Lauren beamed as though she had something personally to do with it, like she’d reached into the clock’s mechanisms and adjusted them herself. “Even a miracle needs a hand,” she said, and then sang the line with a roll of her eyes. “That’s a song in the movie.”
“Hmm.” Asa was surprised he’d never seen this movie before. Not only because he loved Christmas movies and considered himself something of a connoisseur, but because the messaging sounded right up his parents’ alley. If they had known about this movie when he was a kid, one hundred percent it would’ve been shown on repeat as the perfect blend of holiday magic and an allegory for a punitive higher power. He didn’t want to harsh on Lauren’s childhood, but he had to know if he was understanding this movie correctly.
“So, let me get this straight,” he said. “Santa was so mad that this town called him fake—an allegation that cannot be new to him—that he just stops bringing presents? And then only starts back up when they grovel with a clock?”
The line between Lauren’s eyebrows deepened. “I may not be remembering everything exactly right, but yeah, basically.”
Asa made a yikes face that had Lauren laughing, but she sobered as she seemed to think more about what he’d said. “If you think about it, though, there’s an inherent flaw in the Santa logic. Because he’s not supposed to discriminate, right? He only cares if you’re naughty or nice, which is within your control. And yet when you show up to school after winter break, somehow Santa brought the rich kids new electronics while you were left with a used pair of shoes or something.”
There was a thread starting to come loose around the edge of Asa’s bedspread, and Lauren picked at it, unraveling it a few more inches before seeming to realize what she was doing. She smoothed the thread down against the teal cloth, as though that could weave it back in. “Not that I wasn’t grateful for the shoes,” she said. “But this was why it was better not to believe in the first place. It was easier to accept that my mom just couldn’t afford something than to wonder why I wasn’t worthy of it.”
Asa rolled over until he was covering Lauren’s body with his own, his arms braced on either side of her head so he didn’t crush her with his full weight. He had so much he wanted to say, but the minute his eyes locked with hers he realized that his throat was suddenly tight, and it was difficult to push any words out. So instead he kissed the corner of her mouth, threaded his fingers in the silky strands of her hair that were now splayed on the pillow. “You’re worthy,” he said, but his voice was hoarse. He wasn’t sure she’d heard him until she pulled him down for a deeper kiss and tasted the salt on her lips.
Chapter
Twenty-Five
Lauren could tell that Asa was nervous the morning of the presentations, which paradoxically made her feel calmer. Leading up to the big day, he’d been the one who’d repeated his assurances that they were prepared, that their ideas were solid and actionable, that it was going to go great. But now that they were standing in the hallway with Daniel, about to be called into Dolores’ office, he was fiddling with the long sleeves of the button-up he’d worn in a gesture she recognized from his sister’s baby shower.
“It’s going to be fine,” she said, reaching over to fasten the button that had come undone at Asa’s right wrist. She realized only after she’d done it that it was way too domestic and intimate a move for two supposed colleagues with no connection to each other outside of work. When she glanced at Daniel, she saw his eyes were narrowed.
Just then, the door to Dolores’ office swung open, and the woman herself appeared in the doorway. “Oh, my babies!” she said. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long. I was on a call. Come in, come in, and we will get started. I can’t wait to hear what you’ve come up with!”
Outwardly, Dolores seemed her usual self—dressed to the nines in an emerald green dress with flapper-style fringe at the bottom, her long hair curling down her back in a Real Housewives eat-your-heart-out kind of way. But there was something slightly off about her. Lauren suddenly had the strongest desire to beg off the presentations, suggest they do them another day. But she was already stepping into Dolores’ office, Asa’s hand at the small of her back, the barest ghost of a touch and yet it still had her turning to frown at him. Not now.
Dolores took her seat behind her desk, but as if by tacit agreement Daniel, Lauren, and Asa all stayed standing. Lauren suspected Asa did it half out of chivalry—he wouldn’t sit down until she did—and half out of nerves. Daniel, on the other hand, probably saw standing as some sort of power play. Why Lauren didn’t take a seat, she couldn’t say. She still couldn’t shake the feeling that she needed to be vigilant. She just wished she knew for what.
“Daniel,” Dolores said, turning to her son. “You’ve already filled me in a little on your plan for Cold World, so why don’t you go first. How can we improve this place in the new year?”
Daniel started laying out his idea for building the slopes where people could go snow-tubing, which didn’t seem that much more involved than when she’d first heard his half-assed pitch. He claimed to have a couple more investors interested in putting in up to twenty thousand—although Daniel “knew” he could get them higher—and had also done a poll through Instagram where his meager frat boy friends had agreed it would be “awesome” if you could snowboard in Florida.
Lauren had already filled Asa in on the details of what Daniel would probably present on. He was a nicer person than she was, so he’d at least acknowledged that it was a cool idea, although he’d agreed with her that the actual implementation of it was impractical if not impossible, at least given Cold World’s current location. Now, he caught her eye as Daniel was dancing around an answer to Dolores’ very straightforward question about liability waivers, and Lauren had to struggle not to let a smile crack through.
Then Dolores turned to them, registering a flicker of surprise when she saw they were presenting together, then rewarding Lauren with one of the biggest, most open smiles Lauren had ever seen from her boss. That smile wiped away the last of that low dread feeling in the pit of Lauren’s stomach, and her voice was clear and confident when she started describing what she and Asa had come up with. The interactive installations for the kids, the events they had planned, the budget-conscious improvements they could make that would have the biggest impact. Asa jumped in to describe the new aesthetic for Cold World—the mural in the Snow Globe, the merch in the gift shop.
Lauren couldn’t help but watch him and think back to the last time they were in this very office together. Then, they’d sat in the chairs in front of Dolores’ desk, two little islands with governments hostile to each other. She’d been so cold that day—literally, because her hands were still raw and chapped from picking up balls of shaved ice, her sweater and tights dappled with damp spots. And yet she remembered this one sliver of a moment—they’d been talking about whether they could ever get it to actually snow in the Snow Globe, and Asa had looked at her with such a sudden scorch of heat that she’d felt her skin prickle with fever.
She’d discounted it at the time as a weird fluke, like seeing an airplane in the night sky and mistaking it for a shooting star. But looking back, there seemed something almost inevitable about it. Also terrifying—the idea that she might get warmth from someone else, how quickly her body learned to crave it. To need it.