“Ah, come on,” he said. “Nobody wants to hear about someone else’s tattoos. It’s like hearing someone describe a dream.”
Lauren knitted her brows together. “You don’t like hearing about people’s dreams?”
“I do, actually. But you know what I mean. It’s a thing.”
“I love hearing about people’s dreams.”
Asa gave a little scoff of a laugh like he didn’t believe her. “We’re talking about nighttime dreams,” he said. “Not just like, hopes and dreams. Not someone describing how they want to be a teacher or compete on a singing show or live in a tiny house one day. Even you wouldn’t be so heartless as to say you hated hearing someone talk about that kind of dream.”
His words made Lauren flinch a little. Even you. She knew that was how he saw her, maybe deservedly so after the cancel Secret Santa incident at that very first holiday party. So why did it feel like closing her fingers in a drawer each and every time he brought it up?
If that first holiday party had been bad, the second one was even more excruciating to remember. Lauren could only hope that, through some miracle, Asa had completely blocked it from his memory. He hadn’t seemed drunk, but he’d had at least one beer. She knew because she’d tasted it on his lips.
In the most cliché moment ever, they’d gotten caught under the mistletoe. Why they even had mistletoe at a work function was beyond Lauren, but Dolores didn’t cut any corners when it came to the holidays at Cold World. If they’d just kept moving, probably no one would’ve noticed. But Asa had stepped back, trying to let Lauren through the doorway, and she’d done the awkward No, you go ahead thing, and the next thing she knew, Saulo was calling out, “Lauren and Asa are under the mistletoe! You know what that means! Come on, man, lay one on her for Christmas!”
Saulo had definitely been drunk. Obviously, it was totally inappropriate to yell at your coworker to lay one on another coworker. It was also a little sexist, assuming that Asa had to be the one to make the move. Most of all, Lauren could think of nothing more mortifying than kissing someone for the first time in such a public spectacle.
By then, others were adding their encouragement. She’d looked up at Asa, trying to convey with her face something like This is so weird or We totally don’t have to do this. But she also found herself looking at his mouth, and wondering what it would be like to kiss him . . . to be kissed by him. By the time she glanced back up at his eyes, he was making a face like Sure, why not.
And then he’d leaned in. That was the moment carved in Lauren’s memory, because it was the split second when she could’ve made a different decision, and things would’ve ended so much better. His angle was a little odd, so instinctively she’d tilted her head to find his mouth, their lips connecting with an almost cartoonish smooch sound. It was only after she’d pulled back to find him blinking in surprise that she’d registered why he’d come in at the angle he had. He’d planned for a cheek kiss. An air cheek kiss, even. And she’d swooped her head under and gone for the kill.
Even thinking about it now made her wish the beach beneath her would suck her into a quicksand vortex and spit her back out at her apartment. She’d tried to make things right afterward—apologized, blamed peer pressure, apologized again for blaming peer pressure. And then after that, she’d tried to spend as little time around Asa Williamson as possible.
So she supposed she shouldn’t be too bent out of shape by the robot jokes, or the heartless comments. At least it was better than the alternative, where he remembered the one time when she’d been all too human. When, just for a second, she’d thought, You know what? A kiss under the mistletoe actually sounds kind of nice.
“Tell me about one of your dreams, then,” Lauren said now, staring out at the water.
He was sitting more behind her than next to her at this point, and on her one side Kiki, Marj, and Elliot were talking animatedly about what sounded like a dating show, based on the snippets Lauren could pick up. On her other side, John still sat reading his book, twisting a dark curl around his finger. He could be listening to every word of her conversation with Asa, for all she knew, but he did such a good job of fading into the background that it was easy to feel like she and Asa were in their own little bubble.
“I have one involving you,” he said. She imagined she could feel the heat emanating off him, prickling her neck, but it was probably the sun.
“Me?”