Chapter Ten
Alessi’s got some new tumblers and a lilypad-ish flower sculpture in the window display. The blue piece I noticed last time on the felt-covered table, the trio of towers, is gone. Probably sold to Tiffany’s or Restoration Hardware or some other elite corporation who’ll want to use it for a photo shoot or display décor. I stay near the curb, out of sight from the back of the shop.
“Have you ever done it?”
I jam my hands into my pockets to hide my white knuckles. In fact I have. Right here in this studio. Up until my father went to jail for killing your mom.
“What’s so fascinating about it?” I ask, ignoring her last question.
She purses her lips, still gawking into the window. “I’ve never done it or anything. Just the idea of manipulating this mushy mess into something so beautiful and breakable is sort of incredible.”
It’s not really mushy, so much as lava-like. But she’s right: it is incredible.
Or, was.
Suddenly, she starts for the door. I rush forward and grab her arm. “What’re you doing?” My words slice into the warm air. Her eyes grow wide. A long second passes, and then she gestures to the sign in the window.
“It says open to the public. Let’s look inside.”
I’m shaking my head before the last of her words register. “I don’t think—”
“Stop thinking,” she says, loud and assured. Her hand finds mine and, with a yank, she tugs me over the threshold. Into Alessi’s. Fuck, fuck, fuck! Cold air blasts my arms and neck. Glass pieces displayed all around glint with rows of track lighting above. The room is dead quiet, familiar and strange, and I can’t breathe because it feels like the glossy, wooden floor has hands and is reaching up, dredging its long, splintered fingernails into my legs.
A few steps in and Cam stops. She turns and, unexpectedly, her lips touch mine. Gently. Hesitantly. If only I could blink the setting around us away, or close my eyes and wish us somewhere else. The park. Fucking Disneyland. Anywhere but here.
“You’re not going to break anything,” she whispers against my lips, “if that’s what you’re afraid of. And we won’t be long. I just want to look at one thing.”
Those fingernails have clawed their way up my chest, stabbed into my throat so it’s impossible to speak.
Her sweet breath warms my face. “Please?”
Alessi never came in on Saturdays. His brother, Enzo, ran the showroom. That thought eases the hold on my chest a bit. I nod, and she skips over to the display case to a blue, cone-shaped pendant strung on a piece of brown leather. Rusty-orange swirls snake around the edges, and it’s not something Alessi made. He’d never use a mold. If he wasted any time on beads, they’d be wound or drawn.
Cam leans over the glass case. “It’s the same color as your eyes. I like it.”
To my left, in the tiny polishing room, a kid—okay, not a kid; he’s about my age, maybe a year younger—looks up from the fire polisher. The tongs in his hand, holding a glass bead, hang in the flame. The glass glows brighter and brighter orange, and I laugh to myself. Only a rookie would get distracted like that.
“Cam?” the kid says, eyebrows tipped together. Suddenly, the room stops. Then: “What’re you doing here?”
“Seth?” she replies, and immediately I take a step closer to her. How does she know this guy? And why is he smiling at her like that?
“I work here,” he says then shakes his head. “Well, sort of. I’m interning. What’re you doing here?” He flicks his eyes between me and her, his smile fading like the fiery glow of cooling glass. So Alessi’s replaced me. Taken on another intern. I’m not sure how I feel about this.
Seth comes around to the front, pulling his goggles down around his neck. “If you like these colors,” he says, “I have some others I made. They’re in the back.”
“You made this?” Cam’s voice lifts, and I try to swallow, but suddenly there’s a cupful of sand in my mouth. “Of course I want to see them!” She glances back at me, eyes doing a once over on my face. I’m not sure what my expression looks like at the moment. She tips her brow so obviously there’s something.
“No problem,” Seth says. He pushes through the beaded curtain and returns a few seconds later holding out a wooden display box. He sets it on the counter in front of us. Standard black felt coats the bottom and sides, and in it are a variety of beads, all bluish-brown with orange.
