Frosting Her Christmas Cookies - Alina Jacobs Page 0,41
research.”
There was silence. The bartender brought my dad his drink; he sipped it.
“Did you see The Nutcracker?” I asked them.
“Yes,” she replied. “Your father was given tickets. We met friends there. We were supposed to meet them at a restaurant after, but we delayed because of you.”
“We really should be going,” my father said, finishing his drink. “Don’t want to keep them waiting.”
“I can pick up the tab,” I offered as my father helped my mother into her coat.
“Fine,” my father said, blowing out a breath as if I had annoyed him. Which I probably had.
“Okay,” I called to their retreating backs, “it was great to see you!”
I took the train home. I wanted the anonymity, and I didn’t want to make chitchat with the town car driver.
They were just busy, I told myself as the train rushed through the tunnel. You sprang a meeting on them, and they were busy, and they didn’t expect it. At least they agreed to meet with you.
But the usual lies that I told myself about why my parents couldn’t be there for the lacrosse game or the school play or high school graduation or my big capstone college presentation weren’t working as well as they usually did. I was tired of making excuses for them.
But I had to, because the alternative was not acceptable.
You just need to make a bunch of money, I assured myself as I took the stairs up to the street two at a time at my stop. They just don’t understand the alcohol business. Once you land the Hamilton Yards development, then they’ll be impressed. Owen and Jack have big real estate projects, and this would be a million times bigger than theirs. You just need to convince Dorothy to sell.
Instead of heading into my condo, I walked across the street and pushed through the opening in the chain-link fence to Dorothy’s property. It had started to snow, and backlit against the light of the skyline, the sculptures gave the property an otherworldly feel.
Greg wanted to tear all the art pieces out. He had said that we needed the land. But I felt they added a unique sense of place. It made it seem like the portal to another realm, one of those mythical dark fairy courts. I rounded a corner.
There, like an escaped fae princess, was Morticia. At first, I thought she was performing some sort of pagan ritual, but as I advanced, the snow softening my footfalls, I realized she was photographing something.
“Is that a gingerbread house?”
She turned to me then grinned.
21
Morticia
I knew I shouldn’t be so happy that he liked my food, that I should aspire to higher things in life than feeding an overprivileged billionaire, but dammit if I didn’t get a rush of joy at seeing Jonathan happily eat my lasagna. I now knew why my grandmother had loved parties and entertaining so much. There was no better high than seeing someone you loved enjoying something that you’d made just for them.
Wait, uh, love? That’s…no. Nope. Freudian slip. I didn’t love him. We hadn’t even kissed or had a date. Jonathan had blithely ate the lasagna while I had had a mini existential crisis.
Why was I planning first dates and kisses? That was never going to happen. Ever. Never. I was going to keep a very professional distance from him.
It must be the holidays, I told myself after the bake-off challenge. It’s making you crazy.
I should be safely wrapped in my bedroom with heavy black curtains and candles, yet here I was baking a gingerbread house. Now that I had my inspiration for my art piece for the scholarship, I had to start working. It was ten p.m., and this was prime creative time for me. Because the theme of the piece was Christmas consumerism and the female gaze, I needed more pictures of baked goods. The ones I had from the bake-off were not going to be enough.
“You also need some pictures of Jonathan,” Emma said around the bite of lasagna. She and Lilith had stolen several little round tins of it after photographing them for the marketing photos.
“Give your man sex, lasagna, and whiskey for Christmas,” Lilith said as she typed out the Instagram post. “Hashtag don’t fuck with his food, hashtag Italian Christmas, hashtag keep it simple. Ooh, look at all those likes coming in!”
“You should have him pose nude with a strategically placed gingerbread cookie as the main focal point of your art piece,” Emma told me.