He got to work on the fake plant in the corner, stringing it with the lights and adding ornaments with big enough loops of string to fit around the plastic leaves. Just as the alarm went off, he nestled the polar bear into her garland display, and she threw a bunch of tinsel into the air. Pieces of it were still floating to the ground as he reached in his pocket to turn off the radar tone blaring from his phone.
“Jesus,” he said. “Haven’t you ever heard less is more?”
“I told you. I’m competitive.”
There was tinsel in her hair. He reached over to pluck it out, letting his fingers rest in the soft strands a few seconds longer than the action called for. “Apparently.”
She was still breathing harder than usual from all the energetic activity of their contest. Maybe that was why her lips were parted as she watched him twist the silver tinsel between his fingers, but all he could think was that he really, really wanted to kiss her.
“So?” she prompted.
“Hmm?”
“Who won?”
He placed the tinsel delicately on the polar bear’s lap, like it was holding on to its own decoration to participate in the next contest. “I’m the clear winner, showing tasteful restraint with a nod to tradition in my decoration of a plastic Christmas ficus. But ultimately you’re the winner for every day you work inside such a festive office.”
“I knew it was rigged.”
He switched off the harsh fluorescent overhead light, so the office was lit instead by the Christmas lights on the fake plant in the corner. He dropped down to sit on the carpet next to it, and after a moment Lauren sank down next to him, tucking her legs under her.
He unlocked his phone and handed it to her. “Your turn.”
“Number four,” she said, biting her lip. “Tell me a secret.”
He leaned his head back on the wall, closing his eyes. “My passcode is just my house number, with the first two digits repeated. So one-six-eight-two-one-six. Now you can get into my phone without me.”
“That’s not a secret.”
He cracked one eye open to look at her. “Do you go around telling people your personal security information?”
“Well, no,” she admitted. “But you know what I mean. It’s not like that number means anything. It’s not the number of stuffed animals you slept with as a kid or the number of times you got blackout drunk and tried to jump off a roof.”
“One stuffed animal,” he said, “for the record. A dalmatian named Sparky my sister got me for Christmas when I was four. Unfortunately, I left Sparky at an Olive Garden when I was nine. And I’ve never gotten blackout drunk and jumped off the roof, but presumably it would only take one time?”
“Okay,” she said. “Point taken.”
Unconsciously, he rubbed his chest, the area above his heart where he saw the same four-digit number every morning when he looked in the mirror. “You asked me about my tattoos once,” he said. “The truth is that most of them don’t really mean anything—they’re just stuff I thought looked cool. Some of them I even got on a whim, or a dare.” He pointed to a small illustration of a flying saucer on his forearm, done in a solid black outline with some simple shading. “Like this one. Elliot had to go to this convention to cover a story, and there was an artist doing some flash work on the main floor. Elliot wanted to know who would get something as permanent as a tattoo that way, I said why not, they dared me to do it, and half an hour later I had this on my arm.”
Lauren was looking at his arms with such focused attention now that he felt goose bumps prickle across his skin. And he generally ran warm—it was the reason why he rarely bothered with long-sleeved shirts even with the air conditioning running so cold inside. It wasn’t just so he could show off his arms, whatever Lauren might think. Although with the way she was looking at him now, it gave him further reason not to cover up.
“You never have any regrets?” she asked.
“Nah.”
“I guess by now you have so many, it probably doesn’t feel like such a big deal. Was it hard to choose your first one?”
He rubbed at his chest again, thinking back to the tattoo parlor he’d walked into on his eighteenth birthday, the less than ten minutes it had taken to mark his body with the only tattoo he did regret. “I got the numbers six-five-four-three tattooed right here,” he said, poking a finger so hard into the muscle around his heart that it almost hurt. “That was the number of days I lived in my parents’ house. When I figured that out, it seemed significant somehow, that the number so perfectly descended like that. I don’t know.”