Glass Tidings by Amy Jo Cousins

Author:Amy Jo Cousins [Cousins, Amy Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2016-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

“You’re quiet,” Gray said after Eddie passed him the bottle of wine they were splitting.

They drank wine almost every night with dinner, which was a first for Eddie. When Gray had asked him if he preferred red or white, Eddie’s face had heated up with embarrassment when he’d had to answer that he didn’t know.

Cheap beer and discount cigarettes were more Eddie’s speed than fine wine. But he was getting used to it, a realization that hit him when he brought his wine with him into the living room after dinner.

That thought alone bothered him more than he wanted to admit. One of the many tricks of living on the road was to avoid luxury. Maybe some people could do that. Could enjoy the finer things one week and then be happily content heating up beans over a campfire the next, but Eddie had never operated like that.

Keeping on the move was his comfort zone in his head, but his body sure enough got used to nice shit real quick.

Getting used to Gray and his home, his teacups and his clean sheets, was really going to fuck with Eddie’s head when it was time to hit the road again.

Although this time he’d be hitting the road with bank in his pocket, along with his new taste for fine wine. Gray had told him the bottle they were drinking tonight was particularly special, broken out to celebrate Gray’s first purchase of what he was calling “unique glass artworks commissioned specially for the Christmas Shoppe.”

The words were fancy and stupid and shouldn’t have made Eddie’s stomach get all fluttery and his cheeks flush hot. He could turn out a dozen fairies or dragons or roses an hour and they weren’t remotely unique. All he did was change up the colors, tweak the shapes, pulling them thinner or letting the glass thicken up—superficial changes that didn’t change the figurines’ essence. They were junk, not art, just like their maker.

The ornaments Eddie had removed from Gray’s closet and hung from nearly invisible fishing line in sets of three in each window on the house’s ground floor, varying the lengths because matchy-matchy was boring, were art. He’d felt halfway to being a thief just unwrapping them from the soft folds of old tissue paper and laying them out on the coffee table in the living room.

Only a child would be fooled into thinking Eddie’s trinkets were unique. A child or Gray, who was almost insistently childlike when it came to his determination to make more of Eddie than was actually there.

Eddie was starting to feel like he was selling Gray something, and he wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but Gray was definitely buying. Even if he was still giving Eddie the stink eye every time one of the ornament sets hung in the house caught his eye, Eddie could tell he secretly liked seeing them. He’d spent too long wandering from window to window when he’d finally arrived home from work, fingertips brushing each ornament like it carried a specific memory that matched one in Gray’s heart.

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