Page 36 of With Love, from Cold World
If he’d needed a reminder that what they were doing wasnota date, he guessed he’d gotten it.
Chapter
Eleven
Normally spreadsheets were Lauren’s happy place. She loved formatting the columns to right-align all the numbers, loved dragging the cursor down to copy a formula to each cell, loved sorting the data in different permutations and seeing how it looked. She wouldn’t have necessarilychosento be at work at eleven o’clock at night playing with Excel, but it was far from the worst time she could come up with.
Now, she wasn’t even finding comfort in work routines. She was tired, and saying all the wrong things, and forced to confront what had to be obvious to everyone else. It was definitely obvious to Asa.
Daniel wasn’t coming. Tonight hadn’t been a date—it had barely been a dinner between colleagues. He’d wanted her to bring him some paperwork like she was his secretary, and then she would’ve sat awkwardly around a table with a bunch of strangers who were eager to catch up with each other, not her.
Ugh. And she’d called Danielsexyin front of Asa. She felt like she could burst into flames of embarrassment.
She wondered how she was going to sleep tonight. Maybeif she folded her arms on her desk and laid her head down on top of them...
She was trying it out when a soft knock came at the door, and she jerked up straight so fast she sent her chair rolling backward.
“You look like me in high school,” Asa said, the corner of his mouth quirking up. “Always sleeping in class.”
He set a lidded paper cup on her desk. “Truce hot chocolate,” he said. “I didn’t know if you drank caffeine this late, or I would’ve made you your usual black battery acid.”
She reached for the cup. It was warm under her fingertips, and that alone was surprisingly comforting. She took a tentative sip, trying not to grimace. She didn’t normally like hot chocolate, but it was such a surprisingly sweet gesture, she didn’t want to ruin the moment.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m sorry I overreacted. Again.”
“Not an overreaction,” he said, leaning against her desk. “You feel how you feel. And I was pushing your buttons on purpose. It’s one of my least attractive qualities, as you’ve no doubt noticed.”
“Well.” Lauren felt a little disarmed by the fact that he’d so easily capitulated. By now, she expected the teasing, the jokes, the way he got under her skin. She was more surprised when he backed off, or apologized, or seemed to actually notice and care about the effect his teasing might have on her. She waved to her computer monitor, the list next to her keyboard. “I’m overly rigid and don’t like not being in control. Some ofmyleast attractive qualities, as you’ve no doubt noticed.”
“Quite a pair, aren’t we?” He smiled at her, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. But then he slid her list closer to him, and she thought she must’ve imagined that brief sadness that had passed over his face.
“What’s with the numbering, by the way?” he asked, running his finger down the margin of the page. “They’re not in order.”
She grabbed for the notepad, but he’d already lifted it to hold it in his lap, and she wasn’t going there. It was bad enough that his thigh was less than a foot away from where she usually placed her hands on the home keys. He was wearing jeans, the denim soft and worn, and she felt like she could feel the heat emanating from him sitting this close. She tried to look up at him but felt vulnerable from that angle; she couldn’t stare straight ahead or she’d risk looking right at his crotch. Eventually she settled for watching her own hands, knotting and unknotting in her lap.
“I use a random number generator,” she said. “To pick what task I do next.”
“A random number generator.”
She knew telling him would only open up moreLauren is a robotcomparisons, but the cat was out of the bag now. “Yeah, like if I have to go through all the bank account transactions and reconcile them with our QuickBooks,” she said. “It’s not hard, but it’s one of those tedious tasks that you just neverwantto do. Especially when something’s off by like twelve cents, and you have to go pull up both screens and compare back and forth, trying to figure out where you input something wrong... but if I made it number three on my list, and the random number generator comes up with three, then I have to do it. No excuses.”
“No excuses for yourself,” he clarified. “This is you, cracking the whip on... yourself.”
“It works!” she said. “Haven’t you ever had a task you’re scared of? Like, you don’t even want toopenthat can of worms. So you write step one down on your list, put a number next toit, and boom. When that number comes up, you have to do it. You don’t give yourself the chance to be scared of it.”
He shifted back on her desk, bringing his ankle up to cross over his knee. She should care that he’d just pushed back a whole stack of papers that were now fanned precariously close to the edge. She should care that he was making himself so at home in here when they’d been arguing off and on all day. But she didn’t. She was too focused on his face, which had lit from something within as he grabbed a pen off her desk and turned to the next page in the notepad.
“I like this idea,” he said, starting to jot something down. “Random numbers to help you get over the stuff you’re scared of.”
“Or just don’t want to do,” she pointed out. “I use it for all kinds of trivial daily tasks. Anything urgent I bump to the top of the list, but everything else gets assigned a number one to ten, and then when I cross one off I assign the next thing on the list that number.”
“Got it,” he said. “We’re going to play a little differently.”
Lauren felt a frisson of... was it anxiety, or anticipation? “What do you meanplay?”
“Shhh, hang on,” he said, still writing. “Sorry, didn’t mean to shush you. Just give me a second. I’m trying to think of two more.”
“Two morewhat?”
