“Alice in Wonderland?” Seb’s eyes went wide. He’d had the same edition as a kid.
Martin’s smile was shy, like always, but now it felt like a temptation.
Martin didn’t need that from him.
Seb shook himself and accepted the book.
“I found it on the top shelf,” Martin said. “That means it’s fair game, right?”
“Fair game?” Seb flipped through the pages.
“For you to do something with?”
“You’d be okay with that?” Seb raised an eyebrow. The single action made Martin flush, which in turn made Seb’s mouth go dry. Now that Kenneth had awoken the idea in Seb’s brain, it was stuck there.
It got worse when Martin said, “I don’t think Lewis Carroll was big on dick jokes. So you’ll have to behave yourself.”
Seb muttered a hasty thanks and fled before he did anything else requiring another apology in the morning.
* * *
Cassidy didn’t work at the store on Monday, but she appeared at quarter to six with a box. She hefted it onto the counter, and something inside rattled.
“This is your fault.” She scowled. “I asked my mom about my old art projects like you told me to, and she took me to the attic and showed me this.”
Martin lifted the lid, pulling out the bottom half of an egg carton. Fuzzy green pipe cleaners, bent at odd angles, stuck out from one end.
“Caterpillar?” He held it up to inspect it.
Cassidy moaned and bumped her head off the counter a few times. “No college wants to hear about my preschool crafts.”
“Now hang on.” Martin pulled a few more things out. A ceramic disk with a tiny hand print pressed into the center had the word “Cassidy” scrawled in messy block letters on the bottom. A construction paper silhouette of a child’s head. Little Cassidy’s curls had obviously been a challenge for whoever had traced it out because the result was an irregular shaped blob with the tip of a nose on one side. Cassidy moaned again when he held it up. He laughed and dug through more, pulling out a square canvas stretched over a frame. Cassidy’s eyes widened when she saw it.
“My mom kept that?” Her finger traced the edge of the canvas. In the center was a painted red rose with a twisted black stem.
“What is it?”
“They sent me to summer camp when I was eleven. I hated it. I suck at sports and the food was so bad. But there was an art class in the afternoons. Everyone else wanted to go swimming, so there were like six of us at the class.” She smiled. “I worked every day for two weeks on this. I was so proud when I came home. I wanted my mom to frame it and put it up where everyone could see.”
“And did she?”
“No.” Cassidy’s mouth twisted. “It’s okay, though. It sucks. I can see that now.”
The painting wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was better than anything Martin could do.
“I think it’s pretty good.”
“No.” She ran a finger around the outside curve of the rose. “The shadows are all wrong. See here? The light’s coming from a different place than it is on the rest of the flower. I didn’t know much then.”
“But you were proud of it?”
“Well, yeah.” Despite the fact that she was disparaging the work now, Cassidy rushed to defend her younger self. “I worked hard on it.”
“And you wanted other people to see it.”
“I guess.” She shrugged, but Martin persisted.
“You made something that you wanted other people to see and appreciate. You wanted them to see you and what you could do.”
