she turned the pipe deftly so that the blob became a uniform sphere, a perfect globe of yellow jelly. Lock yanked at his tie—it was sweltering, nearly unbearable in here. How did Claire stand it? He noticed she was sweating; her tank top was damp and clung to her. She hadn’t seen him yet, and he wasn’t sure how to announce his presence without scaring the bejeezus out of her. He was fascinated, too, by her movements, by the way she held the pipe, by the way she manipulated the hot glass. The glass was like a living thing on the end of the pipe, with a mind of its own; it wanted to go one way, Claire coaxed it another. She held the pipe to her mouth and blew, and the blob expanded like a balloon. She made it look effortless. She twisted the pipe some more; she lay the balloon against a metal table and rolled it and shaped it and opened the end with a pair of tweezers. Then she turned back toward the furnace. Lock tried to duck out of sight, but he wasn’t fast enough. He didn’t want to scare her, true, but he also didn’t want to stop watching her. She saw him then—her mouth opened, and she jerked the pipe. The vessel on the end of the pipe jerked also and immediately became lopsided. Claire dumped the pipe, vessel-end down, into a bucket of water, causing a lot of steam and hiss. At the same time, Lock’s spirits were dampened. He had made a mistake in disturbing her; he had ruined her work.
He wanted to leave, hastily, but he was here now and she knew it, so he took a few hesitant steps forward.
She closed the furnace door and immediately the room dimmed and grew cooler. She pushed her goggles to the top of her head and blinked rapidly, as if she thought she might be hallucinating.
It’s me, he thought. Surprise! Stopping by had backfired. The five days of silence had been a message. She was finished with him.
But then she smiled. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Can-not believe it.”
“I’m here,” he said. “I dropped off those letters.”
“Letters?” she said.
“For the underwriting.”
“Fuck the underwriting,” she said. She looked around the shop. “This place is safe. The only person who ever comes in here is me.”
“Well, then,” Lock said, moving toward her and putting his arms around her waist, “I can tell you the truth. I came for you.”
They kissed. She tasted like metal and sweat; her lips and the skin on her face were very hot, as if she had a fever. It was different, but not unpleasant. When they both went to hell and they kissed, this was what it would be like.
“I’m revolting,” she said.
“You? Never.”
“My hair?” she said. “And God, I stink.”
Her hair was matted against her forehead and there were marks on her face where her goggles had clamped against her skin. She smelled sour and musky. And yet she had never been more beautiful. In fact, Lock would have been hard-pressed to remember a time he had ever found any woman more beautiful than Claire was right now, working, sweating, smiling in her hot shop. She was a queen.
“I’m sorry about the other day,” he said. “About giving you those numbers. I just thought—”
She put her hand over his mouth. “Forget it. I was too sensitive. I shouldn’t have stormed off.”
“And then you didn’t call . . .”
“You didn’t call me.”
“I didn’t feel like I could call you,” he said. “I did send an e-mail. Two, in fact.”
She didn’t respond. He wasn’t sure if this meant she had read them or not, but it didn’t matter. What the five days of silence had shown him was that he was in love with her. He might have been in love with her for a while, but he had never felt compelled to say it. To say it would be the ultimate in not safe.
“I’m in love with you,” he said.
Her eyes were wet—or it was the perspiration, or a trick of his vision in this heat. But no, he was right: she was crying.
“You must be,” she said. “You came.”
He squeezed her as hard as he could, fearing she would melt in his arms like butter, she would slip away, disappear. The molten glass on the end of her pipe, that hot, pulsing, living thing, that organ she controlled and expanded with only her breath—that was his heart.
They