The Glass House (21 page)

Helen showed me how to work the furnace, how to empty the glass I’d brought inside it.

“Do you know what you want to do with this when it’s melted down, Sasha?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “It’ll come to me. I just want it to be unbroken.”

Helen nodded.

“If you like, I’ll show you how to use the blowing pipe when it’s ready. Until then I’ll be in the studio next door if you need me.”

Thomas sat down on the table behind me, swinging his legs and watching.

“It’s going to take a while to heat up and melt,” I said, standing in front of him.

Immediately his arms came around me, pulling me closer. His hands stroked down my back, making me arch into him, into the space between his legs.

Fire burned through me at the contact.

I’d learned a lot about fire recently.

With fire, broken glass could be heated and remade into something whole. Something still pure despite its initial shattered state.

Love was the fire that burned inside me, and like truth, it burned brighter and hotter than anything. And while some fractures would always remain, they could become places the light shone out through instead of spaces to let the darkness in.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “I mean, really?”

So focused and serious, his eyes held mine, seeing me like no one else. I knew he meant was I okay after seeing Trent, after being honest with Mum, after all the dark secrets inside me had been exposed to the light.

“He won’t come back,” I said. And even if he did, I knew the world wouldn’t shatter. What I hadn’t wanted to face wasn’t him, not really. It was me. “I want to be strong enough to deal with it even if he does.”

I gripped Thomas’s hand and he gripped back.

And Mum? Well, I’d just have to wait and see. Like Thomas’s parents, I think she was blind to the effects her actions had. I vowed never to be blind like that.

“So what are you doing with all the glass?” Thomas asked with a smile, brushing a lock of my hair back behind my ear. “I’m glad we got rid of it, by the way. If your bed collapsed one day, it wouldn’t have been pretty,” he added.

“I’m saying thank you.”

“To who?” He smiled, puzzled.

“To you.”

I didn’t know what I would sculpt, exactly. Perhaps I would reform the glass into two figures embracing. Perhaps they would be us. But whatever I sculpted, it was for Thomas, for what he had done for my heart, for the fire he’d started when he’d trusted me with his own.

“I really want to kiss you,” he said.

I looked around. The studio was open, people wandering around the galleries. No one was paying attention to us.

“So kiss me,” I whispered, leaning in and brushing my nose against his.

And without saying another word, we kissed at the back of the workshop as though that was all that mattered.

And it was.

And is.

Because we are not brittle like glass, but more like the light that shines through it, bright and unending, without hierarchy or reason.

We are not sculptures, still and unyielding—we are alive and unfinished.

We are in love.

And it is enough.

S
UKI
F
LEET
grew up on a boat and as a small child spent a lot of time travelling at sea with her family. She has always wanted to be a writer. As a kid she told ghost stories to scare people, but stories about romance were the ones that inspired her to sit down and write. She doesn’t think she’ll ever stop writing them.

Her novel
This is Not a Love Story
won Best Gay Debut in the 2014 Rainbow Awards and was a Finalist for LGBT Children’s/Young Adult at the 2015 Lambda Literary Awards.

http://sukifleet.tumblr.com/

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7919609.Suki_Fleet

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This Is Not a Love Story

A Love Story Universe Novel

By Suki Fleet

When fifteen-year-old Romeo’s mother leaves one day and doesn’t return, he finds himself homeless and trying to survive on the streets. Mute and terrified, his silence makes him vulnerable, and one night he is beaten by a gang of other kids, only to be rescued by a boy who pledges to take care of him.

Julian is barely two years older than Romeo. A runaway from an abusive home, he has had to make some difficult choices and sells himself on the street to survive. Taking care of Romeo changes him, gives him a purpose in life, gives him hope, and he tries to be strong and keep his troubles with drugs behind him. But living as they do is slowly destroying him, and he begins to doubt he can be strong enough.

This is the story of their struggle to find a way off the streets and stay together at all costs. But when events threaten to tear them apart, it is Romeo who must find the strength within himself to help Julian (and not let their love story turn into a Shakespearean tragedy).

http://www.harmonyinkpress.com

Wild Summer

A Love Story Universe Novella

By Suki Fleet

At fifteen, Christopher falls in love with a boy whose life he saves. But things go wrong and four years later, he wishes he’d acted differently. His conscience begins to haunt him, and he knows he must find Summer again.

At seventeen, Summer pushes away the boy who saved him. Four years later, he is stuck in an abusive, damaging relationship. When he sees Christopher again, it’s a sign he can’t go on living like he is, but he can’t begin to see a way out.

For either boy to stand a chance at happiness, they must find each other and obliterate the wrongs of their shared past.

http://www.harmonyinkpress.com

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