Page 39 of Santa Baby

She smirked, giving me a little nudge with her elbow. “I’ll edit it a bit, add some contrast. The copper behind you really makes your eyes pop.”

“Do you have to edit them right away?”

“I’d like to. It’s always better to do it while the little details about what I want to adjust are fresh. I planned on doing that tonight, anyway. I was supposed to go out to dinner with Liv but she canceled last minute, saying she had a date.” Her smile faltered as she shrugged.

“Do you have plans for dinner?”

“Hmm, leftovers and a movie on my couch.” She eyed me for a moment, lowering her camera. “Do you have plans?”

“I’m going back to the office after this for a few hours but no, nothing other than that. I could come over?”

She hesitated again, looking into my eyes like she was searching for something. She had no idea I was doing the same thing. It was stupid, honestly, how the two of us were ignoring what was building between us.

Was it possible for us to just be friends? To go back to the way it was before I kissed her? I hoped so because I wasn’t sure how far I could take this or how far she wanted this to go, but I was forgetting about our deal with every passing moment. My feelings for her weren’t fake anymore.

“Do you want to watch me edit your photos and pick your favorite? Normally I’d send them in an email but if you don’t have plans, I guess I could use the company.”

“Next time, just come in,” Fia teased as I stepped into her apartment. “Oh, my gosh, how hard is it snowing out there?” She brushed snow from my shoulders.

“Hard,” I grumbled, looking for a place to slip off my wet shoes and coat.

“Did you walk?” She laughed in disbelief.

“I told you I liked to walk.”

She helped me with my jacket and hung it up. “What does Rex do while you’re galivanting around town? Isn’t carting you around his only job?”

“Well, he can add fitting a Christmas tree into a service elevator to his resume now. And I don’t galivant, for your information.”

“Sure,” she teased, motioning for me to follow her to the couch. I immediately noticed that her plastic Christmas tree was broken at its base and leaning against the wall, half of its lights burned out.

“Don’t ask,” she huffed, flopping down on the couch. “I’m not ready to talk about it yet.”

I narrowed my eyes at it. “You should unplug it before it starts a fire.”

“You’re always so worried about something traumatic happening to me.” She slid over so I could sit beside her, but the couch wasn’t that big, and our thighs were touching as she leaned forward to grab her laptop off the coffee table. “Fracturing my skull falling out of my loft, falling down your stairs, getting hit by snowballs. Now, suffocating from smoke inhalation because my fifteen-year-old Christmas tree may catch fire in the middle of the night? You must really like your fake girlfriend, darling.”

“I’d have to find a new one if anything happened to you, that’s why.”

“Oh, please. Like that would be hard.”

It would be hard to find someone I liked as much as her. She opened her laptop and proceeded to walk me through all the edits she made, directing me to choose my favorite. In the end, her favorite won out, and she emailed it to me.

“Is taking pictures of couples different than doing portraits?”

“In a way,” she replied, leaning her back against the cushions. “Weddings are generally very posed and you have to worry about two bodies instead of just one. Portraits are of the face, you know, so there’s a lot of emotion and nuance involved. That’s why I wanted you to smile.” Her eyes met mine. “When you smile at me you get this look in your eyes that I don’t see otherwise.” She toyed with a loose string on her gray sweatpants. “I wanted to see if I could capture it, and I did.”

“Do you take pictures of yourself?”

She laughed. “No, no I don’t. How vain do you think I am?”

“I was just asking.” I was smiling. I hadn’t realized how much I’d wanted to hear her laugh today.

“You know what I was thinking earlier? We don’t have any pictures together, and I know you don’t have social media and you still live in the bronze age⁠—”

“What do you mean, bronze age?”

She turned ever so slightly to face me, tucking her legs beneath her. “I talked to Colin yesterday and he said people—don’t ask me who—have been talking about the fact the infamously private Mr. O’Leary has finally been seen in public with his girlfriend.”