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“It’s not an idea, it’s a benefit. Otherwise, you’d be eating uneven cookies.”

Jase chuckles at this and stirs harder.

Once the dough is ready, I scoop out tiny balls, and we dab them into sugar, then line them across the parchment paper. He places the pan into the oven. We then make the icing. Once we finish, I transfer it into a squeeze bottle. Jase takes out the cookies after they bake.

“How should we decorate them?” I ask.

“Surprise me,” Jase says.

I shoot him a look. “If you don’t like my designs, that’s your fault.”

“Who’s decorating again?”

Feeling challenged, I point the tube of icing at him like it’s a weapon. “Just you wait. My decorations are going to be a masterpiece.”

Jase only stares at my icing tube weapon, then at me, and a snort sputters out of him. Guess my kind face and plastic weapon don’t look threatening enough.

“Anyway,” I say, holding the tube over a cookie, “watch and learn.”

I squirt a flower across each cookie. Jase watches with wide eyes, and I grin triumphantly.

“Watching and learning?” I ask smugly.

His eyes squint to slits. “The frosting looks good, okay?”

“Especially on the cookie that I decorated, right?”

His eyes squint into thinner slits. “Let me try.”

Now I’m the one snorting. I hand him the tube and say, “Good luck!”

He takes it from my hand, eyes still squinting into slits, then holds it above a plain cookie like he’s about to stab it. “I don’t need it.”

“If you say so.” I shrug a shoulder.

Jase squirts, instead, a blob of icing. I snicker, and he throws a leer at me. Again, he tries, the bottle farting, another glob spirting onto the cookie. “Oh, shit.”

“Saw it coming.”

Ignoring me, he moves on to the next cookie and squeezes the bottle, spewing out a thin line of icing. He attempts to decorate what I think is a music note, but once he finishes, icing sloppily gushed across the cookie, it looks more like an uneven sailboat.

“Are you sure you don’t need any good luck?” I smirk.

“I’m sure,” he grumbles. But after he decorates the next cookie, yet another sailboat that’s more uneven than the last one, he says, “I think I could use a little help.”

“Gladly!”

I teach Jase a few of my decorating strategies, and he listens and nods. He decorates half the cookies and I decorate the other half. When we finish, it’s obvious whose cookies are whose. Half are decorated with neatly designed flowers while the other half are globs so sloppy you can’t figure out what they are.

“I think we know who the real artist is,” I tease.

Jase darts a look at me, then scoops a glob of icing and smears it across my face.

“Hey!” I squeal.

I grab the tube and squirt at him. Icing blasts against his face. He flinches and scoops another glob of icing. I shoot another blast of icing before darting away.

We’re running around his house, laughing and yelping as we battle over the tube. Jase snatches it and blasts icing into my hair. I snatch it back, firing a laser of icing at his face. When I’m trapped in the corner, he clutches the tube, but I clutch it tighter. Jase lifts it so he can pull it out of my grasp, but I grip hard enough that I can feel the gooey icing in its plastic home.