Chapter Twenty-Three #2
With Gabe’s touch grounding her, she steadied herself and deepened it. He asked again if she was all right, and she said yes. Surprisingly, it was the truth.
“So, this is where we get our ‘gather,’ the blob of glass to work with. Grab that blowpipe—don’t worry, it’s cold—and bring it here.”
The pipe was surprisingly heavy. Iris gripped it like a protective spear.
“We’ll do it together.” He clasped his hand on the blowpipe, rendering it light as a broomstick.
“It burns too bright to see the walls or depth in there, you can’t even see the liquid glass until your pipe disappears into it.
” Gabe stood in front, closest to the oven mouth, apparently inured to the intense radiant heat, and they dipped the blowpipe in together.
He twirled the pipe in her hands, and they pulled it out; a perfect gather of red-hot glass clung to the end like an incandescent light bulb.
They backed up while Gabe kept the pipe spinning in their hands, and he directed her to place it atop a water trough.
Iris was relieved to set it down. “Whoa, that little glob of glass is heavy!”
Gabe quickly poured a pail of water over the pipe, releasing great plumes of steam with a sizzling hiss. “Keep spinning!”
The gather had instantly begun to droop. Gabe came to the rescue from behind, sliding his arms around her and his hands over hers to resume twisting the pipe until the bulbous weight of the glass recentered.
“Don’t your hands get tired?” she asked.
“The nerves in my fingertips go dead numb. That’s why I have to grab you so tight.” He clapped a hand on her butt, making her laugh. “Okay, let’s take it to the gaffer’s bench.”
He led her over to a rudimentary wooden seat where she could rest the blowpipe on the bench’s metal arms and simply roll it back and forth with her palm to keep it spinning and level. He sat beside her, and the pipe closed them in like the safety bar on a carnival ride.
The blackened tools laid out beside them looked brutal and medieval: a giant pair of tweezers, long and sharp; different types of shears, one with straight blades, the other’s bent and crisscrossed over each other like broken legs; a flat wooden paddle, torched coal black.
The only nonthreatening tools were a block of hard beeswax and a folded newspaper both burnt and wet, which imparted a honey-smoked sweetness to the air.
“These are not what I expected for such a fragile material as glass,” Iris said.
“Cold glass is fragile. Hot glass is tough. And we use rough tools gently.” He picked up the giant tweezers, holding them in his fist pointing down like daggers. “Like, these are called jacks. My old teacher used to say, ‘Squeeze your jacks like you’re squeezing the foot of a sleeping baby.’?”
Iris smiled at the thought.
Gabe instructed her how to use each of the tools, letting her play, poking and prodding the gather to make different shapes while he used the wooden paddle to shield her from the glass’s radiant heat.
Every time the orange glow dimmed and the glass grew transparent, it was time to reheat it in the glory hole, a smaller furnace.
Iris liked that he directed her without taking anything out of her hands, even if on occasion she wanted him to.
Letting her struggle with it, directing without taking over, let her overcome her initial aversion and anxiety.
In contrast, she remembered when Ben taught her to drive stick.
Even just practicing in a parking lot, he grabbed the gear shift every other second, making Iris feel like an incompetent child.
She begged Gabe to give her a proper demo, and at last he obliged.
Iris was in awe as he effortlessly and intuitively kept the heavy pipe level and perpetually rotating, navigating the cluttered space around him with ease and grace, and always protected the glass.
When he placed his lips on the blowpipe, Iris expected him to give a mighty blow, but instead he gave a gentle one, injecting a bubble of air into the glass that swelled like a balloon.
In a move that took her breath away, he stood and spun the pipe around his hand like a bō staff, the centrifugal force drawing out the vessel’s shape.
In no time, he had grown the piece, attached it upside down to a “punty,” a new pipe, narrowed the neck, and smoothed the edges until a voluptuous vase had taken form.
