benefit of honesty. "Yeah. I do."