Page 26 of With Love, from Cold World
He really wanted to sayWhat’syourproblem with that?Back at the beach, he’d thought they were... well, if not connecting, then at least sharing a small moment.
“No problem,” she said, opening her car door. “I shouldn’t have—just forget I said anything. I’ll see you at work.”
There was a stack of DVD rentals on her front passenger seat—Captain America,Iron Man,The Incredible Hulk. Normally, he would’ve teased her about the old-school discs, or about being such a deeply undercover Marvel fan. But whatever lightness he’d felt between them felt prickly and weird now. So instead he just shut her car door after her, raising his hand in a halfhearted wave as she started up her car and backed it out of the spot. Every time he thought he was getting closer to understanding Lauren, he realized he had no idea what made her tick at all.
Chapter
Nine
Lauren never did finish her closet clean-out project. Instead, she just shifted the pile of clothes to the other side of her bed and curled up next to it when it was time to go to sleep. It had actually felt oddly comforting, sleeping next to that pile. But the minute she had that thought, she had to strike it from her brain. It was too sad and pathetic to contemplate.
She purposely gave very little care to what she wore to work the next day, selecting a standard gray skirt and eggplant purple cardigan. She’d thought extensively about dressing up for Daniel, nervous at the prospect of spending a whole block of time in a room with him one-on-one. But she also didn’t want tolooklike she cared.
It was weird, then, that when she gave herself one last look in the mirror before leaving, it wasn’t Daniel she thought of but Asa. She knew she’d ended things badly at the beach, snapping at him like that. She wasn’t even sure why she’d done it.
Hehadwound her up with the dream thing. The truth was that Lauren could be quite gullible, and she’d always hated pranks that preyed on that—ones where someone askedyou to believe something and then made the fact that you believed it the punch line. She’d never understood that kind of joke.
She had to acknowledge that, despite acting like the resident class clown of Cold World, Asa didn’t usually resort to that kind of humor. She’d noticed that his jokes were generally notmean—he didn’t seem to want to laugh at people so much as get them to laugh with him. And he could be just as self-deprecating as he was observant about other people’s quirks and foibles, so it wasn’t like he didn’t play fair.
But she’d found herself curious about him, about the stories of his tattoos, the kinds of things he cared about or thought of. And so when he’d rebuffed that question, turned it around on her, it had felt like a bigger door slam in her face than it probably should have. She didn’t have much in common with Asa Williamson, after all. She didn’t need to unlock all his mysteries. She just needed to get through this stupid holiday season, and the presentation at the end of it.
By the time she got to work, she had half a mind to apologize to Asa when she next saw him. That ended up being sooner than she’d expected, though, as he was back in the break room, drinking his undoubtedly overly sweet coffee that would’ve contaminated the Keurig machine. There was no staff meeting today, and thus no reason for him to be there that early. Unless...
“You’re not coming to this meeting with Daniel,” she said flatly, lifting the machine’s handle and starting the hot water to cleanse it of whatever today’s flavor was.
“You seem to feel very strongly about that. You don’t think you kids might need a chaperone?”
She tried to will her cheeks to stay cool and unflushed but didn’t know if she was successful. Asa had twin stripes of pinkon his own cheeks, probably from the beach yesterday. She wondered how long they’d stayed out. She wondered if they’d talked about her after she left—comparing notes on how weird she was, or why she hadn’t bothered to hang around.
You should try it sometime.Of everything Asa had said, that had hurt the most. It hurt mostly because he wasn’t wrong—she didn’t really have friends. At work, she basically had Kiki, and even then it wasn’t like they were besties telling each other all their secrets. At home, she had no one. Sometimes she was scared she’d signed up to be a guardian ad litem just to have people to see, something todo.
Again, she couldn’t get the machine to actually brew the coffee once she’d put her K-cup in, and again Asa had to put down his own coffee to help her. This time she tried to hold her breath, to not even be tempted to take a deep inhale of that cedar-citrus scent of his. But she found herself staring at his arms instead, at the tree that she’d now seen in full on his bicep. The roots flexed now as he lowered the top of the machine until the whirring sound began. He finally leaned back against the wall with his coffee, and she let out her breath.
“Thanks,” she said.
“I did have an idea last night,” he said. “For a way to improve this place.Yougave it to me, actually.”
She had no clue if this was another trick, where he laid out some elaborate fake idea that was all for fun. She stayed silent, setting her coffee mug back down on the counter until it cooled a little.
“And?” she said finally, when he didn’t appear inclined to go on. “What is it?”
He smiled at her over his coffee. “Oh, I have no intention of sharing it. I just wanted to let you know that yesterday, after a long day at the beach with my friends, I was in theshower washing off all that sand and salt andbam. It hit me. Don’t you love when that happens?”
She knew her mind shouldn’t catch on the wordshower, but she couldn’t help the image that immediately popped into her head. Now that she’d seen his bare chest, it wasn’t hard to picture water sluicing down his arms, his hard, flat stomach, spiking his eyelashes as he looked down at her...
Lauren put the brakes on that train of thought. She had no idea howshe’dended up in this shower fantasy all of a sudden.
Or maybe she did. She was so lonely that sleeping next to a pile of clothing felt comforting, that she was having inappropriate thoughts about a coworker she didn’t even know that she liked that much.
“You okay?” he asked.
She took a quick gulp of her coffee, wincing a little when it burned her tongue. “Of course,” she said. “Fine. Great. I just have a lot of work to do, so I should probably...”
She didn’t bother finishing that sentence before she turned and left. After the holiday season was over, she was going to figure out a way to try to meet more people. She’d try dating apps, she’d join a book club, she had no idea. She just clearly needed to get out of the house more.
It wasn’t lost on her that it was the exact point Asa had been making at the beach.
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