Frosting Her Christmas Cookies - Alina Jacobs Page 0,124

you make this?” I growled at Sarah.

“That’s not me,” she said, “though it is two people we all know.”

I peered at the pictures.

Carl said, “Uh, Jonathan, isn’t that the tattoo you got that St. Patrick’s Day when we drank that rancid Sheridan’s and were basically hallucinating?”

I felt sick.

Sarah smirked. “I didn’t make these—these are recent photos.” She tapped the female figure that was present in a few of the areas of the collage. “It seems Morticia didn’t actually want you for your sparkling personality. It looks to me like she was using you.”

“Why?” I asked desperately.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sarah drawled. “I heard her talking about some scholarship she needed to win.”

Carl was alarmed. “Morticia didn’t publish this or sell the rights, did she? This painting cannot go up online. People will think you’re crazy. This is, like, weird sex shit. Why did you let her take all these pictures?”

“I didn’t think she was going to make a fucking shrine out of this! What the fuck?” I shouted furiously. She was going to ruin my reputation!

“A little something you don’t know about Morticia,” Sarah said. “She has a pattern of creepy obsessions. When we were in high school, she stalked this kid named Justin and tried to poison him. She claimed it was a love potion. They hauled her off to the loony bin.”

“What the fuck? She didn’t tell me any of this. Holy shit.” I turned on my heel, not even bothering to look for my suit jacket. “That fucking bitch.” If this collage hit the internet, it would ruin all the progress I had made with the Hillrock West Distillery brand. And for her to be all high and mighty that I had deceived her… “That fucking bitch.”

I texted her angrily on the car ride over to her friend’s apartment. I had Emma’s address on file from the accounting department. When I arrived, all it took was a smile to a tipsy group of girls coming out of the building, and I was in, pounding up the stairs to the apartment.

“Jonathan!” Morticia said in shock when she opened the door. “Let me explain…”

“Explain!” I exploded. I threw the pictures at her. “You are a lunatic,” I spat. “You made some sort of demented art project about me.”

“It wasn’t about that,” she pleaded.

“Don’t try and lie. Your cousin Sarah told me all about your stalker issues, which you also never told me about. So who was really using who, huh?”

“I—” She shrugged helplessly. “I needed to win the scholarship.”

I barked out a laugh. “And to think I was feeling bad that I cost you the position. I can’t believe I even missed you. To be honest, it’s good you’re out of my life.”

“Fuck you!” she forced out, her hands clenched into fists. “I don’t have a bunch of rich family members propping up my terrible business dealings. I have to hustle.”

“You think I didn’t work hard for my money?” I demanded.

“No!” she said. Tears leaked from her eyes, smearing her black eyeliner and mascara. “I don’t. I think that you work hard. You just bounce around the world like an idiot man-child, and people give you chance after chance and bend over backward for you to be successful. For fuck’s sake, until I came along, you were struggling to sell alcohol. Alcohol! In America!”

“You’re just upset because someone finally called you out on your shit,” I snarled. “You like to pretend that you’re so above everything, that you’re too cool for Christmas, and you’re some independent woman. And yet you stalked some poor boy in high school and freaked him out so much they hauled you off to a mental institution.”

“That is not what happened,” she cried. “Keeley mixed up a poisonous concoction, gave it to Justin, then lied and told everyone I did it. Of course they didn’t believe me, because who’s going to believe the poor parentless girl with the black makeup when they could believe Keeley with her bouncing blond curls and stable home life?” She wiped her face, smearing the dark makeup further. “You know why I hate Christmas? Because that December, I had to spend Christmas in a horrific psych ward through no fault of my own. You think Christmas is about family and giving, but it’s not. It’s about money and power and people who lord that over the people they claim to care about most.”

She pinched her nose and took a few breaths. Then she looked up at me. Her expression wasn’t