He holds my gaze, and I can’t find it in me to look away; the moment feels too important. There’s something he doesn’t say, but I can’t tell if it relates to why he enjoys this or me. Regardless, it seems like something I shouldn’t ignore.
“What would you pick if you were decorating your house?”
He tilts his head a little, appearing amused by the question. I watch as he returns to the front of the store, gathers a basket for my things, and then comes back to my side. “Are you running out of ideas?”
“I’m thinking outside the box.”
His eyes spark, and he carefully moves around me toward a slim stand of shelves nearer the counter. “I like this.” Jinx gestures to an oil painting, framed in decorative timber, hanging on the wall. “Don’t ask me why. I just saw it when we walked in, and I can’t stop looking back at it.”
I move closer, startling myself when my elbow catches a vase filled with peacock feathers. “What do you think is happening in it?” A blue-toned landscape shows undulating ground, haunted by the silhouettes of trees, with a small cabin in the background. It appears to be some sort of clearing in the woods, a glade, but what makes it mysterious is the blurry figure moving through the center of the image, as though caught in a windstorm, cloaked head tucked down against the onslaught.
“I can’t tell if they move away from the cabin or toward it,” Jinx says. “But there’s a tiny dot of earthy orange there in the lowest pane of that front window, so it makes me think it’s supposed to show someone else is there.”
“Do they venture out, or are they returning home?”
“Exactly.” He shakes his head as though breaking from a trance. “It’s stupid, anyway. I’d probably be better off getting these.” He gestures to a set of branded beer coasters in a timber box.
It’s typically male.
A stereotype that doesn’t fit him.
“Why do you do that?”
“Do what?” He turns from the painting and steers us back toward where I’d left off browsing.
“Put up this mask of who you think people expect you to be.”
Jinx stares at me for a beat, searching my face for something that he doesn’t appear to find. “Why did you?”
Did.Not do. But did.
“I was a teenage girl, Jinx. Keeping their parents happy is what every teenager aspires to do, isn’t it?”
He snorts. “Every teenager I knew was hell bent on doing exactly the opposite.”
“Well, maybe they didn’t respect their parents enough.”
“And you do?”
I hate the tension that’s swept in, this bristling reminder of how different we are. “You love deflecting when you feel attacked, huh?”
“Who said I feel attacked?” He picks up a re-taped box of stained-glass Christmas ornaments and pops it in the basket. “You’ll need these soon enough.”
“You’re like Jekyll and Hyde.” A part of me regrets the way I snapped the words, but not that I said them.
He stalls, standing rock solid as I move my ass to the next aisle over so I don’t have to look at him.
Thick fingertips edge between glass-encased sand art and a gaudy statue of a parrot clinging to a pineapple. Jinx moves thestrange bird aside to create a window, peering through to where I stand.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?” It’s easy to apologize to keep the peace, but knowing what for is the true show of character.
“Turning into my father when you call me out on my shit.”
“I wasn’t trying to be a bitch about it.” I look to my feet, the intensity of his crisp gaze unraveling my resolve.
“I know.” Jinx disappears from the makeshift window and appears at the end of the aisle. “When we’re expected to keep up a certain image,” he explains, glancing at the badges on his chest, “then I guess it becomes habit to fit that bill. Plus, when everyone around me does the same thing, it’s normal. Nobody sees it as wrong.”
