Page 40 of Hard to Forgive

I shook my head. “That’s a fancy ass sketchbook. I’ll use mine.”

It didn’t matter how badly I wanted to reach out and feel if the leather was as soft and supple as it looked. It wasn’t some dollarstore find. It was the kind of thing that took thought, and I was not dealing with the idea that Silas had applied actual thought into picking out a good sketchbook. I also wasn’t going to take it and feel like I owed him something.

“Take the sketchbook. I’m never going to use it,” he insisted.

“No. I have my own.”

“Seriously, Jonas,” he sighed.

“Seriously, Silas,” I retorted, my voice a firm answer to the exasperated tone he aimed my way. “I’m happy with mine. Throw your money somewhere else.”

He didn’t show any reaction to the barb. He just took the sketchbook from the table and tucked it underneath. Once it was out of sight, I regretted not taking the chance to touch it. I would almost put money on the paper being higher quality than the cheap sketchbook I carried with me.

But my sketchbook had served me well. I withdrew it from my bag and put it down next to my computer, the small tin of the mechanical pencils I preferred resting on top of it.

“Do you draw outside of work?” Silas asked suddenly. His eyes were trained on the black tin.

“Sometimes.” For once, his questioning look didn’t annoy me. “I’ve always liked art. I like to sketch here and there.” It helped with the anxiety. Sometimes, I could channel those feelings into something more productive. I doubted he’d understand, even if I ever told him.

“That’s pretty cool.” Silence settled over us while we began to open our computers and get ready to work. “Sometimes, I wish I were more creative.”

I looked up from my keyboard. “What?”

“I wish I were more creative,” he repeated. “The closest I come to creativity is drawing rough outlines of what a project should look like. Even then, it’s almost always on the computer andreally simplistic until I figure out the fine details. But that’s still technical. Outside of that, I can’t even draw a stick figure.”

I was taken aback by the confession. I hadn’t expected it. “That’s—You realize creativity is more than just drawing, right?”

He scoffed. “No, really? I thought it was only drawing.”

His sarcasm was so tangible it might as well have been another person sitting on the couch with us. I rolled my eyes at him. “You’re the one that was making a big deal out of not being creative because you can’t draw,” I pointed out.

“Forget it.”

“It’s what you said.”

“And I said forget it. Let’s just get to work.” He pulled his computer onto his lap and leaned back onto the couch. “I think we should use the landing page as a template for everything else. It’ll be easier to translate to all the required pages and deliver a sense of uniformity.”

“I agree.”

“Good, but I wasn’t finished.” Okay then. “I mocked up a few ideas while I was waiting on you. Let’s get through the mock ups and try to hammer one out before we eat?”

My stomach grumbled at the mention of food. The pizza would be cold by then. “Let’s go over what you have, eat, then try to grind out as many of these things as possible,” I countered. “The pizza smell is going to be too distracting otherwise.”

He agreed, and we got to work.

Time flew as we bounced ideas off of one another. His general ideas were good, and I found myself only needing to make a few suggestions—most of which were about nothing more than baseline aesthetics. He might not have thought he was creative, but he had a good understanding of how to make everything flow in a logical way.

If the client approved our designs, the interface would be intuitive thanks to the suggestions Silas had made. We ate ourdinner with our laptops open, typing the occasional note in the shared document we’d created for that night’s collaboration efforts.

We could clean it up later.

Hours passed. It wasn’t until I began yawning that I realized how many hours had passed. It was almost midnight. I gathered my stuff and he walked me to the door.

For a split second, I almost thought he was about to kiss me goodbye.

Which was ridiculous.

And not at all a thing that I wanted.

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