Fire and Glass

by Linda Seed

  “Oh, really?” Connor said, glancing at Daniel and then at Lacy, a smirk on his face.

  “What?” Lacy asked him. “I’m sorry, did you say something?”

  When Daniel walked in the door, his eyes went to Lacy immediately. It just seemed to work that way. His attention had a way of going right to her, wherever she was, whatever she was doing. It didn’t matter that she was crouched halfway down behind the counter. He didn’t have to look for her; he could feel her.

  The guy on the makeshift stage was singing “More Than Words” to maybe a dozen people scattered among the café tables. Daniel didn’t know the singer, and he thought that he knew just about everybody in Cambria. Must have been a guy from Morro Bay, or maybe Paso Robles.

  Daniel didn’t want to disturb Lacy when she was trying to do her job, so he found himself a table and sat down to relax and take in the atmosphere.

  It had been a long day. Daniel had been commissioned to do a large piece for a hotel in Los Angeles: a five-foot-tall sculpture that would sit on a table in the center of the lobby. He’d toured the place—all cool, modern minimalism—and he knew how he wanted the sculpture to look. The trouble was, he couldn’t do a piece of that size and weight alone. And the assistant he’d used on the Eden job had just moved up to the Bay Area. Daniel needed someone new.

  He didn’t have time to train someone from the ground up. He’d talked to the guys down in Harmony—they did a lot of glass work down there—in the hopes of borrowing somebody for a short period, but that hadn’t panned out. Now, he was going to have to use a student from the Art and Design program at Fresno State. You never knew what you were going to get with a student. He’d interviewed one today, and after an hour of conversation, Daniel doubted the guy would be able to find his ass with a mirror and a GPS program. That left him back at square one.

  He’d have to deal with that tomorrow, though. Now, the presence of Lacy Jordan—she didn’t have to be with him, she just had to be in the room—was washing over him like a cool, gentle breeze.

  He caught her eye, and he grinned at her with what he knew had to be a pathetic, lovestruck expression.

  The kiss.

  He kept remembering the kiss.

  Lacy gave him a little wave, but she was busy doing her job, so he just sat and watched her. Faded blue jeans, torn at the knees. A fitted white tee with a low neckline that showed a creamy expanse of tanned skin. A white apron tied around her waist. Golden hair piled atop her head in a messy bun. Her usual, effortless grace was nowhere in evidence at the moment; as he watched, she nearly dropped a tray of drinks on a customer’s head before righting herself at the last moment.

  She seemed rattled by something.

  It occurred to him that he might be that something, and the thought wasn’t an unwelcome one.

  He liked the idea that he might have gotten under her skin—though he would have preferred to be on it instead.

  Once all of the customers had been served and she got a brief break, she came to his table and hovered nervously over him. “Hey,” she said. She was holding a round tray, and she partially released her death grip on it to wave at him with the fingers of one hand.

  “Hey,” he said back. “Can you sit for a minute?”

  Lacy looked around to make sure the other customers were all well tended, then slid into the seat across from Daniel. “Glad you could make it,” she said, giving him a shy smile that just slayed him. Then her eyes widened. “Oh. Can I get you a coffee?”

  “Nah, I’m good,” he told her. And he was. Better than good, in fact, now that she was sitting with him.

  The guitarist segued into “And I Love Her,” a classic from the Beatles, and Daniel thought he sounded pretty good, which wasn’t a given; these coffeehouse deals could go either way. The other customers seemed to be enjoying themselves, either talking quietly among themselves or swaying gently to the music.

  The nervous tension between Daniel and Lacy was thick; it was the tension of having had a first kiss, and not knowing where things would go from there. Would they date? Would they kiss again? Would they perhaps, God willing, sleep together? Would it be more than that? And did both of them want the same things?

  Daniel thought about making small talk, things about his day or hers, observations about the weather, or about the annual Scarecrow Festival that had just ended the weekend before.