“These are five for twenty. Singles are five dollars.” He speaks with confidence. Like he’s been here forever, and all I can think is these beads are not worth five dollars. The insides are scratched, a sign they weren’t polished completely. Others are misshaped or littered with nicks, and I can’t believe Alessi would let him sell these here at all. Unless Alessi doesn’t know.
“They’re flawed,” I say, thinking at the same time I really need to work on keeping my mouth shut. “You might be able to take other people’s money. But not hers.”
Silence.
The two of them stand, frozen. Seth narrows his eyes, red sidling up his neck. Cam’s fingers hang midair over the box. Sweat prickles my forehead. She touches my arm.
“It’s okay, Krister.”
“Wait.” The kid holds up his finger, looking at me with curious eyes. “Krister? As in the Krister who used to work here?”
“I never worked here,” I snap.
“He interned,” a voice from the back announces. Big and bold and, godfuckingdammit, could this get any worse? I swallow hard. Alessi glides through the beaded curtain, his face a serious mask behind his goggles. “Thought I heard your voice.” He comes around the counter and engulfs me in his big arms. I don’t know if it’s an Italian thing or an Alessi thing but he’s always been a hugger. “How’s life treating you?”
When I left here six months ago, Alessi knew everything going on with my dad. Didn’t agree with, but understood, my need for space. He tried to convince me to stay, though. Even after I scorched my hand on the kiln, he thought I could put all of my frustration into my pieces.
It didn’t exactly work out that way.
“I’m sure Seth here is sick of hearing about you,” Alessi says, nodding to the kid. Seth pries his eyes from Cam and adjusts the goggles dangling from his neck. His hair’s sticking up in the back and is the same color as the rusty-orange swirls in the beads he’s holding. Freckles darken his pale skin all over his arms, face, and neck, and I shouldn’t care at all about him standing behind the counter with his eyes glued to the girl beside me, but then why is there an invisible hand crushing my throat?
“You live in Chanton?” I force out. To him I probably sound pissed, but really I’m just stalling, scrambling for an excuse to leave because there is no way this can end well. I want to punch him in the face and disappear from Alessi’s sights all at the same time.
“Moved here for college,” he replies, setting down the box and opening the display case. “I go to U of C with Cam.” He removes the cone-shaped bead and hands it to her.
“We have English together,” Cam clarifies, eyes cemented to the shit-worn bead. As if I give a rat’s ass about him. Alessi skims his dark eyes to the small space between me and Cam, completely insensible to the simple fact that I’m staring at my replacement and it’s more than a little awkward.
“I take it this pretty girl’s the reason you haven’t come back, yet?”
I cringe. In a domino sort of way, yes.
“This is Cam,” is all I can say.
“Hi.” She reaches past me and shakes Alessi’s hand. “So Krister knows how to do all this?”
“Knows?” Alessi belts out a hearty laugh. The sound ricochets off the white walls like a burst of gunshots. “Quite an understatement if you ask me. He’s the best intern I’ve ever had. No offense, Seth.”
Seth blushes but recovers with a bob of his chin. “None taken, boss.”
“He didn’t mention that.” I can feel Cam’s eyes on me, but I don’t meet her gaze. I don’t want to know if the stra
in in her words is interest or anger. I’m betting on the latter because…well, we were just standing outside and I didn’t mention any of this.
“I still have some of his pieces in the back,” Alessi tells her. “Would you like to see?”
“No,” I say sharply.
Cam tilts her head to the side, the tips of her hair sweeping her elbow. “Why not?”
Standing here, with three sets of eyes staring at me, I have no answer for her. Getting out of here before Alessi clues Cam in to who I am—my last name—is what we should do. But it’s not like I can say that.
“Whatever,” I mutter through my teeth instead. “Follow him.” Cam grazes her questioning eyes over my face for a moment longer then starts toward the back, through the beaded curtain, and down the hallway. Seth pinches a grin as we pass him, and it takes all I have to not tell him to mind his own fucking business.
“Flame them longer,” I spit out over my shoulder.
