Kiki was scowling, hovering protectively over her creation as their final roommate settled onto their own towel. “Watch your feet, Ell,” she said. “You almost wrecked my castle.”
“That was a castle? I thought it was just a pile of sand.”
“The row of lovingly placed seashells didn’t tip you off?” Kiki waved her hand in Elliot’s general direction. “This is our last housemate, Elliot. Well, they moved in before me, but you get what I mean. The only one you haven’t met yet.”
Lauren was grateful for something to do, someone to look at who wasn’t Asa. She was aware that he was sitting very close. He smelled more like sunscreen now, but still like him, and a quick glance had confirmed that he had at least one tattoo on his chest as well as his arms. That was as far as she’d gotten before she’d looked away.
The last housemate was the one from the picture with the goatee. Already, Lauren felt like she understood some of the dynamics of the house—Elliot would be the intense one, Kiki sarcastic, John more quiet. As for Asa . . .
Well, he’d be the goofball, probably. But it was a little hard to slot him into that role right now, when he was still watching her, his eyes squinted against the sun. She reached into her bag and slid her giant sunglasses over her regular glasses. She knew they looked ridiculous, but she hadn’t felt like dealing with her contacts, when she wore them so rarely.
“I’m Lauren,” she said, reaching up her hand to shake Elliot’s. “I work at Cold World, too.”
“She cooks the books,” Asa said.
That got her head to whip back around. “I do not!” she said.
“I thought you kept the company’s financial records? Isn’t that what that means?” His face was completely straight except for a slight flick at the corner of his mouth that suggested he was holding back a smile. Ah. He was winding her up again, and she just kept falling for it.
“Don’t worry,” Elliot assured her. “We don’t take anything Asa says seriously.”
“It’s a little hard to take Lauren that seriously with those humongous sunglasses,” Asa said, leaning down to peer up at her. “Where did you get those? My grandmother’s purse?”
She knew her skin was flushed, and not just from the sun. “A Circle K,” she said defensively. “They were cheap. Do you have any idea how much prescription sunglasses cost?”
“For real,” Marj agreed. “And they always look like regular glasses that have just been tinted.”
That sent Kiki and Marj off in a discussion about ordering glasses online and whether they were comparable quality to the ones you could buy at a store—Marj was firmly in the camp that you had to go somewhere in person to try them on, whereas Kiki said the word LensCrafters with such a withering derision that Lauren didn’t know that she’d ever be able to walk into one again. It was nice, just sitting there and letting the conversation wash around her. It was obvious this was a group of people who knew each other well, and cared about each other. The way Kiki talked right over Elliot, her voice rising in correlation to the faces they pulled in response, the way John’s contributions were quieter but always seemed to weigh more, as though because he didn’t speak as much they valued it more when he did. Asa was just like he was at work—laughing, easy, casual.
And yet somehow even he was a little different. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but it was like the happy-go-lucky persona at work was an act, while this one was the more authentic version. The fake was so good you wouldn’t notice the difference until you compared the two side-by-side, but it was there.
“What are you thinking about?” Asa said. His voice was low, and around them everyone else was still talking about whatever subject they’d moved on to. Lauren realized she’d been tuning it all out. And she’d also been staring directly at him the entire time. Whoops.
“Nothing,” she said. But then that sounded vacuous, so she cast around for something to say instead, and landed on something that probably only made her seem like an even bigger creep. “What do your tattoos mean?”
He looked down at his arms. She could see the full tree on his right bicep that she’d noticed before, now stretching up to cover one shoulder. His other arm was more abstract, with a geometric pattern and some swirls of a foamy blue wave. There was a number in a bold slash of a font above his left nipple, but she really didn’t want to be caught staring there. Even with her sunglasses on, it would be so obvious.