Page 54 of With Love, from Cold World
Sure, he texted back, and kicked a dirty T-shirt under his bed. At least his room wasmostlyneat.
Her soft knock came only a minute later, and he sat back in his desk chair, trying to look like he’d been there the whole time. “Come in.”
She glanced around, taking in everything from the artwork on the walls to the bookshelf in the corner to his rumpled dark teal bedspread, his laptop and earbuds still discarded on his bed where he’d left them.
“Elliot got me that,” he said when her gaze landed on a cactus-shaped lamp on his dresser. “From a trip to New Mexico with their boyfriend at the time. It stopped working abouta month later—just longer than the relationship, actually—but I still like it, so.”
He was rambling. Why would Lauren give a fuck about alamp?
“It’s nice,” she said. She came up to the desk, so close he could reach out and pull her onto his lap if he wanted. Which, obviously, he wouldn’t do. She touched the sketchbook page, tapping an illustration of swirling snowflakes he’d made in one corner.
“I should’ve known you were an artist,” she said. “Your handwriting alone.”
He forced himself to swallow the usual protest—that he wasn’treallyan artist. He’d never gone to school for it, never made money from it. He barely showed anyone the stuff he worked on. But if that was how Lauren saw him, he wasn’t about to disabuse her of the notion.
“I’m thinking what Cold World needs is a total revamp of the Snow Globe,” he said. “Not just to include a snow effect from the ceiling—not in the whole place, just in one corner—but also more color and visual interest. We need to make it more selfie-worthy. Social media–worthy. A place where families go to take their Christmas card photos and couples go to get engaged and influencers go to... whatever they do. Tell people to come visit Orlando. We’re never going to have Cinderella’s Castle, but we needsomethingthat feels iconic. Where you see a flash of a picture in a brochure and think, oh, that’s the place with the snow!”
He took a breath, trying to gauge her reaction from her profile. Her lashes lowered as she turned the page to reveal more drawings, then flicked up to the paintings on his wall.
“You did those,” she said.
They were from a while ago, when his style had been alittle looser, more abstract. But they shared a sense of color in common—Asa liked vibrant, saturated hues in his art.
“Yeah.”
“You did the one in the living room,” she said. “The boy on the stairs.”
“That one, too.”
She glanced back down at the sketchbook, running her fingers over the glossy imprint of a colored-pencil penguin wearing a blue-and-white-striped scarf. “These are amazing,” she said. “I can see a whole mural of this kind of thing in the Snow Globe, and then you could design magnets, tote bags... all kinds of merch featuring the same art. That might bring more people inandmove product in the gift shop all in one go. It’s brilliant.”
“Well,” Asa said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Except that I’ve never painted a mural in my life. It’s a lot different, doodling a few things in a sketchbook.”
She started flipping more pages, and he reached out to grasp her wrist, stopping her mid-action.
“Sorry,” he said. “Some of the rest are, uh...”
For you.He thought of the idea he’d had for her Christmas present, the general sketches he’d done already.Of you.He thought of a loose pencil sketch of her profile he’d worked on idly weeks ago, back when they’d been called into Dolores’ office and Lauren had said having falling snow in the Snow Globe would bemagical. He drew people all the time. If she went through the whole sketchbook, she’d see pictures he’d done of his housemates, of random customers at a local coffee shop, of celebrities. But the one of her had been different, and he worried she’d know it right away just by looking at it.
“Pornographic?” she asked, and he almost choked.
“Private.”
“Ah,” she said, flushing a little. “Right. Sorry.”
He still hadn’t released her wrist. Her pulse jumped beneath his fingertips. “You really think I’d put all my pornographic drawings in the same notebook as that little penguin guy? There’s gotta be a separation of church and state.”
“So in this scenario, pornography is... church? Or state?”
“Okay,” he said. “Bad example.”
He stroked his thumb along the back of her hand, half because he wanted to and half to see if she’d pull away. When she didn’t, he cleared his throat. “Lauren...”
Clearly, they were on a similar wavelength, because she cut him off before he could get another word out. “About last night,” she said. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
He didn’t know what she’d meant to say, but he could tell from the way she clenched her eyes shut for a moment that it hadn’t been that. He didn’t even bother trying to hide the grin that cracked over his face. “Same here.”
“I think some of that is because it feels... unfinished.”