Alessi leads us to his office, a small room adjacent to the workroom where most of the glassblowing is done. Yellow light streams through the windows in zigzags, across the cement floor, and settles near the foot of his desk. He’s moved it from one side of the room to the other, and apparently half a year plus a new intern have robbed him of his ability to be organized. Papers and folders form a mound three feet high.
Across the room, Alessi points to the lower ledge of a bookshelf under the window. Looking at them—the heart-shaped paperweight with ribbons of purple and pink, the tumbler with curls of blue and green that always reminded me of an ocean wave—doesn’t feel real. Like they’re an illusion of something I vaguely recall seeing before. Pieces my brain wants to recognize, pieces that tug at my gut as if each one had a string attached.
The “before Krister” created those. Not me.
That’s why.
“You made these?” Cam asks, her voice dangerously curious. If I close my eyes, could I pretend to be that Krister again? The one who’d take her into the workshop and show her how it’s done. The one to explain step-by-step how I twisted the pink and purple together to look like a piece of twine, or how I hiccupped, accidentally jerking my hand, and that’s how the blue and green got that curl.
I ball my hands until they start to ache.
“Couldn’t bring myself to sell’em,” Alessi tells her. Or me. I can’t tell which one of us he’s talking to. “They’re the last pieces Krister made before leaving.”
Cam leans down, hands on knees, and if we were anywhere but here I might be a little turned on by how her skirt lifts a bit in the back, revealing more leg than I’m sure she’d want to. “I was just telling Krister how incredible glassblowing is.” She stands and looks across the room at me, shaking her head. “I can’t believe you made these.” Dark strands of hair fall around her probing eyes. It was a mistake allowing Alessi to bring her back here.
“We need to go,” I say as even as possible. Alessi watches silently as I take Cam’s hand and lead her out of the room. He follows us back to the front, and I think I’m going to make it out without a word, but then his hand clamps down on my shoulder.
I freeze.
“You know where I am if you need to talk,” he whispers close to my ear. They’re words I’ve heard before, when I left the last time. Only now, they send aching prickles throughout my entire body. Six months ago, I didn’t want to talk. Didn’t want anything more than my old life back and vaguely remember saying something in the vicinity of “fuck off” to him. But since this ugliness has engrained itself inside me, like a fucking alien clinging to my bones, his offer sounds rather tempting. Even though it’d be impossible.
“Go ahead and sell them,” is what I say to Alessi instead as I walk out the door without looking back. Cam and I pass block after block, not saying a word to each other. I know she wants me to explain what that was about—glassblowing and Alessi and the fact I told her about neither. She watches me through our reflection off the storefront windows. At the corner we stop to wait for the light, and she steps in front of me.
“Something’s wrong.”
The light turns green, the crosswalk says GO, and I move to step off the curb but she pushes her hand firmly to my chest. I stiffen. Despite being small, her arm’s got some strength and, standing a full head below me in combat boots and a thin line of black around her eyes, she looks a little like a rebellious schoolgirl. The sight softens me.
“What’s going on, Krister?”
I force a wide grin, meeting her eyes. “What do you mean? I thought you wanted to eat…”
She glares up at me. And this would be the moment I deny everything, to the point she leaves out of frustration and never talks to me again. Maybe that would be best, considering who she is. And who I am.
“Nothing’s going on,” I add, watching as her gaze darkens. I start to count in my head the seconds until she’ll turn and stomp off.
One, two, three.
A car turns right, the sound of the exhaust covering up the beat of my heart.
Four, five, six.
Pedestrians pass by. She’s still standing here, her hand warming a spot on my chest.
Seven, eight—
“I don’t expect you to tell me your life’s story,” she finally says, her voice frail and disarming. Why am I so drawn to her? And why does the thought of her leaving and never speaking to me again hit me like a punch to the gut? Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, she continues, “But I guess I kind of want to know why being in that studio does this to you.” Her hands slide to my forearms and squeeze, then drift to my wrists. Her fingers gently uncurl mine. “Or why every time that man spoke, it looked like you were being beaten from the inside out.” Her fingers slide between mine and words start to fall from my mouth.
