Frosting Her Christmas Cookies - Alina Jacobs Page 0,38
psych ward. Fortunately, a nurse there had taken pity on me and given me paper and pencils. Still, it had been the worst five months of my entire life.
Use your trauma and let it fuel your creativity, I told myself.
Sometimes I didn’t want to have my creativity fueled by anger and trauma. Maybe I wanted to draw pictures of a hot guy eating a cupcake and wearing nothing but a Santa hat.
“Drink?” offered an older woman flanked by several geese wearing Christmas outfits as she came over to me with a familiar bottle of amber liquid and two glasses. “You look like someone who needs some lubrication, though not the sex jelly kind,” she continued.
I took a glass from her.
“The famous Morticia—baker and artist extraordinaire,” the old woman said, pouring me a generous amount. “Contemplating the beginnings of the universe?”
“Are you Dorothy, the sculptor?” I asked, pointing to the plaque. “It’s a brilliant piece.” I toasted her, and we drank.
“Damn, that man makes a mean liquor!” she said appreciatively.
“When you made this piece,” I asked, looking for inspiration, “how did you come up with it? How did you capture the beginning of the universe?”
“Actually, the label is completely bullshit,” she said cheerfully.
I barked out a laugh.
“That’s the funny thing about art. At a certain point, it’s about creating something aesthetically pleasing then coming up with a good story to sell it to people!” Dorothy winked. “The explanation has to make you sound wise and insightful, even though what really happened was that you were super horny and in between rounds of being fucked by the biggest cock east of the Mississippi, and you decided that orgasms that good needed a sculpture in their honor.”
Unfortunately, I did not have any orgasms or cocks for inspiration. The clock was ticking. I spent the next two days trying to draw various ideas, failing, drawing Jonathan, kicking myself, then drawing various baked goods and looking up then trying recipes online.
As I baked, I told myself that all those cupcakes, trifles, and cake pops were Instagram props to fulfill the marketing contract. Pop a sexy cocktail next to the dessert, post it on the Hillrock West Distillery Instagram, and bam! Viral content.
Because I had so many sketches of Jonathan, Lilith started co-opting them before I could ball them up and give them to Salem to play with. She created little scrapbook pages from them and posted them on the Instagram account along with my sketches of various alcoholic beverages and desserts.
And yet I still had no idea what I was going to do for my scholarship piece. If I even landed that internship, I was going to be living out of my car in Los Angeles. Oh wait, no I wasn’t, because I didn’t even have a car. I was just going to sleep in a ditch.
At least I had managed to avoid Jonathan for the past few days. Unfortunately, we had another bake-off challenge. I couldn’t tell if I was dreading or excited to see him.
You need to just see him and get it over with.
But when I saw him, my heart started fluttering.
It’s all the sugar you’ve been eating.
“For your challenge today,” Anastasia announced, “we’re having a decorating party! You should make creative desserts that are great to share with family and friends. Then head over to the Hillrock West Distillery showroom to trim the tree and decorate!”
More free labor. Whoo.
Though I was mostly annoyed, a part of me welcomed the task of baking and then decorating—anything to keep me from spinning my wheels about the scholarship and about Jonathan.
As soon as Anastasia started the timer and all the other contestants had rushed to the pantry and fridge to grab their ingredients, Jonathan sauntered over to me. He was wearing a dark-navy suit similar to the one he’d had on a few days ago—not that I was noticing because I liked him! I noticed because I was an artist, and I noticed color and form.
Jonathan’s form…
“I love to see you in the Christmas spirit!” he quipped, taking a Santa hat out of his pocket and placing it on my head.
“I am not wearing that.”
“But you look adorable in it!” he exclaimed.
“You’re not going to feel so warm and fuzzy about Christmas when the bachelorettes are force-feeding you dessert in a few hours,” I reminded him, jerking my head toward the other contestants with their armloads full of sugar, candy canes, and chocolate.
Jonathan grimaced. It wrinkled his forehead and the lines around his mouth.