Page 40 of Snowed In with Benefits

I like that she’s going to be wearing it.

16

JOSIE

Gasping, I shoot wide awake in the dark. I was dreaming… about something… my heart is racing and my breath is coming in short bursts. There’s a throbbing between my legs, a damp heat, and I’m sweating. I’m so aroused it almost hurts.

The dream. What was I dreaming about? Who was I dreaming about?

Maybe I was having a dream about Preston.

I frown as soon as that thought enters my mind, shaking my head. No, definitely not Preston. I might question whether I’m crazy to run away from the life we were building together, but I would never say that our sex life is the thing that makes me crazy for leaving. There were never really fireworks between us in that department.

It wasn’t like he was terrible in bed or anything. It’s just that I always felt like I had to do more to measure up to his expectations. Like I had to make the right sounds, the right gestures, pretending to come at the right moment and if I didn’t he would be disappointed. I was always so focused on keeping his approval that I never really let myself enjoy the moment.

I was always second-guessing myself. It’s hard to have good sex when you feel like you’re being graded on your performance.

Brushing those thoughts aside, I roll over and try to get comfortable again. It’s no use, I’m wide awake. What time is it? No, it doesn’t matter. It’s still dark outside. If I look at my phone to check the time, I’ll never get back to sleep.

I fight it for a solid few minutes. The impulse to check my phone, the impulse to get out of bed and get away from whatever dream had a stranglehold on my loins just a few minutes ago. Eventually, I stop fighting. I want to get out of this room.

Grabbing my laptop, I open my door as quietly as possible and creep into the hallway. It’s dark, but the moon is bright and I can navigate by the shadows. It’s not like I don’t know this place by now. Apart from helping Beau with the deer, I haven’t left this house since I arrived.

The thought of Beau brings back the feeling of the dream, so I push the thought and feeling away. Padding down the stairs as quietly as possible, I can hear Beau gently snoring on the couch. I feel bad that he’s still sleeping there. Tiptoeing past his couch, I head for the back of the house.

I could sit in the kitchen, but sound carries from there into the living room and I don’t want to risk waking up Beau. I remember the office, the little room across the hall from the bathroom, and I go in there instead. Flicking on the light, I take stock of the space.

It’s a cozy room. There’s a desk, a full wall of bookcases, a desk chair, and a cozy chair in the corner under a standing lamp. The ceiling slants slightly toward the desk, and I realize that the stairs are right overhead. It’s a comfortable little room.

Curling up in the cozy chair, I inhale through my nose. I can smell Emmett on my shirt, that specific lumberjack scent of pine and flannel. There’s a hint of Hunter, too, lingering on my skin; the scent of his clothes that I’d been wearing all day before changing into Emmett’s. The smell does something to me, warming my belly and giving me goosebumps all at once.

The shirt brushes against my thighs as I tuck my legs up into the chair. The fabric is rougher than the shirt that Beau burned, but I kind of like it better. It feels more real, somehow. Sighing contentedly, I open up my laptop and click into my photo editor.

I start with the cardinal. It’s good, but it could be better. I adjust the colors slightly, the contrast, the cropping, then save it as a copy. I don’t want to overwrite the original. It’s a little habit I’ve developed, a sort of anxiety that I’ll edit something wrong and never be able to recover it, or that the original is better than anything I could do to it.

The fears are mostly unfounded, but it only takes one wonky edit to give some of us lasting artistic anxiety.

I click through the batch until I find the picture I took through the window. It’s a beautiful picture of a cardinal in the tree, but that isn’t what interests me. This is the photo I caught of Beau negotiating with the deer. Cropping, zooming, and enhancing only gets me so far. It’s actually clearer as a speck in the background, but it still makes me smile.

I roll my neck, letting relaxation spread across my shoulders. This meticulous, detailed, steady work grounds and settles me. It’s almost like writing in a diary or doodling on a page, satisfying the same piece of my brain. I’ve gotten better at the technical side of things recently. All this down time with just me and my camera has allowed me to develop some skills that have gotten rusty over the last few years.

I wonder what I could do now with some of my older pictures. That’s another reason I like to keep the originals; sometimes, I like to go back and make a good picture even better once I have the skills to do so. I know that a bunch of these pictures are completely raw and unedited; I didn’t really have the time to edit them when I took them.

There’s one of a pink and gold teacup catching the light just right. I took it at a little café that Preston brought me to. He wasn’t happy when I pulled out my camera, but I couldn’t resist this photo. I made it up to him for the rest of the evening, hobnobbing with his friends and making him look good.

It might bring back less than good memories, but it’s still a great picture. I work a little magic on it and bring it to life. Now it practically breathes on the screen. Smiling, I click through to the next image.

A moth on a lace curtain. I remember being disappointed in this one. The moth was so delicate and had such intricate patterns, rivaling and complementing the lace it sat on, and my camera couldn’t seem to capture it properly. But with a little enhancement… there. Disappointment dissolves into joy as the creature comes to life on my screen.

I click through a few more without stopping to edit. A velvet chair with a carved wooden back, my bedroom slippers sitting in a ray of sunshine, my sister’s cat peeking out from under a duvet. Little moments of my life. Little moments of beauty.

The next photo is a picture of me and Preston. It’s nicely composed, the color is all right, but there’s something wrong with it that I can’t put my finger on right away. Frowning, I zoom in to my own face. It’s my smile. It looks fine at first glance, but it’s not. That smile is completely fake.

My frown deepens. I never noticed that before, but now it’s all I can see. I was never really happy, was I? I was just pretending to be, because I was expected to be. Just like I pretended to come, because I was expected to come. I shudder at the parallel and push all thoughts of sex from my mind.

I look at my face for a while longer, comparing it to Preston’s face. His smile looks calculated, if genuine. Optics, always with the optics. He sucked me into that mindset, but it was easy to do so. My mother had me prepped and ready to be the person who made other people look good. It’s how she raised us. It’s how she trained us. It’s always been the biggest point of contention between us, but I fell for it in the end, didn’t I?

Blowing out a breath, I move on to the next photo, then the next and the next. I’m barely even looking at them now. My mind is otherwise occupied with my fake smile.