Lauren couldn’t stand to hear another word that came out of his mouth. “I don’t know how much you’re paying him,” she said to Dolores, indicating Daniel with a dismissive gesture, “but there’s another line item you could cut from the budget. Not to mention untold legal fees and the amount of any future sexual harassment settlement.”
“Hey!” Daniel said, but Lauren didn’t bother sticking around to see what he could possibly have to say for himself. She had to go after Asa.
Chapter
Twenty-Six
Asa didn’t know where to go. He found himself turning toward Lauren’s office as if by habit—she was the person he most wanted to process this with. But then he remembered that she’d been there, that she was part of what he needed to process in the first place, and he headed in the opposite direction instead. He kept going until he found himself in the “scary back room,” as Lauren had once called it, sliding down the wall until he was sitting on the floor next to a pile of broken ice skates.
Cold World was closing. Or being sold—as far as he was concerned, it was the same thing. This place—the place he’d considered a second home for the past ten years, the place where he’d found some measure of security and peace—was ending.
And Lauren was planning to leave. Just like she’d said she would, if the presentation didn’t go well. She’d gotten into a master’s program—a program she hadn’t even told him she’d applied to—and he knew part time was only a gateway to her moving on.
He was still sitting on the floor when he heard the door creak open, and Lauren stood in front of him, her face in shadow as she looked down, before she folded herself into a sitting position next to him on the floor. It wasn’t easy for her to do in her pencil skirt, and she apologized when she knocked her knee against his thigh. The soft “sorry” made Asa close his eyes.
“That could’ve gone better,” she said finally, her voice deceptively light.
He swallowed. “Yeah.”
“I actually thought our presentation went great,” she said. “Dolores seemed into our ideas. It’s just—”
“When were you going to tell me?” he asked. “About the master’s program.”
“Classes don’t start for two weeks,” she said. “And like I said, it’s mostly online. It’s not going to change anything.”
Change. If there was one thing Asa didn’t handle well, it was change.
“Aren’t you . . . happy for me?” she asked tentatively, and he hated the doubt in her voice, hated that he’d had any role in putting it there. At the same time, he didn’t know what he felt. It was too complicated to boil it down to happy.
He opened his eyes, looking over at her for the first time. He loved her so much it was physically painful, an ache in his chest, his throat, until he realized his eyes were actually starting to sting. He had to glance away, blinking a few times. Despite what the Cure might lead you to believe, boys do cry. How was it possible that only a few weeks ago he’d been teasing her with little jokes like that, testing her on some level, he realized only now, and here he was unable to find a single lighthearted thing to say?
“I am happy for you,” he said. “I want the chance to be happy for you. But Lauren, why wouldn’t you just share that with me?”
She shrugged, the motion stiff. “At first, I guess I didn’t tell anyone in case I didn’t get in. And then even afterward . . . I don’t know. It didn’t seem like that big a deal.”
I didn’t tell anyone. He didn’t know if she knew how much that word hurt. Was he just anyone to her? He wanted to ask. He was scared to ask. He didn’t know if he wanted the answer.
“I know you’re upset about Cold World,” she said. “I am, too. I wish—well, I wish Dolores hadn’t blindsided us with that at the presentation. That we’d known going in that any ideas we’d come up with would be fed straight to an investment group. Maybe we could’ve gone all-in on Daniel’s dumbass idea.”
She smiled at him, and he could tell she was joking, trying to make him laugh. He wondered vaguely if that was the first time he’d ever heard anything approaching a swear word from her. She’d written it on that note on his fridge, back at the start of all this. It was such a stupid thing to focus on, but it was better than any of the alternatives.
“At least if Cold World closes down, we can be public with our relationship, right?”