Page 41 of Pieces of Ash
I need to start thinking about getting my own fucking place, so I don’t have to worry about shit like this.
“An adult,” I scoff, sitting on a paint-splattered stool at my workbench and staring at the little figurine I’d been firing before Jock knocked on the barn door. I look at it objectively for a second before releasing the clamp and letting the figurine fall from the tiny metal platform to the wooden table, where the cooled glass splinters.
I’m not good at the small stuff yet. Not nearly as good as my dad anyway.
My father, Luc Ducharmes, born in France and apprenticed to Baccarat straight out of secondary school, was a master glassblower. After ten years of working with the finest crystal in the world, his skills earned him a work visa to the United States, crafting a special collection for Simon Pearce over in Quechee, Vermont, where he met my mom.
And for a while? We were happy there—Dad, Mom, me, and my little sister, Noelle. Until we weren’t. Until my mom wasn’t. Until she left for greener pastures and destroyed our little family.
So, yeah. That was fun.
Bruno looks up at me and whines. How the hell he knows the difference between glass that breaks by accident and glass I break on purpose, I’ll never know.
I slide off the stool and stare down at him.
“Sorry, boy.”
His deep brown, sorrowful eyes look up at me for a thoughtful moment before he turns to the barn door and barks once before looking back at me.
You’re so beautiful, you sweet, sweet girl.Her feminine voice echoes in my head like crystal wind chimes on a breezy day, and it makes me scowl.
“If anyone should have been offended,” I tell my dog, “it wasyou. How could she mistake such a masculine specimen of hunting perfection for agirl?”
Bruno vocalizes softly, a cross between a complaint and a question, and I realize I said one of his favorite words,hunt.
“Nah, buddy. Not today,” I say, gesturing to his bed in the corner of the barn. “Go lie down. I’ll take you for a…” If I saywalk, he’ll go crazy, so I skip the word and finish with, “…in a little bit.”
Bruno lumbers over to his bed and lies down with a soft huff, those all-seeing hound eyes watching me as he settles himself in a tight circle.
I’ve had Bruno for a year, since I left Washington, DC, on the worst day of my life and drove up here to Vermont to start over. I stopped in Middlebury to get some gas and a sandwich when I saw a notice on the service station bulletin board about a one-day pet adoption event two streets over.
His owner had been shot in a hunting accident, leaving three-year-old redbone coonhound Bruno without a home. I looked at him, he looked at me, and I guess you could say we chose each other right then and there. Two sorry bastards who’d been dealt unlucky hands. Not like our luck could get any worse together.
I adopted him on the spot, loaded him in the passenger seat of my overpacked car, and kept driving north on Route 7 until I reached Shelburne.
With my dad gone and my mom remarried to a guy in Florida, the only person I had to return to was my sister, Noelle, who is four years younger than me and a junior at Saint Michael’s College up near Burlington. It’s been good to live closer to her this past year—to see her on any random weekend she feels like driving down and visiting.
God knows I would do anything for that kid.
And woe to the prick who makes her cry because he will be dealt with swiftly and mercilessly.
I put on my left glove and sweep the broken pieces of glass on my workbench into a metal collection bin filled with otherjagged pieces. Then I sit down on the stool again, staring out the dusty window at the green meadow behind the barn.
I like Jock Souris. I truly do.
I grew up in Vermont, where pretty much anything goes, so renting a house from a gay man and his partner is a nonissue for me. Besides, at one point in each of our lives, both Jock and I worked for Uncle Sam, so we have that in common. But he told me very little about the chick he dumped on my doorstep. Just that she’s a “friend of the family” and “needs a place to stay” for a while.
Now, there is the fact that I’m living here rent free for as long as she stays. That should make me happy, right? Wrong. I amnothappy about this new development. I have no interest in sharing the house I’ve grown to love with some girl I don’t know.
I picture her face—her beautiful fucking face—and the way she stared at me with those wide eyes and her lips slightly parted. Those lips. Angelina Jolie lips. Scarlett Johansson lips. Liv fucking Tyler from the “Crazy” video lips. Except this chick doesn’t look like Liv. She’s got blonde hair and a perfect pout like Alicia Silverstone. I remember the beginning of that video when our girl, Alicia, climbs out a bathroom window in her Catholic school uniform, her skirt riding up to show her black lace panties…makes me feel dirty as fuck, but I feel my cock twitch when I imagine the waif upstairs in nothing but black lace panties.
Fuck my life.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Because, yeah, I was yelling at Jock, but she was standing behind him, and I didn’t miss the tight lines of her teenage body under a pair of new jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. Her rounded tits strained just a little against the fabric of her top. Not enough to be dirty. Just enough to hate her. Because no guy alive—least of all me—has a right to want someone like her. Orsure, we canwanther, but we’ll never have her. Not in a million years.
She looked to be about Noelle’s age—somewhere between eighteen and twenty, and ridiculously young to suddenly arrive alone in the middle of nowhere, put up in an old farmhouse by a couple of aging queens.
