Page 20 of With Love, from Cold World
Asa held up his hand before she could keep going listing every reason she could think of not to go. It was fine if she didn’t want to. But if it got to the point where she said she needed to stay home to wash her hair or wait for a delivery, he’d feel like a bigger chump than he already did. “No worries,” he said. “If I don’t see you around, I guess I’ll see you at the budget meeting on Monday.”
“You’re not—” she started to say, but he never let her finish the sentence. He turned and left her office, rubbing at the back collar of his shirt, now completely dry.
•••
Asa volunteered at an LGBTQ youth crisis line as a text counselor, which meant he spent three hours a week taking chats from teens who needed someone to talk to. Mostly they were dealing with coming out, or being bullied at school, or questioning their identity, but every once in a while one was in the middle of an active suicidal crisis, and those always required more time and care. On a call like tonight’s, it was Asa’s supervisor who did most of the work to call a consult, see if emergency services needed to be dispatched, and all of that. Asa’s job was just to be present, check in with the person regularly, and try to offer some validation and empathy while gathering information about their safety.
Still, it had taken a lot out of him, and it had been a weird day in general. His housemates had promised to wait for him to finish his late shift at the crisis line, even after it ended up going longer than scheduled, but he almost hoped they’d started the show without him. He didn’t know that he was up for a night of snarky guilty pleasure TV watching.
Since theyhadwaited for him, he didn’t want to say no, so he plopped down on the couch next to Kiki and made a few halfhearted comments about last episode’s double elimination. When they had to pause it only ten minutes while Elliot left the room on a phone call, Asa leaned his head back against the couch and closed his eyes.
“Your shift okay?” Kiki asked.
“Fine,” he said. “Just, you know. Long day.”
“I don’t know how you do it,” she said. “Doing hours of that on top of working a ten-hour day at Cold World. All I did was show up for five hours of watching for shoplifters and ringing up magnets, and I’m beat.”
Kiki looked at John, as if for support. He held up his hands and shook his head.
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “You know I haven’t held a real job in... well, ever.”
“Lucky bastard,” Asa said.
Kiki snorted. “You of all people don’t mean that. I swear I’ve never met anyone who finds more ways to have fun at their job than you. Is it true you got into a snowball fight today in the Snow Globe?”
Normally, Asa didn’t mind the perception that he goofed off at work. He hadn’t done much to disabuse people of that notion, and there was some truth to it, after all. Why was it such a bad thing, finding ways to have fun at work? If more people could do it, they might be happier.
But for some reason, he was getting tired of playing the role of the jester.
“Lauren started it,” he said, which wasn’t exactly a great beginning to his new mature persona.
“Lauren?” Kiki’s eyes went wide. “LaurenFox?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.” Her face registered disbelief, then something more pensive. “I guess I can’t blame her if she finally snapped. You can be pretty annoying.”
“Gee, thanks.” He was already regretting giving Kiki more information than was strictly necessary, but at the same time he couldn’t seem to get off the subject. “I invited her out to the beach this weekend.”
“Oh, that’s awesome,” Kiki said. “I would’ve invited her myself if I’d thought of it.”
“Maybe then she would’ve said yes.”
John was typing something on his phone, acting like he wasn’t listening, but even his eyebrows rose at that. Asa didn’t like this itchy feeling, like he was exposed in some way. He rushed to explain what he meant before Kiki could draw any wrong conclusions.
“Like you said, she finds me annoying,” he said. “Or she thinks she’s better than me, or both. I can’t tell. The point is, she’s not coming to the beach. I just wanted to give you a heads-up that I invited her, in case it came up, or she changed her mind.”
Even to Asa’s ears, that explanation sounded pretty flimsy. The truth was, he had no idea why he’d mentioned it at all. Kiki reached forward to grab her Coke off the coffee table and take a big gulp. John was off his phone now, watching him. For someone who didn’t even know who they weretalking about, Asa had the sneaking suspicion that John understood more of the undercurrents in the conversation than might be expected. He could be the very definition ofstill waters run deep.
“Why would she think she’s better than you?” John asked.
Asa shrugged, resisting the urge to sayBecause sheisbetter than me?He didn’t believe that, deep down. But it was hard not to see all the ways that, if she believed that, she’d be right. She had a college degree, a job where she worked in an office, her own apartment (which she undoubtedly rented, but still—in this economy?). She was responsible and competent and professional.
Well, except for the snowball incident.
“She doesn’t,” Kiki said. “I know Lauren might seem stuck-up, but she’s really not like that. Sometimes I think—”
Elliot came bounding into the room, plopping down on the second couch next to John. “Okay, sorry about that,” they said. “I swear my mother feels the need to narrate every single second of any commercial that makes her cry. Which is practically all of them at this time of year. Have you seen the one with the old guy training to lift his granddaughter up to put the star on the tree?”
