A giggle burbled up out of him and he looked down where his hand was against Curie’s side. “Ok, fair point. I guess it would depend on the cat, but this one seems snuggly.”
“She’s not usually like this with strangers,” I confessed, needing to be honest for some reason. “Usually she hides when my family comes over. Possibly because my mom gets a little…overenthusiastic.”
He munched another carrot - I noticed he was studiously avoiding the celery - thoughtfully and then smiled. “Let me guess, she tries to touch the belly?”
I couldn’t help my laugh. “She says that if she’s exposing it that way, she must want it petted. She left last time with a nice suite of scratches on the back of her hand and Curie escaped on top of the bookshelf.” I gestured to the six-foot-high bookshelf that stood in the corner of the room. It held a mix of books and my random junk, including a wood plane - why was that in the house? - two reversible, snarky-faced plushies, and a bottle of hand lotion that I had failed to return to the bathroom last time I used it. No, get your mind out of the gutter. Woodwork is hard on the hands, it sucks all the moisture right out!
He eyed the book - junk? - shelf curiously for a moment, then popped to his feet, carefully avoiding Curie’s tail, which was curled around his knee, and walked over to it. His hand reached out to one of the plushies - a rainbow octopus with a scowl on its face - and then drew back. He looked at me. “Can I touch?”
I shrugged. “Sure. Nothing there is breakable.”
He picked up the plushie, appearing delighted when he realized that it could be flipped inside-out to expose a smiling face instead of the scowling one. “This is awesome!” He flipped it to the smile and beamed a matching smile at me, then flipped it back to the scowl and put on his best glower, which mostly made him look like an angry puppy, not that I was going to tell him that. “You can make it match your mood!” He put the plushie down in its spot and reached for the plane, fumbling it a little when it was heavier than he anticipated. “I’m assuming this is for woodworking? Either that or it’s a torture device.”
It probably would make a pretty decent torture device, now that he mentioned it. You could plane off layers of skin, starting with the outer layers just to scare someone and then moving deeper…
Morbid, Henry. I coughed. “No, not a torture device,” I said, mustering a smile that I hoped didn’t reflect my creepy thoughts. “It’s a plane. You use it to shave off thin slices of wood to shape something.” Once again, I wondered how it had ended up on the bookshelf. “I’m not sure why it’s there instead of my workshop, to be honest. Maybe I carried it in absentmindedly one day.”
He rested the flat of the plane against his palm and his forearm twitched as if he was going to move it forward. I jerked toward him and grabbed his arm, stopping the movement. “It’s sharp,” I warned, gently prying the plane out of his hand. “You don’t want to do that.”
He colored delicately. “Oops, sorry. Got curious. Probably the plushies are safer, huh?”
I nodded my agreement. “I mean, you survived my cat, I wouldn’t want you to cut off a finger on a tool that shouldn’t even be where it is and break your streak.” I put the plane back on the shelf with a mental note to return it to my workshop next time I went out there.
We looked at each other for a long, awkward moment, and then Jamison reached for one of my books, an inlay design manual. “This is…” he began, flipping through the pages. “No, you know what, I’ve got nothing.” He slipped the book back into its place. “I can’t even fake something intelligent to say about that one. Too complicated.”
I couldn’t blame him. It was a pretty detailed manual. I sometimes pulled it out when I couldn’t sleep. Flipping through the pages and eyeing the intricate designs was sure to make my eyes cross and then close. “Don’t blame you,” I agreed. “It’s not exactly approachable reading.”
He spun away from the bookshelf, startling both me and Curie, who leapt to her feet and waved her tail as if catching her balance to bolt. “Where’d you put the vodka?”
I blinked at him dumbly for a second. “The what? Oh.” I gestured toward the kitchen island, which we could see clearly across the open-plan cabin space. “On the counter.”
Curie, apparently deciding her alarm had been unnecessary, wandered over to the couch, hopped onto the back, and settled down to lick her butt fur as Jamison made his way to the kitchen. He seized the bottle of vodka. “I’ve decided I need that stiff drink we talked about.”
Heh. Stiff.
“So,” he went on, unaware of my juvenile brain inwardly snickering, “what mixers do you have?”
I gave that a moment’s thought. “Um, there’s orange juice in the fridge, and I have some cans of soda in the pantry. I don’t think I have any cold ones, though. I forgot to switch the twelve-pack when I ran out a couple of days ago. But there should be Coke and Sprite.” I took a moment to run through my mental list of what was in stock in my kitchen. “I think there might be some apple juice in the back of the fridge, but for all I know it’s fermented itself since the last time I had a glass of it.”
“Do you have any grenadine?” he asked eagerly.
I blinked. Grenadine? That was the hot pink syrup, right? “Um, if I do it’ll be in the last top cabinet on the right, with the rest of my alcohol.” I had a couple bottles of nice bourbon that I drank occasionally, and probably some vodka of my own, because who didn’t keep a bit of that on hand. If I had cocktail mixers, I’d have put them with the rest. Though when I’d have ever bought grenadine, I didn’t know.
He walked to the cabinet I indicated, opened it, and started sorting through its contents. He exclaimed over the bourbon - “Fancy!” - and scoffed at my choice of vodka, which was apparently “cheap as hell”, then pulled out a bottle of sweetened lime juice, a small bottle of bitters - why in the world did I even have that? - and, yes, a bright red bottle of grenadine. “Yesss,” he hissed. “We’re having Dirty Shirleys.”
Dirty…what? I blinked at him owlishly and he grinned. “Do I even want to know what you’re about to feed me?” I asked cautiously. “And why do I suspect it doesn’t go with onion dip?”
He winced. “Yeah, it really doesn’t go with onion dip. But it should be fine with the carrots plain if we want to keep munching. Or if you have chips or something, that’s even better. Glasses?” he asked. “Spoon? Oh, and ice if the soda’s not cold.”
I motioned to the cabinet I kept my drinking glasses in and opened my cutlery drawer to extract a long-handled iced tea spoon. “Here.” I set it on the counter in front of him, then filled a plastic cup with ice from my freezer.
He pulled two tall glasses out of the cabinet and set them on the counter, then ducked into my pantry, which was the size of awalk-in closet. Yes, I was proud of it. Yes, I’d made the shelving. I heard him muttering and the sounds of my belongings being shuffled, and then he emerged with two cans of Sprite in his hands. He set them next to the glasses, then grabbed the vodka and the grenadine. “Two Dirty Shirleys, coming up.”
I watched as he dropped in some ice cubes, glugged a shot of vodka into each glass, filled them the rest of the way with Sprite, and then tipped some grenadine onto the top. The spoon rattled against the sides of each glass as he stirred the mixture.
Suddenly, it clicked in my brain. “Did you just make us alcoholic Shirley Temples?”
He grinned. “Sure did. Thus the ‘dirty’ part of Dirty Shirley.” He presented me with a glass. “Drink up. We’re going to get tipsy and then you’re going to teach me to braid.”
