Page 134 of The Difference Between

“Why didn’t he tell me?” I asked.

“Why do men do anything?” She chuckled. “You’ll have to ask him.”

And now, I’m in the shop as he moves, directs, and of course, laughs, with confidence. He’s never unsure of himself, but he owns this place—the space—and the attention of every person in this building.

Gavin’s clearly in charge, the rest of the people—assistants as Gavin introduced them—swarm around him like ants on a hill, programmed to know exactly what to do.

Sabrina, the woman with the mic, narrates what’s happening. “Gavin’s at the furnace doing what we call a gather,” she explains.

Gavin sticks the pipe into the opening of a large oven that glows with hot, liquid glass. When he pulls it out, there’s a lava-like ball on the end.

Sabrina keeps talking, throwing out words like marver and glory hole—that one makes me laugh—but I am transfixed.

By him.

His command of the room and the ease he works the glass.

Two people have pipes connected by a single blob, walking away from each other to stretch it apart like a string. Sabrina tells us they’re pulling cane—thin pieces of glass that will be used to add detail.

Gavin’s back at the furnace, gathering more glass before holding the pipe upright so the excess drips into a bucket that hisses with steam. He puffs on the end, then he’s at the chair, calling to an assistant.

Sabrina says, “Gavin’s using jacks, a common glassblowing tool used to manipulate the glass.”

The jacks look annoyingly like the tattoo he let me believe was hedge trimmers. The tattoo that’s now flexing as he moves and making my mouth water. Bastard.

One of the assistants gathers more glass then rolls it around in what Sabrina calls frit, granules of glass used to add color. He takes it to the marver—a stainless-steel table—rolling it across the surface before pressing his blob onto the piece at the end of Gavin’s pipe.

One end has been worked into a narrow point, and now there’s a torch in the mix.

Gavin wipes his brow, and his shirt clings to his back with sweat. Two of the assistants take long drinks from water bottles and Gavin says something to make them laugh.

The whole time they work, I can’t stop thinking that Gavin is a glassblower—no, an artist. And I didn’t know.

Only maybe I did.

Maybe I didn’t want to see or believe he was so much more than met the eye.

I asked him the first day here and he said no—only he didn’t. He asked me if that’s what I thought and it wasn’t, so I wrote him off.

Like an idiot.

It’s easy to tell myself I can’t be with someone because they don’t have any drive. But him chasing a dream to near perfection and letting it all go because his family needed him?

That’s not a detriment; it’s a testament.

And fucking annoying.

“Miss Reese!” Addie barrels toward me with Nancy not too far behind her.

“How was your first rehearsal?” I ask, wrapping my arms around her.

She barks like Toto then turns her attention to Gavin. “What’s he making?”

I shrug, following her gaze to him. “No clue.”

For the first time since he started working, he looks at me with a smirk that turns to a grin when he sees Addie next to me. He points at her and mouths, You’re a glass bubble.

Glass bubble, of course. I dismissed it as a weird inside joke.