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.
“Lauren?” Asa was saying now, his voice gentle. She realized she’d been staring at his animated face while he was talking without registering most of his actual words. They’d rehearsed their presentation a few times, so she knew basically what he’d said, but still. She cleared her throat.
“These outline estimated expenses, as well as projections for ticket sales adjusting for the discounts and deals we came up with,” she said, passing the report she’d prepared to Dolores. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Daniel make a face, as if she’d literally pulled his work off the printer and tried to hand it off as her own. She gave him a placid smile and was gratified when he broke eye contact first, looking down at his pointy-tipped leather shoes.
“This looks fantastic,” Dolores said, scanning down the first page before flipping to the next. “Truly, I’m impressed by the attention to detail here, and the creativity.”
Lauren allowed herself a quick glance at Asa, who looked about two seconds away from an actual fist pump. “Thank you—” she started, but Dolores cut her off.
“I’ve been in touch with a potential buyer for Cold World, and they have such a vision for how they can modernize the place. It’s the same group behind that boutique hotel on Orange, the one with the iron gate, what’s it called . . . Anyway, this report is going to be so helpful in showing them all the possibility here.”