Frosting Her Christmas Cookies - Alina Jacobs Page 0,19

cold winter air streamed in, I fished in a drawer for the first aid kit.

I shouldn’t have let Morticia come back here. I was clearly on the verge of losing my self-control.

“You look flushed,” Morticia said from the doorway.

I jumped.

“Why is the window open?” she asked.

“It’s hot,” I croaked.

She reached up and felt my forehead. “Maybe the infection has set in.”

I grabbed her hand then thought better of it and released her. Man, I was in bad shape.

She took the first aid kit and grabbed a disinfectant wipe and took my hand. Her fingers were long and her motions sure as she cleaned the cat scratch with the alcoholic wipe then rubbed Neosporin on it and stuck on a Band-Aid.

“We’ll see if he makes it through the night,” she told Salem, who was sitting on the bathroom counter, tail curled around him.

“Does that mean you’re going to stay here and play nursemaid all night?”

“No,” Morticia said tartly, washing her hands, “that means I’m calling your sister and letting her know to put you on plague watch.”

11

Morticia

I am a night person. I think best at night. I do my most creative work at night. I usually am not awake until noon at least, and I don’t go to sleep until five a.m. This was fortunate, because when I returned from Jonathan’s, the bachelorettes were still up, and it looked as if they had set off a cake bomb in the kitchen.

“We made cake penis pops!” one of them shouted at me over the din of the movie Elf blaring on the large flat-screen TV.

Of course Jonathan kept the nice apartment for himself and stuck us all in here like cows.

I sighed loudly as they continued to chatter then went into my shared room and slammed the door.

Salem purred as I stroked him under the chin and took out my sketchbook to plan what I was going to say during my internship interview the next morning.

Salem was nibbling on my hair, tugging it, the next morning. I yawned. It was ten a.m. Too early for me. I dragged myself through showering and pulling on clothes. The studio was empty, as we weren’t doing a bake-off competition that day.

“I wish I had a better background,” I told Salem as I clicked on the video link I had been sent by the Getty internship program. The Christmas decorations I’d put up in the studio the week before twinkled under the lights. The whole place smelled like gingerbread and sugar.

“What a festive scene!” one of the interviewers, an older woman in a Chanel suit, remarked when the video chat screen opened.

“Yes, quite,” a short, balding man with a rosy complexion added.

“This was just some paid decorating work I was asked to do,” I explained. “Nothing special.”

“If I’m not mistaken, is that ornament arrangement that I see to the left of your screen an homage to Fang Fei’s art biennial pavilion?” the woman asked.

I smiled. “So glad you noticed!”

The interview went smoothly after that. They asked me about various pieces in my portfolio and my philosophies on various restoration processes. They were impressed with my involvement in the Art Zurich Biennial Expo in Harrogate that summer.

“We were all there,” the male interviewer gushed. “What an event! And what was done with that small town was miraculous.”

“I’m sure it had nothing to do with all those good-looking billionaire Svensson brothers roaming around,” the woman said slyly.

“They are easy on the eyes and handy when checks need to be signed,” I said.

“And you have your own billionaire,” the woman continued, eyes sparkling. “A Mr. Frost?”

I grimaced. So they’d heard about The Great Christmas Bake-Off.

“I wasn’t actually going to be in the production,” I said in a rush. “Of course, a reality TV show is not my cup of tea…”

“But it must be so inspirational,” the woman said. “You could do a whole exposé on art, femininity, consumerism, and domestic ideals. It would be a great piece to submit for the scholarship for the internship.”

Forget cake. Nothing perked me up like free money.

“Yes!” the man said excitedly. “We very recently had a generous endowment finalized, and a portion of the money is to be set aside for young interns. We ask that everyone submit an original art piece that speaks to what it means to be a young person in the twenty-first century. We’d love to have your vision included.”

“I will absolutely send in a piece,” I assured them.

After signing off the call, I carefully made sure I wasn’t