“You have a busy job,” Asa said. “So go do it. I can do this better without you.”
He wasn’t even looking at her. It was back to the detached-sentry look, except instead of standing with his hands behind his back, he reached down to pick up a candy wrapper that someone had dropped into the snow. And Lauren had no idea what got into her, but something made her bend down to grab another handful of snow. She didn’t bother to mold it into a ball.
Instead, she dumped the whole cold, wet handful straight onto Asa’s exposed neck.
Chapter
Six
This time, when Asa and Lauren were asked to speak to Dolores, they were definitely in trouble.
It felt a lot like being called into the principal’s office. Asa had taken one chair in front of Dolores’ desk, Lauren the other, and Dolores even closed her office door before standing next to it, her arms crossed over her chest like she was waiting for one of them to speak first.
He tried to sneak a look at Lauren, to see how she was handling all of this. Somehow she struck him as someone who’d never been in trouble a day in her life. He bet she freaked out if she got anything less than an A in school.
Her cheeks were pink, whether from the cold or embarrassment, he didn’t know. Under her chair, she kept sliding her feet halfway out of her shoes before sliding them back in again. It was mesmerizing. He kept waiting to see her toes, still covered by the sheer fabric of her tights, but then she would push her feet back in her shoes and start the whole process over again. She still had a damp blotch at the hem of her cardigan from where he’d gotten her with some snow as a retaliation for that first hit.
It had taken him by complete surprise. Not only the shock of the sudden icy pressure on his neck, but the fact that she’d done it at all. It seemed very un-Lauren.
But then, so had a lot of things lately. He was beginning to wonder if maybe he’d just had her pegged wrong from the start.
“I expected better from both of you,” Dolores said finally, seemingly giving up on letting them sweat out the silence. “Asa, when you suggested this work exchange idea, I certainly never expected that it would be used as an excuse to play the goof. If you want to snowfight so badly, you can buy a ticket on your day off and fling snow to your heart’s content.”
Next to him, Lauren frowned. “Well, you’re never supposed to fling the snow.”
Asa leaned back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling. He swore, she made everything harder than it needed to be. “I’m sorry, Dolores,” he said. “It was a lapse in judgment. It won’t happen again.”
The corners of Dolores’ mouth pinched so tightly her smile lines deepened. If he didn’t know any better, he would say she looked more amused than angry. “Well,” she said. “See that it doesn’t.”
“In fact,” Asa said, “I’m thinking it might be better to cancel the experiment altogether. Lauren should do her job, I should do mine, and—”
“That’s not fair,” Lauren cut in. “I did my time. He should have to do his.”
Dolores lifted her perfectly arched brows. “And what did you have in mind?”
He could tell by the panicked look on Lauren’s face that she hadn’t thought this through. Just like he hadn’t, either. He’d been so focused on trying to get one up on Lauren, trying to shake her out of her comfort zone, that he hadn’t actually thought about what a bad idea it was. She didn’t deserve to be thrown into a role she’d never done before, forced to deal with entitled, belligerent dudebros. And he doubted there was much he could do to help her with her job, anyway. Math had never been his best subject.
“It’s fine,” he said. “We should probably focus on coming up with our actual proposals for updating Cold World. That will take more than enough time without adding extra job duties on top of everything.”
“And have you thought of anything?” Dolores asked, glancing at Lauren and then back at him. He could’ve sworn his boss looked almost . . . anxious. But that wasn’t possible. In the decade he’d known her, he’d never seen Dolores as anything less than unflappable.
“The Snow Globe,” Lauren said. “Is there any way to make it actually snow?”
“From the ceiling?” Dolores clarified, then shook her head. “We tried it. You remember.”
That last part was directed at Asa, and he pulled a face. He did remember. They were lucky to get an hour out of the overpriced machine Dolores had gotten talked into at some trade show, although it turned out an hour was more than enough. They’d never quite gotten the formula right for some reason, and the faux “snow” would come out as cold rain, or tiny hard pellets that stung a little, like someone was throwing ice chips at you.