  Instead, he opted to directly address the elephant in the room.

  “About the kiss,” he said, leaning toward her.

  Lacy looked a little bit startled. “What about it?” she said.

  “I’d like to do it again.” He felt the flutter of butterflies in his stomach, but plowed ahead anyway. “Not right here, obviously. But sometime. Sometime soon. Just so you understand my thought processes here. I really enjoyed the kiss. A lot. And, yeah. I’d like to … explore that further.”

  He wasn’t at all sure that this was wise, but he also wasn’t sure it was still a decision he could make, a thing he could think about and say yes or no to. If she was agreeable, then it seemed he could no more stop himself from kissing her again—as soon as possible—than he could stop himself from breathing or blinking.

  “Daniel—”

  “Just think about it,” he said, interrupting her. He’d interrupted her because, if she was going to say she didn’t want that, too, then he hoped to delay hearing it as long as he could.

  A couple of people strolled in the front door from Main Street and headed up to the counter.

  “I’d better get back,” she said. She gathered up her tray and went behind the counter to make lattes or hot teas or whatever the hell the new arrivals had come for.

  The fact that she hadn’t answered him—that she’d hurried off without any indication of where she stood on the matter—rattled him. Of course she had to work. Of course she did. But had she hurried away just a little more quickly than she otherwise would have? And if so, what did that mean?

  Well, hell. He’d stated his intentions—the information was out there. And now she had her job to do, so he figured he should probably get the hell out of there just in case her answer was no. The ball was in her court, and if she chose not to lob it back over the net, then continuing to sit here would be painfully awkward.

  Not that it wasn’t already.

  He was still pondering what to do when the lights went out and he heard a crash.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Blackouts at Jitters weren’t an unusual occurrence. It was an old building that hadn’t been updated in a while, and sometimes the circuit breakers tripped when somebody in the building—maybe the hair salon on one side of Jitters, or the bar on the other—used too many appliances at the same time.

  The blackout itself wasn’t that big of an issue. The bigger issue was that Daniel had rattled her, and that, combined with the sudden extinguishing of the lights, had caused her to trip while she was carrying a tray full of used water glasses to the dishwasher.

  The crash had been deafening.

  She wasn’t hurt, but now she was in pitch darkness, sprawled on the floor, surrounded by broken glass.

  Shit.

  She heard the swinging door that led to the front of the shop open, and heard someone step into the back room.

  “Connor?”

  “He went to check the breaker.” The voice was Daniel’s. “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, yeah, fine,” she quipped in a light and airy voice. “Just, you know, face-planted on the floor with about ten broken glasses all around me. The usual.”

  “Are you hurt? Are you cut?” His voice was sharp with concern.

  “No, no. But be careful if you’re coming in here. There’s glass everywhere.”

  “Okay. Don’t move.”

  She heard him rustling about, coming toward her in the darkness. Then she felt a hand on her back as he felt around to figure out where she was.

  “I’ve got you,” he said. He found her hand, took it, and helped her up.

&
nbsp; “Let’s just … over here.” His hand in hers, he guided her away from the broken shards and toward the door leading back to the front of the shop.

  They went back through the swinging door and into the area behind the counter, where the espresso machines and the cash register stood silently in the darkness.

  “Is everybody all right?” Lacy called out into the blackness. She received answers in the affirmative.

  The guitarist, apparently realizing that he didn’t need electricity, resumed playing without the benefit of the sound system. Keeping with the Beatles theme he’d started earlier, he began a slow, lilting rendition of “My Love.”

  Maybe it was the darkness. Maybe it was the music, and the guitar player’s sensuous voice. Or the fact that Daniel had come to rescue her. Maybe it was because he was still holding her hand, warm and safe in his. Or, maybe it was because she’d spent the last couple of days wanting him so badly it felt like a high fever.

