Page 38 of My Not-So-Secret Santa

He shakes his head.“No, nothing like that.He’s actually kind of the best version of himself now.I guess it’s just that he’s… content.”His lips press together, and he works them back and forth like he’s thinking about what to say next.“I’m not jealous exactly.Darby’s a great girl.Not my type—as if I could handle a smart, pretty, professional, pulled-together woman who doesn’t own a single framed movie poster.”He grins at me as I hand him another ornament.“I’m happy he’s happy.I’m just… I’m very aware that I’m not a part of it all.”

He shrugs and reaches for another ornament, which I hand up without comment.

Message received.Gabe’s girlfriend isn’t his type, which means I’m not his type.But I’m asking abouthimright now, not obsessing over myself.

“Do you think you’d like it though?Landscape design?”I ask.

His shoulders drop on an exhale.“Yeah.I think I probably would.But am I sure enough to quit my jobs?”

There it is again.“Jobs?”

His eyes fall away from mine.“Ya know.It’s a gig economy.”Then he smiles that lazy smile, the one that crawls across his face and changes him from handsome to breathtaking.“Now you owe me an explanation about those lions.”

Right.The lions.

“Well, I majored in art.”I say it like it’s enough of an explanation but quickly realize it’s not.“And that mural is…”

“Not art?”he asks, wiggling his fingers for the next ornament.

“Oh, it’s art, all right.”I hand one up to him.“It makes you feel something.”

“Yeah?”He has the ornament’s ribbon clamped between his teeth.“Howzit make you feel?”

I answer without censoring myself.“Hot and reckless and a little horny.”

The green ball hits the ground at my feet, and I look up to see Jonesy’s mouth hanging open.

Thirteen

Jonesy

“Sorry, could you say that again?”I’m grinning, but I’m also turning my lower half away from her as subtly as I can so she doesn’t see that I’m halfway hard because the word “horny” just tumbled from Liv’s sophisticated mouth.Then again, that’s kind of been my MO since Saturday.

Covertly knowing how your crush sounds when she comes is incredibly distracting when you’re trying to remember drink orders for a table of ten.

“I will not,” she says primly.“And none of that means the art itself is any good.”

She walks over to the mural and studies it with her hands clasped behind her back like she’s at a museum.

“The perspective’s all off.There’s no vanishing point.”Her voice turns into a college professor’s, and I’m thrilled to be in her personal lecture hall.“See how everything’s on the same plane to the viewer?The background should look farther away than the subjects in front, but it’s all the same size.”

I pivot on the ladder to look where she’s pointing.

“Huh.Yeah, I think I see what you mean,” I say after a beat.“It’s like somebody flattened the scene.”

“Exactly!There’s not enough depth and dimensionality in the trees.No attempt at shadows or shading.”She reaches up to rest her hand on the simplistic leaves on the branches.“The artist needed to either amp up the sense of flatness and sameness to make it intentionally jarring and surreal, or they needed to think carefully about the spatial relationship of the objects they were creating.”

“Huh.”I say it again but softer this time.“That may be the smartest thing anybody’s ever said in here.”

I asked Darryl about decorating as a way of making it up to Liv for blowing her off to go to the Chicago thing, making her think I’d be interested in dating anybody but her, and oh yeah, sprinting from the room yesterday to suck the taste of her orgasm off my fingers.

Honestly, it was the least that I could do.

Liv, meanwhile, just shrugs off my compliment.“It’s Art 101.This mural shouldn’t work at all.But at the same time…” She wanders closer to the lions and runs her fingers over the mane of the bigger one.“I like it.I see the flaws, the clashing colors, the wonky sight lines.But I don’t really care.Not when the lions look so?—”

“Fierce.Free.”

She smiles in agreement.“Exactly.They’re standing in for humans who wish they could be that way too.”

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