Page 7 of Blown

“What the fuck are you doing in England, Jake? Didn’t you tell me you had a gallery opening in New York next week? Does this have something to do with that?”

Jake breathed carefully, steeling himself before saying, “I don’t have a gallery opening in New York. I don’t have a gallery opening anywhere. I…it was…I might not have been entirely honest about that.”

A long silence followed. Jake could practically feel Beth vibrating with fury all the way across the ocean.

“Jake, we talked about this,” she said, her words clipped and sharp. “The lies have got to stop. Mom and Dad are already done with you because of the lies.”

“Mom and Dad are done with me because I’m gay,” he said. That definitely wasn’t a lie.

Beth huffed. He could practically see her pressing her fingertips to her forehead. “Okay, whatever, I know. But you have to stop doing this. You’ve ruined your life by lying to people.”

“I can’t help it,” Jake said quietly.

“You need to help it,” Beth snapped. “You’ve got problems, Jake. Lying about them and running away to England isn’t going to solve them. Get your ass back here and deal with the mess you’ve made of your career and your life.”

“I can’t,” Jake said, sinking into an uncomfortable hunch. “At least, I can’t right now. You know I’ve always wanted to live in England.”

“Livein England?” Beth’s voice rose again. “How long are you planning to stay there? Where are you staying? You don’t have any money, Jake, and you burned all the bridges you had in the art world over here. What the fuck are you doing inEngland?” she demanded, circling back to her original question.

“I don’t know,” Jake said as loud as he dared. He didn’t know how solid the walls of Hawthorne House were yet. “I don’t knowwhat I’m doing, Beth. I just know that something is calling me to be here. Yes, I’ve burned bridges over there, but I want to make new ones over here. I want to start over, start a new life, a better life.”

“You need therapy, Jake,” Beth sighed.

“I know, I?—”

Before he could agree with his sister or say he fully intended to get help, she hung up on him.

Jake pulled his phone away from his ear and stared at it. The disconnect had an air of finality to it. He was left with the sinking feeling that he would never hear from his sister again.

There wasn’t any point calling her back and trying to explain that he knew he had a problem, knew he needed professional help for it, but didn’t know how to find that help. There was no point in saying that the best idea he’d come up with, even though it wasn’t a good one, was to appeal to the one person who he might be able to call a friend, who he hadn’t disappointed, to talk him into a risky marriage.

No. There was no point at all. He couldn’t make his sister see his reasons any more than he could stop himself from telling people whatever he thought they wanted to hear to get them to like him.

The lies always caught up with him, though. But maybe with Rafe he could fix things and start over. Maybe this time things would be different.

THREE

The morning had not gonethe way Rafe had thought it would. He hadn’t known what to expect from Jake, but it wasn’t to find him as handsome and perky as he’d always been. He’d thought maybe Jake would be apologetic and ready to make amends so that he could get what he wanted, or that he’d be arrogant and try to overshadow him in front of his family.

None of that had happened. Jake was exactly the same as he’d always been. He was magnetic and luminescent. His family had liked him, Rafe could tell. It was clear they all suspected there had been a romance in Corning that he’d failed to mention to them. That was probably because he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off Jake.

“Stupid,” he muttered to himself as he gathered a bit of glass from the furnace on his blowpipe. He wasn’t the sort to be suckered by charm. Not usually, at least. He was usually the one who exuded charm and drew people to him.

Spinning the blowpipe to keep the liquid glass in place, he moved from the furnace to the stainless steel marvering table nearby to roll the bit into shape. He’d pulled some cane whenhe’d first come down to the hot shop, since nothing soothed his anxiety like pulling cane, and as soon as the molten glass was how he wanted it, he carefully rolled it over the cane.

Are you sure you’re not just jealous, the annoying voice in the back of his mind asked.

Rafe frowned in an attempt to chase it away and concentrated on his glass. He wasn’t entirely certain what he was making. He wasn’t as concerned with the finished product as he was with the heat and the distraction of making something.

As long as he could remember, the sharp, acrid scents of a hot shop and its intense heat had excited him. He was a Hawthorne, so of course he had been exposed to every kind of art at an early age. He’d tried painting and ceramics, he’d sculpted in several mediums and even done some photography. But nothing sang to him like the high-stakes, risky art form that was glassblowing.

As soon as his piece was where he wanted it, he blew into the pipe to start shaping the striped blob at its end. Without an assistant to help with the process he couldn’t make anything particularly large or elaborate, but he could form a basic vase.

Without thinking, his eyes flashed to the hot shop’s door. Since returning to England, he’d had various students and people just learning glassblowing around to help him make a few more ambitious pieces. But it was difficult to do something stellar without a partner who was as much of an expert as he was. Now that Jake was here….

He grunted at the direction his mind had been going and pulled his forming creation aside to get a look at it, then took it back to the furnace to add more heat. He could make a vase on his own. He didn’t need Jake’s or anyone else’s help for that.

When the emerging vase was hot enough to work with again, Rafe pulled it out of the furnace then shifted to one of the handful of workbenches scattered around his hot shop and sat.He had his tools at the ready, and with as much focus as he could muster while his head was filled with tangled, unhelpful thoughts, he picked up a pair of jacks and began to shape it.

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