She didn’t think she did, but he took her lack of response as a sign to keep going.
“You say, I wish I had taken you up on that offer to work together when I had the chance.”
Chapter
Eight
Asa waited for Lauren’s reaction, but the back of her neck gave nothing away. She scooped her hair in one hand, gathering it to one side. The green tie of her bathing suit top dangled down above her black tank, the bow crooked and double-knotted.
“I think I’m going to stand in the water,” she said finally, and pushed herself to her feet. She brushed the sand off her hands onto her shorts and headed down toward the shore without looking back at him once.
He was still watching Lauren down by the water when John spoke up next to him. He’d almost forgotten his housemate was there.
“Why did you do that?”
“Do what?”
John closed his book with an air of Fine, let’s get into it. “That was the most bullshit response to an honest question I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s a long story,” Asa said. “Involving this project our boss wants us to work on, where we propose changes to Cold World. Lauren and I are each working on a separate presentation. It’s a friendly rivalry kind of thing.”
“Friendly.” John snorted, letting Asa know what he thought of that. “Okay.”
Did you have to be considered friends to call it a friendly rivalry? Asa didn’t know the answer to that question. He wouldn’t go so far as to call Lauren a friend, and he knew for a fact she wouldn’t call him one. But they’d certainly talked more in the last week than they had in . . . pretty much since she started at Cold World two years ago.
“Lauren has this idea that there’s some catch to the presentations,” Asa said. “Like that the person who comes up with whatever Dolores goes with will get some kind of promotion, or bonus. So it makes sense that she would want to work by herself.”
“What about you?” John asked.
Asa understood the question, because it was what he’d been asking himself the past few days. If there was a prize attached to the presentation, he should welcome the chance to throw his hat in the ring for it. Even if there wasn’t, he did know Cold World better than anyone. Between him, Lauren, and Daniel, he should be the one best positioned to knock this out of the park.
Maybe that was what made him so nervous. Because what if he didn’t? So far, all he had to show for his brainstorm sessions were a few doodles on a sketchpad. He felt like he could see what a new, improved Cold World could look like, but only in abstract terms. He might’ve teased Lauren about her potential science fair exhibit, but at this point he’d be walking into Dolores’ office with nothing more than a few swatches of watercolors on paper.
Lauren was crouching down now, looking at something in the sand, and Asa stood up. He’d never answered John’s question, but he knew his housemate wouldn’t care—he was already cracking open his book again.
He reached Lauren before he actually knew what he planned to say to her. So instead he just knelt next to her, getting a closer look at whatever had grabbed her attention.
It was a swirled cone of a shell, pearlescent white on the outside. It was pretty enough, but nothing that special for the beach. But then he noticed four claws curled around the edge, looking almost like long, reddish-colored fingernails. They flicked out further, sending the shell scooting backward.
“It’s a hermit crab,” Lauren said. “This is what it’s been doing—it’ll stay really still and then all of a sudden, a burst of movement. It’s—” The crab did another of its flick maneuvers, only this time part of its head poked out of the shell. Lauren gave a little laugh, glancing up at him. “See?”
“Pretty cool,” he said. It really was. He could see how she’d gotten so mesmerized by watching the creature—there was something about waiting to see when it would move next, how much of a glimpse you’d get. At one point, its legs came out enough to actually carry it across the sand, traveling only a few inches before it settled its shell back over its body.
He glanced over at her. The wind had blown her hair over her face, a few strands stuck to her mouth, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Sorry for being a dick,” he said.
The crab was in another motionless phase, easily mistaken for nothing more than an ordinary shell in the sand. The Atlantic didn’t wash up as far as they were, but the sand was damp, as though the tides had recently been higher than they were now. Lauren’s toenails were painted a coral pink.
“You weren’t—” she started, but he cut her off.
“I was,” he said. “Even John thought so.”
She sat back in the sand, pulling her knees up to her chest and resting her chin on them, her gaze still trained down at the crab. “I wouldn’t react like that, you know,” she said. “If you did manage to come up with the best proposal—which I’m still skeptical about, for the record—I wouldn’t go back to my office to cry.”
He winced even remembering that part. He’d definitely taken the whole thing too far. He didn’t want to make Lauren cry, even in some fake scenario he’d come up with to mess with her. “I might,” he said. “Except I don’t have an office, so I’d have to go break down in my car like a real winner.”
“You would not,” she said.
“Despite what the Cure might lead you to believe, boys do cry.”
He was joking, trying to make her smile. But he realized he was cutting a little close to the bone, too. After what John had said, he didn’t really want to do more of this dance with her, where he feinted around her questions or played things off. At the same time, he wasn’t exactly in the mood to get into a heavy conversation about things like the last time he’d cried or why.
“Does this mean that much to you?”
Another Pandora’s box of a question. He realized that it did, but he couldn’t fully articulate the reason. He wasn’t generally a competitive person—although Lauren seemed to bring it out in him—but that wasn’t what was spurring him on. Something to do with giving back to Cold World, and to Dolores, and with proving something to himself.
“Nah,” he said. “I won’t break down if she chooses your idea. Don’t worry. I’d just get back to work.”
She was quiet for a minute. The crab had been still for so long Asa wondered if it knew they were there and was playing dead. He didn’t know the etiquette of finding a hermit crab on the beach. Did you just let it chill where it was, let nature take its course? Or should you move it to a safer spot, like a turtle in the middle of the road? He was about to bring it up to Lauren when she spoke again.
“I’d probably quit,” she said.
“You’d quit?” The words sent a spike of some emotion through him that he didn’t care to analyze. “That’s a bit extreme.”
“I don’t mean it like that,” she said. “Not like a rage quit or anything. It’s more like . . . I have other goals, I guess. And if I had an opportunity to do something bigger at Cold World and it didn’t work out, I’d take that as a sign that maybe it was time to move on.”
He didn’t know what to say. He could ask more about what those goals were, but something about the way Lauren drew her knees up tighter to her chest, the way her face got closed off and remote, made him think that she was done sharing. Knowing her, she probably regretted sharing that much with him already.
“I think we should move him,” she said, tilting her chin toward the crab’s shell. “Just put him by those rocks, where there are fewer people.”
“I agree,” he said. “You do the honors.”
She picked up the shell delicately between two fingers, her face scrunching up in an almost-smile when the crab’s legs flicked out for a second, brushing her hand. He followed her to the rocks, where she placed the crab down into the sand. It immediately came out to scuttle away from them, as if it were under attack. Couldn’t blame the guy.