The implication was clear. She didn’t expect him to do any work on his own. He flashed back to the comment she’d made when he tried to convince her to work together, how she’d carried the weight of enough slackers in school.
There’d been enough truth in that to sting a little. Asa had never been the most diligent student—in high school, he’d been way more interested in navigating the social side of things. He’d had his first girlfriend at thirteen, his first boyfriend at fifteen, and then there’d been the whirlwind of keeping any relationship secret from his hyper-religious parents, because the only thing worse than premarital sex was premarital queer sex.
And then he’d been on his own two weeks before graduation. He’d technically still gotten the credits to get his diploma in the mail, but he hadn’t bothered to walk. There would’ve been nobody there to support him, anyway. It had never even occurred to him to go to college. With what money? And to do what?
Lauren had gone to college. He knew that because she had her diploma framed and leaning against a wall behind her desk. It was as if she meant to hang it but never got around to it, or maybe she was embarrassed to put it out front and center. The more he got to know Lauren, the more either explanation made a certain amount of sense.
“You did start it, you know,” he said.
He expected a denial, or maybe defensiveness. What he didn’t expect was for her to put her head in her hands and let out a low, guttural growl. A sound that shot immediately to his dick.
Well, that was unexpected.
“Ugh,” she said, her fingers curling in her hair. “I do know. I am so sorry. I have no idea what came over me—”
“Hey,” he said. “It’s okay. I—”
I liked it. That was the sentence that was about to pop out of his mouth. But he couldn’t say that.
“I think that guy got my hackles up,” Lauren was saying. “Got me feeling all aggressive. The snow was there, and I was frustrated, and . . . I took it out on you. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” Asa said. He didn’t know why that explanation disappointed him a little bit, but it did. “That makes sense. I shouldn’t have put you in that position.”
She frowned. “I know to you I must seem really . . .” She blew her bangs out of her eyes, looking up like she was searching for the right word. “Timid. But I promise you, I can handle myself.”
Weird, but timid wasn’t a word Asa would’ve used to describe Lauren. Careful, maybe, or reserved. She was deliberate, and thoughtful. He had no doubt she’d been thinking her way through the confrontation with that guy, considering what would allow her to stay professional and courteous but also get out of the situation. She struck him as someone very concerned with doing the right thing, but definitely not timid.
He didn’t know why he felt like he knew her well enough to say that, but he did.
He also didn’t know what made him say what he did next, except that the more he saw Lauren outside of the rigid role she’d always occupied in his mind, the more she intrigued him.
“Kiki and I are both off this Sunday,” he said. “We were all thinking of going up to New Smyrna Beach, if you wanted to come.”
She blinked at him, as though the words coming out of his mouth were in a foreign language, and she was waiting for her translation software to catch up.
“Assuming you’re free,” he said. “And feel like making the drive.”
This was such a mistake. She was looking at him now like he had two heads.
“The beach,” she said. “In December.”
He laughed, hoping it sounded more natural than it felt coming out of his chest. “I know it’s hard to remember in this place, but it’s seventy-five degrees outside. This is the best time of year to go. Not as crowded, you don’t feel like you’re melting . . .”
“I can’t,” she said. “I mean, I appreciate the invitation. I just have a lot to do before the holidays, and I should probably work on the proposal, and that’s a pretty long drive. It would take up my whole day.”
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 they had waited 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. “Lauren Fox?”
“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.