Page 50 of Blown

He glanced at the corner of the house, waiting for Janice to come back and dreading what might happen if Hélène was still with her for some reason. Hélène was gone, but Jake still felt the threat that the woman represented. If she tried to hurt Rafe in any way, Jake didn’t care how big of a name or how important she was, he would bring her down.

SIXTEEN

The restof the weekend was painful. Having a major artist grace Hawthorne House with her presence should have been an occasion for celebration and excitement. Instead, once Hélène left, the entire family descended into a funk that stuck around until Monday. The family was usually each other’s best friends, but once the picnic lunch was cleaned up, everyone buggered off to their own activities, leaving a sense of disquiet over Hawthorne House.

Rafe and Jake headed back to the hot shop to clean up, but they didn’t speak. The silence alone was enough to throw Rafe so far off his game that he didn’t stick around after they had everything back in order. Without a word, he headed back up to the house to shower, have a tea, and sit on the couch, staring mindlessly at the telly for an hour to try to settle. Even that didn’t feel right.

“Have you seen Jake?” he asked when he headed downstairs close to supper time, looking for someone, anyone, to talk to.

He ran into Nally, who looked like he was still hungover or exhausted. “No,” he said curtly. “And frankly, the more time that passes before I see him the better.”

Rafe sighed and rubbed his hands over his face. He hated tension in the best of times, and it felt like the whole house was flooded with it now. The weird thing was that it didn’t feel like it was Jake’s fault, even though he was sure the rest of his family would think it was.

“Do you have any idea where Jake went?” he asked instead of giving up and going back to his flat to sulk.

Nally frowned at him, like it was strange Rafe didn’t know the whereabouts of his fake fiancé. “He said he was going sightseeing in London,” he said. “He called an Uber hours ago.”

“And he’s not back yet?”

Nally held out his arms and looked around peevishly instead of answering with words, then let his arms flop to his sides before sulking off.

Rafe shook his head and did the only thing he could think to do when he was that upset, he headed down to the hot shop to blow goblets for the next Renaissance Faire.

He didn’t catch Jake whenever he made it home, and he didn’t see him on Sunday either. It was strange and frustrating, like they’d been talking and Jake had been whisked away before he’d finished saying something important. And there wasn’t a single thing Rafe could do about it.

He almost cried with joy when Jake appeared at the hot shop on Monday morning, while Rafe was setting up for his first class.

“Mind if I work while you teach?” Jake asked, mumbling a little and not ever meeting Rafe’s eyes directly.

“Sure,” Rafe said, barely breaking stride as he continued with set-up.

That was as far as their conversation got. Both of them went to work, doing what they needed to do, without speaking. It felt so wrong. Rafe would have given just about anything for Jake to say a single word. He missed the elaborate stories Jake usuallytold, even though he knew most of them were completely made up now. He missed Jake being Jake.

Once his students showed up, there wasn’t time to miss anything. It was chaos as usual right from the start, even though it was one of his adult classes.

“What are we supposed to do with leftover frit?” Stewart, one of the guys in his twenties, asked after portioning out too much frit for the project he was working on.

“Set it aside and I’ll sort it later,” Rafe said, trying not to be curt.

“Is there room for it?” Stewart asked.

Rafe glanced around. It was a particularly full class and Jake was there working, too, which meant space was at a premium. The only table with any clean area was the one where his and Jake’s English countryside work sat.

“Over here will do,” he said, gesturing for Stewart to follow him to the table.

Once he reached it, he cleared some of the English countryside glass over to the side, stacking a few pieces as he did. A few pieces were missing, but he assumed Jake had moved them on Saturday, when they’d cleaned up, or maybe before that. He would ask when he got a chance.

That chance didn’t come anytime soon. His class was working with optic molds for the first time, which meant he had to pay close attention to six different people to make certain they didn’t end up with molten glass on the floor or stuck in the molds. It was lucky for him that Jake was there to lend a hand, but that wasn’t the same as the two of them having a chance to talk.

He wasn’t certain what he would have said even if they were on good terms. His pride was still smarting. But that was the problem. The more time that passed, the more Rafe began to worry that pride in having Hélène Rénard eager to see his hotshop and watch him work had blinkered him to why she had been so quick to come, and then so eager to leave. He hadn’t heard a word from her since Saturday, not even a text to thank him for the visit.

That faint worry turned into a persistent niggle that wouldn’t let him go. Maybe Jake was starting to get to him, but as Monday bled into Tuesday and then Wednesday without a peep from Hélène, Rafe questioned the entire visit more and more. Things didn’t add up. Every one of the questions Hélène had asked as she watched him and Jake work took on a new significance. The more he thought about it, the more worried he was that he’d given an artist with a larger and louder platform than his a tutorial on how to accomplish his and Jake’s unique, potentially groundbreaking technique.

It was exactly what Jake had warned him about, but he’d been too full of himself and wary of Jake’s past lies to listen.

By Thursday, worry was beginning to affect Rafe’s concentration to the point where he couldn’t work. He only had a morning class on Thursdays, so after lunch, it was just him and Jake in the studio. The two of them should have been working on their joint project, but instead, Rafe was blowing more mindless, generic vases for his family to sell and Jake appeared to be drilling himself in basic techniques by constructing half a dozen identical goblets.

So much needed to be said. They still hadn’t worked things out between themselves. Now, with each minute that ticked by, Rafe felt like the chasm between the two of them was widening, and that was the last thing he wanted.

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