“The garbage kind?”
She nodded again, more enthusiastically this time, her grin definitely getting the better of her now.
Theo stared at her. After a moment, he rolled his jaw and shook his head. “You’re a horrible person. You don’t deserve my homemade ice cream. I’m going to need you to give it back.”
“You—what?”
Without warning, he lunged forward and grabbed her head with both hands, pressing his mouth to hers and forcing his tongue inside, swiping it around and licking with wild abandon.
Audrey let out a muffled shriek and tried to struggle away. “Ew, no, Theo!” she screeched when she finally pushed him off of her, but he only chased her mouth with his again. “Theo!Stop, that’s gross!”
“I don’t care!Give it back!”
“NO!”
“That took me two days to make! You don’t deserve it! GIVE IT BACK TO ME!”
She tried to run, but he caught her easily and swept her up into his arms, squeezing her tight and tickling her on all her most intense spots while she squeaked and struggled.
“I’m sorry, it’s delicious, I didn’t mean it!” she cried through bouts of laughter. “I lied, it’s the best thing I ever tasted!”
“You’re awful!” He picked her up, still kicking, and pressed his nose against her neck, burying his face in the crook of her shoulderwhile he feverishly peppered her skin with kisses, punctuating his sentiments with tiny, aggressive nips of his teeth, biting just hard enough to leave marks behind. “But I’m going tomakeyou appreciate it!”
In the end, he won.
He also finally showed her how he worked.
Turned out that bending neon glass took an enormous amount of skill and dexterity, and Theo was absolutely incredible with his hands, even with his lingering tremor.
And he was equally incredible with his mouth.
When he first described the process, he’d left out the fact that he had to blow into the glass tube at the same time as bending it over an open flame, puffing air through a rubber straw–like contraption into the glass to keep it hollow while he bent the exact angles corresponding with the pattern he’d made. The work required deep concentration, extreme precision, and a fair amount of speed. And if he ever made a critical error, he’d have to scrap the entire glass piece and start over.
“I make more mistakes now than I did before the accident,” Theo explained. She was perched on one of his worktables, watching him with fascination. The process was slow but mesmerizing. “My hand shakes or spasms at odd moments, and it fucks up the curves I’m working on half the time. So it takes me a lot longer to complete things now. I don’t know how that’s going to play into my art—or my business—and I’ll be lucky to get any piece finished at this rate.”
He sighed and shook his head. “The first time I tried a few months ago, I wasn’t ready yet, and I could barely grip the tube at all. I couldn’t doanything. It was a nightmare. I got so frustrated, I smashed the Lightm4st3r sculpture I’d been working on before my dad died. And then I just…left it there for months, all the glass shards strewn about the floor. It’s why I didn’t want you comingdown here when you stayed over that first time. I wasn’t kidding about it being a mess.” He eyed his work in progress. It sat covered in a sheet in the corner, shrouded in mystery. “I’m still not sure I can pull off this piece in time for the charity auction. It’s…not good right now.”
Audrey frowned. He was doing so much better, but it must have been bad for him to destroy the sculpture completely. “Is there anything I can do to help? Can I hold something steady for you, or…?”
Theo tilted his head at her. “That’s a good question. Wanna try it out? See what it’s like?”
She grinned and launched herself off of the table and straight into his arms. He smiled softly as he tucked her into his chest and handed her a scrap piece of glass while he reset everything.
“Okay. I’m going to work the air tube, and you’re going to try to bend a curve into the glass, just like the one on that pattern over there.” He covered her hands with his, demonstrating how she would heat the glass over the flame, working it carefully back and forth. “You want to bend it when it’s pliable enough not to snap or shatter, but not when it’s so hot that it just melts in your hands. You want to stress it enough to bend, but not break. That’s where it transforms.”
“How am I going to know where that point is?”
He placed the air tube in the side of his mouth and smirked crookedly at her, one parenthetical dimple appearing in his cheek. “You’ve gottafeelit. That’s where the artistry comes in.” He huffed in amusement. “Well, one of the places, anyway. Artistry andskill.” He fired up the gas again and relit it before trailing his fingers gently along her hands. “All right, sweetheart. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
It was so much harder than he made it look.
Even though Theo’s hands guided her, even though she pulled the glass from the fire when he tapped her arm, even though she did her best to twist and bend the tube against the pattern laid out on thenearby table, her curve was still horribly misshapen. After the sixth attempt, Theo took a look at her handiwork, raised an eyebrow, and tried—and failed—to suppress a grin.
“Ahhh,” he finally hummed. “Very kinky.”
“Hey! I tried!” She punched him in the shoulder for the dig, which only made his grin widen. The glass did, in fact, have several kinks in it. But she had a greater appreciation for the smooth beauty he wrought from nothing now, and she wiped the sweat away from her brow while glaring up at him in mock indignation.
“I know,” he purred. “And I liked it.”
