Page 37 of Follow Your Bliss

“You could totally take him.”

“Second, that’s not the first time I’ve heard you say that about your sister, but you’re selling yourself short. Yeah, Lily’s okay, but you’re objectively the more beautiful sister. Alex and I both think so.”

I looked down at my pizza, wholly embarrassed. “You don’t have to build me up, Jason, that’s not why I told you this.”

“I’m not building you up. I’m being factual.”

“You and your brother werenotcomparing Guidry sisters. Don’t give me that shit.”

“He had too much to drink at the shower, and he ranked the bridesmaids by hotness. You came out on top.” He put a hand to his chest. “I was, of course, too gentlemanly to participate, but I’m entitled to my opinions.”

“I do like being on top.” I snorted. “Alex is a little shit. Where wouldyouplace me?” I dared to ask. “Or are you also too much of a gentleman to tell me?”

He smiled and rested his cheek on his fist—ugh, death by dimples. “Exactly where you like to be.” He raised his eyebrows once.

I looked away first and laughed. My face flooded with heat, and my panties just plain flooded. Was Deck Daddy…flirting with me?

No, that was ridiculous.

“Yeah. Sure.” I rolled my eyes.

“Seriously, though. Are you doing okay?” he asked. “With the break-up?”

I took a deep breath and let it out, avoiding his big, earnest eyes. “Yeah, I’m fine. Like I said, we weren’t close. We weren’t even friends. It was kind of…a soulless relationship. I’m more upset with myself for getting involved with him in the first place.”

He smiled sadly and briefly rested his hand on mine, squeezing and releasing. The short contact zipped electricity up my arm. “You deserve so much better.”

“Thank you. So do you.”

After we finished eating, I stacked our plates and wiped all the drink condensation and parmesan off to the side. Conversation changing time. “I have something to show you, and I don’t want you to make fun of me because I was just having fun when I couldn’t sleep last night and I truly don’t think it’s useful but if it is in any way, yay.”

I dug in my purse and half-unfolded two of the community room printouts that I stole from his stack in the middle of the night. “I went in to do laundry, but your discard stack was calling me, and I wanted to look at something other than fabric for a minute.” I stopped one unfold away from the reveal.

“And I know I have some nerve showing this to someone so talented, especially when I don’t know shit about construction or if anything I sketched is possible. But maybe it’ll give you an idea, at least.”

He finished wiping pizza grease off his hands and set the napkin on the plates. “Well don’t hold back, let me see it. I need all the help I can get.”

I took a breath and laid it out on the table then sat up on my knees to show him the sketch that sparked my idea. “I liked your rejects like this one, where you flipped the rectangle sideways to make the house wider than deeper. But it didn’t make sense to me to have all the bedrooms on one side when you’d have all this awkward space here.” I pointed to a den he’d sketched out with a balcony ringing it.

“That’s exactly when I tossed this one.”

“Yeah, it would be a nice room, but you’ll be entertaining in the church, not the community center, right? This part of the house is meant to be more private for you and your family, right?”

“Yeah, that’s what I wanted.”

I took that paper away and revealed my piss poor sketch underneath that one. He regarded it very seriously with knitted brows.

“So I kept most of the high ceiling and opened it up to this breakfast area, closer to the kitchen. So now your main stairs are here by this back door, with a mudroom, but I moved the back stairs over here…” I dragged my finger to the back of the structure. “And now you kind of have this gallery area over the middle area to connect your master bedroom to your other bedrooms, to give you some privacy.” I couldn’t bring myself to sayto give you and your wife some privacy.“And it allows for the library and the media room you wanted to be separated, separated. And then you get this fun upstairs bonus area, and this fun downstairs bonus area, i.e. spaces I didn’t know what to do with.”

He met my eyes. When did I get so close to his face?

“Rose?” He grabbed my face and warmly kissed my forehead. “I love your brain.”

He released me and picked up the drawing, sitting back in his seat to study it while my third eye’s orgasm radiated to every part of my body.

“I never once thought of putting a gallery here, but it’s brilliant. And I can fill these bonus spaces because I’d planned on arranging the bedrooms a little differently—plus adding more bathrooms. I love the idea of the master being separated but on the same floor as the other bedrooms.”

He stared at me, and I tried to pretend my heart wasn’t going a mile a minute by gorging myself on the last piece of cheese bread. “Girl. You just broke my designer’s block. Damnit, I wish I hadn’t left the blank ones at home, because now I have all these ideas.”

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