The Glass Studio – Part 2: Annealing

Dinner was grilled fish at a tiny table by the canal, and they talked until the waiter put the chairs up around them. Marco told her about his grandfather's furnace and the winter he almost closed it. Elena told him about the lamp, the client, the deadline, and how she had not wanted to be anywhere else for three days.

"Come and see the cooling oven," he said at last, with a shy grin. "It is my favourite part."

"That is the most romantic thing a man has ever said to me."

"I know. I practised."

They walked back along the water in the cool dark. The studio was quiet, the furnace banked low, a dull orange glow behind the iron door. Marco showed her the annealing oven, where the finished glass cooled slowly overnight. "If it cools too fast, it cracks," he said. "Everything cooled too fast cracks."

"So you wait."

"So you wait."

His flat was upstairs, a small warm room with a window over the lagoon and a bed with a blue wool blanket. Elena stopped at the top of the stairs. "I'd like to stay," she said. "If you'd like that."

"I would like that very much." Then, because he was Marco, he asked again. "You are sure?"

"I am sure." She took his burned, careful hands in hers and kissed the scars on his wrists, one by one. "Slow," she said.

"Always slow."

He kissed her at the window with the lights of the lagoon behind them. She slipped his work shirt off his shoulders, and he unbuttoned her jacket with fingers that never fumbled, as steady as when they shaped glass. The blue blanket was soft. His mouth found her neck, her collarbone, the inside of her wrist, taking his time as if she were something to be shaped with great respect and no rush at all.

She turned him on his back and laughed against his chest. Moonlight poured in over the water.

Neither of them said anything for a long while.

In the morning the lamp was waiting in the cooling oven, a pale silver globe that caught the light and held it. Elena stood in front of it with a mug of coffee in Marco's shirt.

"Moonlight," she said.

"A little late for your deadline."

"I'll tell my client it took as long as it took."

Marco kissed her forehead. "And the glass?"

"Still just glass," said Elena. "And not at all."

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