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Rounding the corner into the kitchen, I wasn’t the least bit surprised to find Wynn already standing at the island, pouring herself a glass of wine. We hung out often enough that I always had at least two bottles of her favorite on hand.
I’d given her a key several months ago when a job for my company, Elite Investigations, had taken me out of town for a couple weeks. I’d asked her to look in on the place, pick up my mail, and water the few plants I had somehow managed to keep alive. I never bothered to ask her to return it and I had a key to her place now as well. It was simply more convenient for us to be able to let ourselves in to whichever house when we hung out together.
Her head came up, those unusual and extraordinary violet eyes of hers landing on me and doing a quick scan before they rolled back in her head. “Oh, come on!”
My forehead creased with confusion. “What?”
She jerked her chin in the general direction of my middle. “What is with you guys and gray sweatpants? Do they not make men’s sweats in any other color? I mean, youknowwhat they do. You have to. An entire gender can’t be that oblivious.” She waved her hand at my crotch. “All that business just flinging and flopping around in there like a hairless cat trapped in a hammock or something.”
I’d just taken a pull from the beer she’d opened and left on the island for me and proceeded to choke.
I managed to clear my throat and drag air into my lungs, but it took a good thirty seconds to recover. “Quite the image you just painted there, Bits.” I looked down at my junk and shrugged a shoulder. “But I don’t think I’d compare it to a hairless cat, for Christ’s sake. Maybe a kielbasa?”
She let out a snort, a teasing smile pulling at her lips from behind her wineglass. “Says you.”
I moved farther into the kitchen, stopping at her side to leanwaydown and press a quick kiss to her temple. I was a big dude, standing a few inches above six feet, and Wynn was exceptionally small, hence her nickname, Bits, shortened from itsy bitsy.
“Never had any complaints in that department,” I said as I followed my nose to the two pizza boxes sitting in the center of the island. My stomach let out a grateful rumble as I flipped the lid back on the box on the right. That rumble turned from grateful to sour as I curled my lip in disgust at the sight that greeted me.
“Christ, Bits. That looks like vomit. I hope you don’t expect me to eat that shit.”
She shot me a glare over her shoulder as she reached into a cabinet for a couple plates, having to stand on the tips of her toes in order to reach them. “It doesnotsmell like vomit, jerk.” She set the plates down and flipped the second box open.
Thank God.
My shoulders lowered in relief at the sight of the steaming pepperoni pizza. “Here, you whiner. This one is just for you.” She pulled out two slices of her barf pizza and dropped them onto her plate. “And for your information, spinach Alfredo is a very popular pizza topping. Maybe you’d know that if you stepped out of your rigid comfort zone every once in a while.”
I doubled up, pulling out four slices of mynormalpizza before grabbing both plates and heading for the living room as she followed behind with our drinks and napkins. It was a dance we’d done so often it was second nature to both of us by now. We spent at least two nights a week hanging out together, not to mention the meet-ups for coffee or the occasional lunch in town. Most weeks we saw each other almost every day, so we had a nice, steady rhythm to our friendship, a routine we each knew by heart, and that worked great for me.
I dropped onto one end of the couch, kicking my feet up on the coffee table and propping my plate on my stomach while she tucked herself into the opposite corner, crisscrossing her short legs in front of her before resting a throw pillow in her lap and using it as a makeshift table.
“So how was painting?” I asked before chomping off a huge bite. “You manage to make something halfway decent this time?”
It was a real bone of contention for Wynn that she wasn’t the most artistic person in the world, and I always had fun giving her a hard time about it.
She let out a disgruntled huff and pointed the tip of her pizza slice toward the fireplace before taking a bite and speaking around it. “You tell me. It’s yours now, by the way. Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday. Don’t think for a second you’re allowed to return or regift it either.”
I followed her line of sight, spotting a small canvas propped against the hearth. I wasn’t sure if it was the distance that made the object in the very center difficult to make out, or if she was justthat bad. But it looked like I was staring at an oversized turd.
“What the hell am I looking at, babe?”
She wiped a bit of Alfredo sauce from the corner of her mouth with her thumb. “It’s a dog playing in a field,” she announced loftily, her chin held high, eyes narrowed like I was the idiot for not getting it.
“That’s a dog?”
She nodded.
“And all that shit around it... that’s supposed to be a field?”
She gave me a sardonic look that screamedwell, duh. “Of course it is. Can’t you see the trees and the grass?”
Okay, so she really wasthat bad. Deciding the best course of action would simply be to lie, I hummed around a bite of pizza and nodded my head. “Oh yeah. Now that you mention it, I totally see the tree. And that big white blob in the upper left corner is definitely a...” I trailed off, praying she’d fill in the blank.
“A cloud.”
“Yep. Definitely a cloud. You did great, Bits. I’ll put it beside the ashtray you gave me last month.”
She let out a noise of affront and dropped the pizza slice back onto her plate with a gooeyplop. That was a fruit bowl, Gage, not an ashtray. God!”
