Her next turn yielded a six, and she turned the phone to show him so he wouldn’t think she was making it up just to fish for a compliment. “You don’t have to,” she said.
“I want to.” His gaze raked over her slowly, from the top of her head to the toes of her shoes. She resisted the urge to check to make sure her hair wasn’t all messed up, that she didn’t have a mustache of hot chocolate on her face. She’d been sitting back in her office chair with her legs crossed, and only now did she realize the position made the swingy red skirt of her dress ride up a little on her thigh—not enough to be close to indecent, but definitely showing more skin than she’d realized. She shifted in her seat, pulling down the hem in a way that she hoped wasn’t obvious.
Gray eyes were supposed to look cool. But when Asa’s gaze returned to hers, his looked anything but.
Eventually, he cleared his throat. “I really admire that you took such care with that family’s picture, in the Snow Globe.”
Lauren blinked at him, unsure at first what he was even talking about. Already that felt like a lifetime ago. She had no idea what she’d expected him to say—had been holding her breath, waiting to see what it might be—but she never thought he’d go back to such a random event from last week. She felt oddly disappointed.
“It was just a photo,” she said.
“Yeah, maybe. But like you said—it’s a memory. And you wanted to make sure they had a good one.”
She shrugged. “I don’t have many pictures of myself, especially from when I was a kid. That’s probably why I put more stock in them than I should.”
“What about school photos? Those horrible ones where you can pay extra to have a jewel-toned background.”
No one had been around to spend money on wallet-sized mementos throughout the years, much less shell out extra funds to change the color of the backdrop. She’d known that so well she hadn’t even bothered bringing the envelopes of photos home, scared that if she forgot to bring them back they’d try to charge her anyway.
“Nope,” she said. “Not even those.”
He was quiet for a moment, and she was about to hand him his phone, just to keep the game moving and change the subject. But then he said, “I would always do the same goofy face in mine. Drove my mom crazy. I swear I wasn’t doing it on purpose, but it was like every time a camera was pointed on me from ages five to sixteen, my facial muscles automatically twitched into this weird dopey smile.”
“Let’s see it.”
“It feels like you should have to random-number-generate your way to this kind of gold,” Asa said. “But I’ll give this one to you for free, just because. The face went something like this . . .”
His eyes widened, his mouth stretching in what looked like half shock-surprise, half manic grin. It was so unexpected that Lauren actually choked on her own spit and ended up coughing through her laughter. Then, just when she’d started to recover, he did it again and she was back to a fit of giggles. It was several minutes before she was able to settle down.
“There’s no way you weren’t doing that on purpose,” she said. “Nobody’s face does that naturally.”
“Maybe it’s like the old urban legend, and my face got stuck that way.”
“But only when a camera came out.”
“Defense mechanism.”
She giggled again, glancing down when she felt a buzz against her ankle. Her first thought, inexplicably, was that it was coming from Asa’s phone that she still held in her hand. But that device had been idle so long his lock screen was already back up—a group selfie of him with his three housemates, clearly taken at the same time as the one Kiki had sent her of all of them at the beach. She set his phone down on her desk and reached into her purse to check hers.
There was a text from Kiki from over an hour ago—how’s it going?!? with a string of fire and eggplant emojis. Then there was a text from Daniel that had just come in—You ok?
Well. That was kind of nice. She hadn’t told him the complete story about being stuck inside Cold World—she hadn’t wanted to look silly, or risk him telling Dolores and their dinner getting ruined anyway. So despite her bravado to Asa, she hadn’t really expected Daniel to follow up in any way and come to their rescue. But here he was, texting to make sure she was okay after she’d told him she wasn’t able to come to the dinner. She could easily reply with something like Not okay, actually—stuck inside Cold World! She could ask him to come. She could ask him to call with the alarm code.
Instead, she swiped to answer the text message, hesitating slightly before typing All good! Thanks! She added a smiley face at the last second, and sent it off.
“What’s up?” Asa asked.
“Nothing,” she said, feeling a little guilty as she slid her phone back in her purse. “It’s your turn.”
Chapter
Twelve
Not for a minute did Asa buy that the text Lauren had received had been about “nothing.” It was almost midnight, for one thing, and the only person he knew she was expecting any communication from was Daniel. But if he’d texted to say he couldn’t make it out, Asa wasn’t going to complain. He found that he didn’t want this party to break up. Not when it was just getting fun.
“Contest,” Asa said, after the random number generator showed him an eight. The arm-wrestling idea wasn’t half-bad—the prospect of holding hands with Lauren and sitting in such close proximity definitely had its appeal. But he had a pretty big advantage, and something told him Lauren didn’t like participating in competitions where she didn’t have a high chance of winning.
He glanced around her office, suddenly seizing on another idea. “Do you know where the storage space is?”
“In the scary back room?” Lauren asked. “It’s not like I have any reason to go there.”
“There’s a bin of leftover Christmas decorations . . .” He stopped himself short, getting to his feet. “Just follow me.”
He led her through the narrow hallway to the rear of the warehouse space, turning on his phone’s flashlight when they got to the back area. Even he had to admit it was a little scary to be there when the building was so dark and silent. When they got to the storage space, he flicked the wall switch on to fill the room with light.
“See those?” He gestured toward the bin he’d been referencing, which had been left open, decorations draped carelessly over the sides when employees had rooted through it. He’d been one of those employees, tasked with helping to decorate the lobby area, so he couldn’t judge anyone too harshly for the way it had been left. “I’m going to set a timer on my phone for three minutes. That’s how long we have to gather materials and decorate your office. Whoever has the better display wins.”
“Who judges better?”
“Me. You’ve gotta admit, I’m the expert here.”
“That seems biased. And what’s the prize?”
He grinned. “Bragging rights.”
“That’s hardly—”
He hit the start button on his phone. “Go!”
She may have been about to protest, but that didn’t stop her from practically elbowing him out of the way to get to the bin. She scooped items into her arms with little care for what they were or how they might fit together, and when her arms were so full she couldn’t possibly grab anything else, she made a beeline for the door, dropping bits of tinsel and red velvet bows in her wake.
Asa was laughing too hard to be quite as effective in gathering his materials, but he managed to snag a string of lights, some ornaments, and a stuffed polar bear. By the time he got to her office, she was already lining the top of her filing cabinet with a garland, adding more of the red velvet bows every few inches.
He got to work on the fake plant in the corner, stringing it with the lights and adding ornaments with big enough loops of string to fit around the plastic leaves. Just as the alarm went off, he nestled the polar bear into her garland display, and she threw a bunch of tinsel into the air. Pieces of it were still floating to the ground as he reached in his pocket to turn off the radar tone blaring from his phone.