“A few months ago, my dad…” I bite hard on my lip. Dammit, what am I doing? I take a breath. I have to say something about him. Obviously not the truth. But something close. “He left while I was interning with Alessi and…I guess you could say it’s seriously a miracle all I did was burn myself.” I lift my hand to show her the smooth, pale-colored scar above the back of my thumb. “I quit the internship.”
She blinks slowly. “Being in there reminds you of him?”
I nod.
“And your mom? What does she think about it?” For some reason, I don’t think Cam truly cares about my mom. Losing her mom, though, she probably just wants to hear about somebody’s mom. It’s odd, but I’ve done the same with Ditty before. Asked stupid, meaningless questions about his dad, like what he did in the evenings or if he knew how to barbeque, just to—for a split second—imagine my life was like his.
“I don’t have a mom.” The words come out flat. Detached. It’s easy to talk about someone I can barely remember. “I mean I do, I’m sure, somewhere. But she abandoned ship when I was little. Never heard from her after that.”
“Krister, I’m so sorry.” The honest-to-God concern she feels is over me. Something concrete in my chest bobbles, and it discharges a cautionary shock through my system. Whatever the hell is going on inside me has to stop.
She steps close, running her tiny hands up my arms. The knot of tension in my chest loosens with each stroke of her hand, and I can’t help but wonder what it would feel like to have those hands all over me. Slowly, she raises up on her tiptoes, cradles my face in her hands and smashes her mouth to mine. The touch of her ignites a fire in my chest, and suddenly I don’t care if we’re standing in the middle of the sidewalk, surrounded by moms and dads and kids.
I want this girl, and I want her now. She must have the same idea because as I turn our bodies with my arms around her back and guide/shuffle/walk us to an alcove between storefronts, she attacks—open mouthed and without hesitation. Out of view from the public, I press her back to the brick wall. Her tongue darts into my mouth and, hot damn, I don’t know what it is about this girl, but she’s managed to wipe away the pain clawing at my chest.
I nip at her bottom lip, and her breath
escapes in a whoosh. My mouth trails the line of her jaw down to her neck, and I drop a row of kisses along her shoulder, my finger toying with the thin strap of her shimmery tank top. Her hands find mine and guide one to the swell of her breast. The other she moves to her cheek, pressing her face against it for a small, silent moment. Then she kisses the inside of my wrist; the gesture is insignificant, yet intimate, and gets my blood flowing south.
As close as I possibly can move to her, every inch of my front pressing to hers, I kiss her long and hard and deep until we both pull away gasping for air.
“What was that for?” I say, smoothing her wild hair from her face.
She shrugs, an impish smile on her red, swollen lips. “If it were me, I would’ve wanted a distraction.”
Chapter Eleven
The latch of the door wakes me.
Not mine. Wrenn’s. Her feet pad down the hallway, and then the deadbolt on the front door releases with a thunk. I rub my face and sit up. What the hell is she doing? It’s three in the morning.
In the pitch black of my room, I find my jeans, throw them on, then trace her steps to the front of the apartment. Out the window I see Wrenn standing amid a puddle of orange light under the decomposing parking structure, arms wrapped around herself, head tipped. A man stands with her, dressed in jeans and a button-up shirt, talking, and whatever he’s saying must be pretty intense because by the way Wrenn swipes her fingers under her eyes over and over it looks like she’s crying.
It takes a minute, but when the guy steps out of the shadow to wrap his arms around Wrenn, wind his fingers into the flowery fabric of her dress, I see that it’s Jamon.
This can’t be good.
~*~
Jamon. Wrenn. Crying.
It was about Dad, obviously, but what? Dad’s gonna lose the appeal? Ha, that’s not really breaking news—
“I’m not talking to you.”
I turn and face Jess. “Um…isn’t that what you’re doing right now?”
“I mean it.”
“Okay… What if I apologize for running out on you Friday night?”
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