“For real,” Marj agreed. “And they always look like regular glasses that have just been tinted.”
That sent Kiki and Marj off in a discussion about ordering glasses online and whether they were comparable quality to the ones you could buy at a store—Marj was firmly in the camp that you had to go somewhere in person to try them on, whereas Kiki said the word LensCrafters with such a withering derision that Lauren didn’t know that she’d ever be able to walk into one again. It was nice, just sitting there and letting the conversation wash around her. It was obvious this was a group of people who knew each other well, and cared about each other. The way Kiki talked right over Elliot, her voice rising in correlation to the faces they pulled in response, the way John’s contributions were quieter but always seemed to weigh more, as though because he didn’t speak as much they valued it more when he did. Asa was just like he was at work—laughing, easy, casual.
And yet somehow even he was a little different. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but it was like the happy-go-lucky persona at work was an act, while this one was the more authentic version. The fake was so good you wouldn’t notice the difference until you compared the two side-by-side, but it was there.
“What are you thinking about?” Asa said. His voice was low, and around them everyone else was still talking about whatever subject they’d moved on to. Lauren realized she’d been tuning it all out. And she’d also been staring directly at him the entire time. Whoops.
“Nothing,” she said. But then that sounded vacuous, so she cast around for something to say instead, and landed on something that probably only made her seem like an even bigger creep. “What do your tattoos mean?”
He looked down at his arms. She could see the full tree on his right bicep that she’d noticed before, now stretching up to cover one shoulder. His other arm was more abstract, with a geometric pattern and some swirls of a foamy blue wave. There was a number in a bold slash of a font above his left nipple, but she really didn’t want to be caught staring there. Even with her sunglasses on, it would be so obvious.
“Ah, come on,” he said. “Nobody wants to hear about someone else’s tattoos. It’s like hearing someone describe a dream.”
Lauren knitted her brows together. “You don’t like hearing about people’s dreams?”
“I do, actually. But you know what I mean. It’s a thing.”
“I love hearing about people’s dreams.”
Asa gave a little scoff of a laugh like he didn’t believe her. “We’re talking about nighttime dreams,” he said. “Not just like, hopes and dreams. Not someone describing how they want to be a teacher or compete on a singing show or live in a tiny house one day. Even you wouldn’t be so heartless as to say you hated hearing someone talk about that kind of dream.”
His words made Lauren flinch a little. Even you. She knew that was how he saw her, maybe deservedly so after the cancel Secret Santa incident at that very first holiday party. So why did it feel like closing her fingers in a drawer each and every time he brought it up?
If that first holiday party had been bad, the second one was even more excruciating to remember. Lauren could only hope that, through some miracle, Asa had completely blocked it from his memory. He hadn’t seemed drunk, but he’d had at least one beer. She knew because she’d tasted it on his lips.
In the most cliché moment ever, they’d gotten caught under the mistletoe. Why they even had mistletoe at a work function was beyond Lauren, but Dolores didn’t cut any corners when it came to the holidays at Cold World. If they’d just kept moving, probably no one would’ve noticed. But Asa had stepped back, trying to let Lauren through the doorway, and she’d done the awkward No, you go ahead thing, and the next thing she knew, Saulo was calling out, “Lauren and Asa are under the mistletoe! You know what that means! Come on, man, lay one on her for Christmas!”
Saulo had definitely been drunk. Obviously, it was totally inappropriate to yell at your coworker to lay one on another coworker. It was also a little sexist, assuming that Asa had to be the one to make the move. Most of all, Lauren could think of nothing more mortifying than kissing someone for the first time in such a public spectacle.
By then, others were adding their encouragement. She’d looked up at Asa, trying to convey with her face something like This is so weird or We totally don’t have to do this. But she also found herself looking at his mouth, and wondering what it would be like to kiss him . . . to be kissed by him. By the time she glanced back up at his eyes, he was making a face like Sure, why not.
And then he’d leaned in. That was the moment carved in Lauren’s memory, because it was the split second when she could’ve made a different decision, and things would’ve ended so much better. His angle was a little odd, so instinctively she’d tilted her head to find his mouth, their lips connecting with an almost cartoonish smooch sound. It was only after she’d pulled back to find him blinking in surprise that she’d registered why he’d come in at the angle he had. He’d planned for a cheek kiss. An air cheek kiss, even. And she’d swooped her head under and gone for the kill.
Even thinking about it now made her wish the beach beneath her would suck her into a quicksand vortex and spit her back out at her apartment. She’d tried to make things right afterward—apologized, blamed peer pressure, apologized again for blaming peer pressure. And then after that, she’d tried to spend as little time around Asa Williamson as possible.
So she supposed she shouldn’t be too bent out of shape by the robot jokes, or the heartless comments. At least it was better than the alternative, where he remembered the one time when she’d been all too human. When, just for a second, she’d thought, You know what? A kiss under the mistletoe actually sounds kind of nice.
“Tell me about one of your dreams, then,” Lauren said now, staring out at the water.
He was sitting more behind her than next to her at this point, and on her one side Kiki, Marj, and Elliot were talking animatedly about what sounded like a dating show, based on the snippets Lauren could pick up. On her other side, John still sat reading his book, twisting a dark curl around his finger. He could be listening to every word of her conversation with Asa, for all she knew, but he did such a good job of fading into the background that it was easy to feel like she and Asa were in their own little bubble.
“I have one involving you,” he said. She imagined she could feel the heat emanating off him, prickling her neck, but it was probably the sun.
“Me?”
“Uh-huh.”
When her voice came out, it sounded strangled even to her ears. “Do I want to know?”
“It’s December twenty-seventh,” he said, “and we’re in Dolores’ office.”
That was awfully specific. Did Lauren have any sense of exact dates and times in her dreams? She couldn’t remember.
“You’ve just presented your proposal to revamp Cold World. You put it on a trifold display, like you were gunning for first place in an elementary school science fair. Bubbly letters, cutesy border, that kind of thing. It looked nice—you worked hard on it. We won’t even mention what Daniel’s was like. He just rambled for a bit about turning Cold World into a rave club for his business-bro friends or something like that. It was embarrassing.”
Lauren frowned. Daniel was in this dream, too?
“Thank god I’m there,” Asa continued. “With my polished, professional proposal. It turns out you were right—there was a promotion in it for the winner. I’m modest about the new title, but I’ll take the money. Dolores shoos us out of her office. She wants to put my plan into effect immediately, and needs to make several phone calls. You pack up your bulky cardboard presentation board, and the last thing you say to me before disappearing into your office to cry—do you want to know what it is?”