Jake couldn't help but grumble under his breath as he wiped the sweat off of his brow, careful to do so with the towel in his left hand and not the sandpaper in his right. He had already made that mistake twice - he wasn't going to make it a third. He had slipped away from school for more than a week straight. If he was going to build a new guitar, he needed to do it right, and he needed to do it sooner rather than later. He still couldn't believe that Ramses had broken the body of his old one. Dude needed to watch where he was flinging rocks during rehearsal.
He could feel the burn in his chest, aching to be let loose. It had been a long time since he hadn't had a guitar to let loose with. He longed for the feeling of the strings under his fingers, the tones mixing in his brain and in his ears like a melody of magic that pulled the fire forth and free. But he knew how badly that could backfire with a poor guitar. It made his skin burn, his ears burst. Only he knew what he needed. And if it took him a month, he would do it right. And then beat the ever loving hell out of Ramses.
He could feel the music in the wood he had chosen. Firm and flexible, with a resonation that rung through its rings even when the wood was flat and fat. A day each of carving for each face of the body, and another day for the walls. But that was just the carving itself. Rough cuts to get the shape, but assembling it in that condition, the strings would have sounded like rocks thrown against the walls of a two foot deep cave. And they already had one idiot sounding like that as it was. They didn't need two.
The sanding had taken him longer than anticipated. He had run through nearly a dozen sheets of each level of paper, which was taking him the better part of a day when he had anticipated only hours. And when he had first started to sweat, he had to move fast and careful so as to prevent it from dropping on the wood. A couple drops might not do much, but too much moisture would cause the wood to expand, ruining all of the work he had already put into it. That's what was taking so long. When he sweat too much, he had to stop and take a break. He wasn't the fittest guy in the world, and it took his body a long time to calm down - no amount of working out would have done anything about that.
At the end of the day, he lay out the pieces to analyze the appearance of his soon to be guitar. It would still take another week before he could finish, but he could go back to school in the meantime. The next step was to start gluing. It would take a while to make sure it was all connected just right, but the more important part was to let it dry. He couldn't do anything while that was happening. Hopefully in the meantime he could get a loaner. But trying to find a guitar he could play without anyone seeing him do it...
That would be harder than making one himself.
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