I sit back on the couch. “What? My studio is tiny, Logan. It’s about the size of a big closet. I can’t afford much more.”
“But it has windows. Natural light. And every wall has cool art on it, some of it finished, and some of it in-progress.”
I lift an eyebrow. “You want to release naked pictures of yourself withmyart in the background?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I thought you would like that.”
I lean further back on the couch, scrubbing my palms over my face and then through my hair.
Oh God.
Just act normal.
Yes, he just sat there and said the nicest thing you’ve ever had someone say to you.
But you don’t need to make a big thing out of it.
“That could work,” I tell him, sitting back up and nodding.
He stares at me and I hate how good his grey eyes look as they reflect the light from the fire.
“Yousure?” he asks. “You seemed like you were about to tell me no.”
I shake my head, closing the laptop lid and scooting back on the couch. My phone buzzes in my pocket and I ignore it, but when it keeps buzzing again and again I realize someone’s calling me.
I slide out my phone.
“Shit. It’s my mom,” I tell Logan.
“She’s up at this time of night?”
I nod. “Mom’s a night owl like me. God, I never should have taught her how to video call. I have to answer. I won’t show you, okay? My mom really likesYard Line, so…”
Logan nods. “It’s fine. Go ahead and answer. I have fresh mangoes in the kitchen, I’ll cut some up for us.”
I press the button to answer the call. “Hi, Mom.”
“Chase, this thing was manufactured in thedepthsof hell,” she says immediately, pointing her phone toward the new thermostat I set up in her house last week.
“Hello to you, too, my sweet, loving mother.”
She laughs. “Sorry. Hello, Chasey. Could youpretty pleasehelp yourdearold mother with trying to program the schedule on this technological instrument designed to make me frickin’ lose my mind?”
“Yes, yes, I can,” I tell her. “Okay. What’s the problem? You want to change the schedule on it, or have no schedule?”
“It’s frigid as the Arctic from six ‘til ten, then it suddenly turns into a sauna in here.”
I tell her to show me the different settings, and for the next fifteen minutes, I walk her through deleting the old schedule and making her own. By the end of the call, she’s praising me like I’m some sort of thermostat whisperer, and she settles down onto her couch and looks at me through the video.
“Wait, you’re not in your apartment,” she says, peering at the background. “No brick wall.”
“Oh. No,” I tell her. “I’m at a friend’s place.”
“Fancy friend, huh?”
I see that the background of my video shows part of the white couch as well as the lower wood paneling on the walls of the suite. There’s a framed piece of art on the upper part of the wall.
I nod back at the painting. “It’s a replica of a Matisse painting. You like his stuff, right?”