  Whatever it was, she couldn’t seem to help herself. She pressed her body to his, reached up to put her hands in his hair, and drew him to her. She touched her lips to his, gently at first, and then devoured him with a hunger that surprised even her.

  At the first touch, she felt his surprised hesitation. And then, she felt him let go of all resistance and give everything back to her: the desire, the need.

  Lacy had kissed a lot of people. A lot of boys, and then men. But never had her body responded like this, with this kind of intensity, this kind of fire. She seemed to mold herself to him, every inch of her, as everything else ceased to matter. The taste of his lips, of his tongue, were like a sweet promise; the feeling was like lightning in her blood.

  Neither of them noticed when the lights came back on.

  By the time they did, by the time Lacy roused herself to conscious thought and opened her eyes to see the glow of the overhead lights, Daniel was still adhered to her as though they had somehow fused into one person. And everyone in the coffeehouse was staring directly at them.

  Connor, who had switched the breaker back on, came into the room through the back, having picked his way through the broken glass. “What the hell happened back th—” He froze in midword as he emerged to see Lacy and Daniel looking as though they might consummate their lust next to the coffee filters and the grinding machine.

  Lacy, finally conscious enough to fully get the situation, gasped slightly and shoved Daniel away with both hands. He was a little slower than she was to rouse himself, but when he did, he cleared his throat and ran his hands through his hair in an effort to regain his composure.

  “Oh. Okay. Ah … wow,” he said, to no one in particular.

  After a few more moments of silence, the guitarist resumed playing, and the customers went back to talking among themselves, a few tittering and side-eyeing Daniel and Lacy, who were still behind the counter looking embarrassed as hell.

  “I … ah … I should probably go,” Daniel said.

  “Yeah. You probably should,” Connor said bitterly.

  “And so I went into the back room to clean up the broken glass. I could barely look at Connor. It was mortifying,” Lacy concluded. She was in her workout clothes, breathing hard, hiking briskly at Fiscalini Ranch in the morning fog. Cassie had called her on her cell phone, and Lacy figured they would talk for as long as the spotty cell service held out.

  The thing about this historic small town was that the actual infrastructure—like the cell phone service and the electrical grid—was sluggish, while the gossip network functioned like a Swiss watch. By the time Lacy had awakened at seven a.m., her family had heard all about the incident at Jitters, and they were calling her, one by one, to get the full scoop.

  “Sounds like the guitarist wasn’t the only entertainment,” Cassie observed wryly.

  “Yeah, well.” Lacy powered past an older couple walking a poodle on a leash, and headed up into the trees of the Forest Loop Trail. The fog laid a gentle layer of gauze over the woodsy landscape, and the cool, crisp air felt good on Lacy’s skin. She could hear the crashing waves off the bluffs to her left. Above, a bird cawed in the branch of a tree.

  “So, how was the kiss? Dish!” Cassie insisted.

  How could she describe the kiss? How could a person describe feeling as though their body had quite pleasurably been turned inside out and then set right again? And did she even want to tell that to Cassie? It was one thing to tell the truth to her friends about her raging, rampaging lust and the confusion that raised in her. But it was quite another to say such things to her little sister. Also, Lacy knew that whatever she told Cassie would soon get to her mother. And nobody wanted their mother to know about their raging lust.

  So, she downplayed it.

  “It was … fine,” she said.

  “That’s not what I heard,” Cassie said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t hear ‘fine.’ I heard, ‘just inches from dropping to the floor and going for it right there in Jitters.’ That’s what I heard.”

  The image that raised—of Lacy and Daniel on the floor, going for it—made Lacy temporarily lose her train of thought. But then, with considerable effort, she rallied.

  “Well, that’s just … You know how things get twisted. People exaggerate.”

  “So, it wasn’t so hot you were about to burst into flames?” Cassie pressed her.

  Just then, Cassie’s voice started to break up, and the call got dropped. Lacy sighed in relief. Saved by the poor cell coverage. She tucked the phone into the pocket of her warm-up jacket and focused on physical fitness.