“This is the moment of truth, I need you.” He brought it to where she sat on the gaffer’s bench and instructed her to roll the punty while he put on two giant dirty oven mitts and crouched beside the spinning vase.
The vase was large and radiated more heat than the initial gather had.
“Now rap the punty against this metal bar, hard .”
“ Eeek! I can’t, I’m scared I’ll break it!”
“It always breaks, it’s just gotta break right. Trust me. Now!”
She banged the punty and the vase snapped off cleanly at the base, landing safely in Gabe’s waiting mitts.
They cheered, exhilarated, and Gabe hustled it into the annealer. When he returned, Iris jumped to hug him and he spun her around. She landed on the ground and raised her arm to high-five him, but Gabe caught her hand.
“Whoa,” he said, turning her arm over. The skin on the underside of her forearm was bright pink. “You hung in there like a pro! But I didn’t mean for you to take this much heat. I’m sorry. Does it hurt?”
“Not really. It’s fine, it was fun!” She hadn’t noticed it until he said something. “I have a high pain threshold, I guess.”
Gabe held her hand and bowed to softly kiss it.
Then he turned it over to kiss the center of her palm, her inner wrist—where she dabbed her perfume, she noted—and he proceeded to kiss a trail up her slightly swollen, flushed skin.
By the time his lips reached her inner elbow, all pain had turned to pleasure.
As he nuzzled between her bicep and her breast, all heat had turned to shiver.
He surprised her when he flicked his tongue in the crevice of her underarm. Her body caved away from him with a giggle, embarrassed to have liked it.
“Where are you going?” He pulled her back toward him.
“Gross.” She smiled.
“Nothing about you is gross.” He looked at her, eyelids heavy.
“I meant you .”
“Oh, I can be disgusting.” In one motion, Gabe picked her up and tossed her over his shoulder as if she weighed nothing. He craned his neck to take a bite of her butt cheek as she laughed, doubled over him.
He set her down before the spectators’ couch and lifted her dress off over her head.
As he undid her bra, Iris reached her arms around his neck and kissed him, pressing her chest into his, experiencing the softness of her body as it yielded to the firmness of his.
He broke from their embrace only to pull his T-shirt over the back of his head with one motion, before he caught her waist again and pulled her close enough to feel his yearning.
But it wasn’t his own satisfaction he saw to.
Gabe sat and brought her onto his lap, not facing him, but with her back to his chest. He gently pushed her hair off her nape and kissed the back of her neck, her earlobes, her shoulders.
From this angle, she could barely kiss him back.
She could only tilt her head back and expose her most vulnerable parts to him, and to pleasure.
The furnaces now seemed no more threatening than a cozy, crackling fireplace, and she closed her eyes, enjoying having him explore her body.
Gabe slipped his hand down the front of her underwear and cupped her as gently and assuredly as he had the spinning glass bulb, spreading and closing his fingers over her without ever pushing inside. It only made her want him more.
He made her feel beautiful, irresistible, sexy.
He made her feel safe, present, and alive.
He made her feel.
And she wanted to feel everything.
Iris turned on his lap to face him, straddling him as the heat from the furnace warmed her bare back.
She ran her hands down his muscled torso to where his skin rippled lightly over his stomach, the soft hair trailing his lower abs to where his dress slacks strained.
He kissed her breasts with greater ardor, his bites leaving her flesh pink, but Gabe knew how to use sharp tools gently.
Soon they could wait no longer. Gabe swept her onto her back, slipping her panties down her legs and quickly hopping to remove his own while Iris lay back and watched.
He crawled over her, his naked, tattooed body hovering tantalizing over her, so that with one intake of breath, Iris could touch her nipples to his skin and send shivers down his body, and with one thrust of his hips, he could set hers on fire.
But they were done teasing each other. They closed all space between them, melting into one another until every edge was smoothed, their two bodies a mirrored reflection of shared passion and desire.
When they came together, the heat they generated was so bright that it obliterated any walls between them, and there was nowhere they didn’t meet.