Page 44 of Full Tilt
“Yes,” I said softly. “Beautiful.”
At my apartment, I unlocked the door and held it open for Kacey. She smiled almost shyly at me as she went in.
Holy shit, this is a date,I thought, locking up. I just took Kacey out on a date and now… This is the end of the date.
“Thanks for the cupcake,” she said from the living room. “And the water show. Did you plan that?”
“I know this city. Aside from my time at grad school, I’ve lived here all my life. And it’s part of my job to know where all the best shows are.”
“You’re good at your job,” Kacey said. “You go above and beyond, actually.” She moved close to me, rested her hands on my forearms and craned up to kiss my cheek. “Goodnight.”
I waited until she stepped back to speak, not trusting myselfto open my mouth while hers was so close to mine.
“Goodnight,” I said. I stared as she went into my bedroom. In a few minutes, she’d be in my bed, her hair spilling across my pillow…
This is bad. Very, very bad.
I changed to the sleep pants and T-shirt I’d stashed in the hall closet and leaned back in the recliner. I laid my hand over my ailing heart that ached for reasons that had nothing to do with my chart or diagnosis, or any terrible biopsy. It ached because I could still feel Kacey’s soft lips on my cheek, and I missed her.
She was fifteen feet away, and hadn’t yet left Vegas with her band, but I missed her just the same.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Jonah worked all the next morning at the hot shop. He came back for me around noon, and we grabbed some lunch at a Chinese place, talking and laughing about everything and nothing. After two lunches and a cupcake, I felt a little bit like I’d become part of Jonah’s routine. It wasn’t true, but it made me happy to think so.
He drove us out to an industrial part of town on the outskirts of Vegas. The scenery outside my window was filled with more desert than civilization. Lots of warehouses and ramshackle buildings with aluminum siding. He parked the truck in front of what looked like a small airline hangar with three chimneys. The heavy metal door creaked as he slid it open sideways, and he ushered me inside the space.
Jonah laughed to see my expression. “I know it’s not much to look at.”
I couldn’t argue with him there. The hot shop was about a thousand square feet of cement and steel, hotter than the midsummer Nevada heat outside and smelling of burnt wood. An air conditioning unit was waging a losing battle against two furnaces—one large and one small—that lined a single wall. In front of one raging furnace was a bench that had rails on eitherside, like high armrests made out of stainless steel. Next to the bench was a table upon which sat a thick, charred dictionary, and tools soaking in a bucket of water: tongs and cups and strange-looking ladles.
“You leave the furnaces on?” I asked, fanning myself as the heat wrapped around me and squeezed.
“I turn them down at night,” Jonah said, “and fire them back up for the day. It takes too long to get them hot enough otherwise. Alarm system over there”—he nodded his head at a wall unit with blinking lights—“alerts my phone if there’s a problem.”
I meandered past a rack of stainless-steel pipes on the near wall, each about three feet long. Beside that was a small metal table with nothing on it.
“So this is where the magic happens,” I said.
“On a good day.”
“What makes a bad day? You break something?” My feet crunched shards of glass on the cement floor as I walked between the furnaces and the metal table.
“Breaking a finished piece would definitely suck, yes.” Jonah rapped his knuckles on the wooden table with the strange-looking tools. “Mostly a bad day is one where I haven’t gotten enough done.”
“The gallery has you on a pretty tight deadline?”
Jonah wore a strange expression on his face, a thin smile that didn’t touch his warm brown eyes. “You could say that.” He glanced at his watch. “Tania’s on her lunch break. She’ll be back soon and you can meet her.”
“Does it always take two people to make a piece?”
“Not always,” Jonah said. “I make most of the individual pieces myself—those that are going to be for sale at the gallery. But for the larger sections of the installation, I need help.”
I glanced around. “Where’s your installation?”
“Through that door.” Jonah indicated a door on the far wall. “That’s where I keep all the finished pieces.”