  And the image of herself and Daniel on the floor, naked.

  Jesus, Lacy. Stop it.

  When she passed again into an area where the cell service worked, her phone chirped with an incoming call. She checked it: Jess. Lacy put the phone back into her pocket and ignored the call.

  While Lacy was walking off her sexual tension, Daniel was coping another way. He was throwing his energy into the glass.

  All morning he’d been working on a piece for the Porter Gallery, a tall sculpture with streaks of red and orange, with a shape that mimicked flames licking toward the sky. It was the biggest thing Daniel could comfortably handle without an assistant, since he was still searching for one.

  The Eden piece had invoked water; this one was fire. And both of them had made him think of Lacy.

  God, Lacy. He had to get her out of his head, and yet a part of him wanted her to just live there forever. He turned the glass inside the furnace and thought of heat, of passion.

  The problem with him and Lacy was that she threw off his equilibrium. He’d more or less had his life settled. He had his house, his work, his friends. He’d date somebody every now and then, and that was fun. But he had the distinct feeling that if he went with this Lacy thing—if he got involved with her and then just let it go wherever it was going to go—then his life would be altered in ways that were both frightening and unpredictable. They wouldn’t just go out a few times, maybe sleep together a few times, and then part on good terms.

  Good or bad, positive or negative, it was going to be more than that. Daniel wasn’t sure how he felt about that prospect.

  Increasingly, though, he was starting to feel as though he didn’t have much choice in the matter. Walking away from this thing with Lacy after last night’s kiss would require superhuman levels of self-control that he knew he just couldn’t muster.

  The whole thing was like jumping out of an airplane with your eyes closed, without knowing for sure whether you were even wearing a parachute.

  But, hell, he guessed he was going to have to jump, because life inside the airplane no longer seemed sustainable.

  Daniel turned the rod, shaped the glass, added color, fired it again, shaped it again.

  And then blew the transfer and sent the whole thing crashing to the concrete floor.

  “Fuck,” he said, looking down at the shattered and misshapen remains of his work. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”


  One thing about infatuation: It was playing hell with his career.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “So, I heard you made out with Daniel last night, but it wasn’t that great,” Kate said. She was standing across the counter from Lacy at Jitters, waiting for her coffee order.

  “Wait, what? Where did you hear that?” Lacy froze in the middle of steaming a pitcher of low-fat milk.

  “Which part? The making out part, or the part about how it wasn’t that great?”

  “The part about how it wasn’t that great.” Lacy didn’t have to ask how Kate had heard about the making out, since she’d done it in front of about twenty people, many of whom were locals who were regular contributors to the gossip mill. That part just went without saying.

  “Oh. Whitney told me. She came into the shop this morning for the new John Sandford release, and we got to chatting.”

  Lacy set down the pitcher and planted one fist on her cocked hip. “Whitney told you? How does Whitney even know?”

  “Apparently Cassie called her.”

  “Ah.” Lacy sighed, then shook her head slightly to refocus on her work. She went back to making Kate’s drink.

  “So, was she right? It wasn’t very good? Because that would surprise me. Partly because Daniel seems like he’d be a great kisser, and partly because the eyewitnesses are fairly unanimous that there was enough heat between you two to melt the ceiling tiles.” Kate grinned gleefully at Lacy.

  “The eyewitnesses,” Lacy repeated.

  “Well, yeah. The bookstore was all abuzz.”

  Lacy didn’t know how to feel about being the object of the Swept Away buzz, but it wasn’t as though she had any say in the matter. The thing to do, she supposed, was to keep her head down and wait for someone else to do something more buzzworthy.

  “Well … it was,” Lacy said. She slid the coffee in its paper cup across the counter to Kate.

  “Wait, wait, wait.” Kate waved a hand in front of her face. “What was? Cassie was right? It was awful? Or it was good, or …?”