Dreaming of His Pen Pal's Kiss - Jessie Gussman Page 0,41
top and scoot back down.
“One down, four to go. I think we’ve got this,” he said, glancing around at the other contestants, none of whom had finished their first task.
“I think we go that direction next,” she said, her brows raised, as though making sure.
“I have to admit I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention when he explained everything. There were just so many things that were kinda wild.”
“I agree. Still, I think that’s where we go.”
He nodded. “I’m with you.”
They started walking side by side toward the table with all the big boxes of decorations on it. Dante took her hand with what felt like natural ease. She allowed it.
He spoke casually. “So, do you feel like you conquered your current claustrophobia, or was that just a one-time thing?”
“I think, as long as you’re singing to me...I might even lock myself in a closet just to hear it.”
“Okay. I think the lady is making fun of my poetry skills.”
“Isn’t that what you do in your spare time? You’re a poet?”
“I think that’s a skill I just discovered today. But I’ve got a feeling the football better still come first.”
She didn’t have a smart retort as he expected. If anything, her face lost a little of its glow.
Was she against football?
That didn’t bode well for his chances. He’d deliberately kept from saying anything to her about football in their letters. Maybe they needed to talk about it. He kinda looked a little different than most of the guys in town, a little bigger, but he supposed his status as a pro player hadn’t been something he really wore on his sleeve.
Maybe she didn’t like being reminded of it.
Or maybe it made her uncomfortable in some way.
That’s almost the way it seemed.
“Here’s our box,” she said, leaning over and looking in, using her hand to move things around. “Oh boy, this could get interesting.”
He looked in the box with her, ignoring the calls from the stands. He’d vaguely heard them while they were doing their chimney climbing and especially the cheers once they were done, but now people seemed to be shouting advice at them from where they sat in the stands or stood along the roped-off area.
“Is this where I admit that I’ve never done a craft voluntarily in my life before? I seem to recall going to some kind of youth activities at the church when I was kid, dragged there by some relative, and being forced to participate in coloring and doing something with scissors. I just want to say I hated it then, and I’ve never voluntarily picked up a glue gun since. Just throwing that out there.” He lifted his shoulder and tried to look manly despite the decorations in front of him.
Journee held up what he considered to be a particularly hideous wall hanging type thing that had red and green feathers and a fuzzy purple outline framing what looked like a pretty good imitation of the Charlie Brown Christmas tree.
“I think ugly Christmas sweaters everywhere are cringing at that particular decoration,” he murmured.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Journee said, with fake-sounding wisdom. “Honestly, for me, the uglier something is, the more I like it. I think it’s a pity thing, or maybe it’s just I relate to their feelings.”
“That is an inanimate object. It doesn’t have feelings. I went to college for four years, and despite the fact I played football, they gave me a piece of paper at the end that said I actually learned a little bit of something.”
“Maybe they were overly optimistic?” Journee said, obviously joking, but then she pulled a few more decorations out of the boxes. “I wasn’t a cute kid. I pretty much had no idea how to comb my hair, and being that I was the youngest, I wore a lot of hand-me-downs. I got teased a lot for my looks, which honestly I didn’t always understand since I didn’t really know what good things look like, but I think that definitely gave me empathy for ugly things.”
“You couldn’t have been ugly. No kid is ugly.”
“I agree. I guess I don’t really think of myself as ugly as much as I think of myself as being perceived as ugly. There’s a bit of a difference.”
“I agree with that. We can be attuned to what other people think of us, and it affects the way we think of ourselves.” He’d been thought of as a pain in the butt and something that people had