“Uh-huh.”
When her voice came out, it sounded strangled even to her ears. “Do I want to know?”
“It’s December twenty-seventh,” he said, “and we’re in Dolores’ office.”
That was awfully specific. Did Lauren have any sense of exact dates and times in her dreams? She couldn’t remember.
“You’ve just presented your proposal to revamp Cold World. You put it on a trifold display, like you were gunning for first place in an elementary school science fair. Bubbly letters, cutesy border, that kind of thing. It looked nice—you worked hard on it. We won’t even mention what Daniel’s was like. He just rambled for a bit about turning Cold World into a rave club for his business-bro friends or something like that. It was embarrassing.”
Lauren frowned. Daniel was in this dream, too?
“Thank god I’m there,” Asa continued. “With my polished, professional proposal. It turns out you were right—there was a promotion in it for the winner. I’m modest about the new title, but I’ll take the money. Dolores shoos us out of her office. She wants to put my plan into effect immediately, and needs to make several phone calls. You pack up your bulky cardboard presentation board, and the last thing you say to me before disappearing into your office to cry—do you want to know what it is?”
She didn’t think she did, but he took her lack of response as a sign to keep going.
“You say, I wish I had taken you up on that offer to work together when I had the chance.”
Chapter
Eight
Asa waited for Lauren’s reaction, but the back of her neck gave nothing away. She scooped her hair in one hand, gathering it to one side. The green tie of her bathing suit top dangled down above her black tank, the bow crooked and double-knotted.
“I think I’m going to stand in the water,” she said finally, and pushed herself to her feet. She brushed the sand off her hands onto her shorts and headed down toward the shore without looking back at him once.
He was still watching Lauren down by the water when John spoke up next to him. He’d almost forgotten his housemate was there.
“Why did you do that?”
“Do what?”
John closed his book with an air of Fine, let’s get into it. “That was the most bullshit response to an honest question I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s a long story,” Asa said. “Involving this project our boss wants us to work on, where we propose changes to Cold World. Lauren and I are each working on a separate presentation. It’s a friendly rivalry kind of thing.”
“Friendly.” John snorted, letting Asa know what he thought of that. “Okay.”
Did you have to be considered friends to call it a friendly rivalry? Asa didn’t know the answer to that question. He wouldn’t go so far as to call Lauren a friend, and he knew for a fact she wouldn’t call him one. But they’d certainly talked more in the last week than they had in . . . pretty much since she started at Cold World two years ago.
“Lauren has this idea that there’s some catch to the presentations,” Asa said. “Like that the person who comes up with whatever Dolores goes with will get some kind of promotion, or bonus. So it makes sense that she would want to work by herself.”
“What about you?” John asked.
Asa understood the question, because it was what he’d been asking himself the past few days. If there was a prize attached to the presentation, he should welcome the chance to throw his hat in the ring for it. Even if there wasn’t, he did know Cold World better than anyone. Between him, Lauren, and Daniel, he should be the one best positioned to knock this out of the park.
Maybe that was what made him so nervous. Because what if he didn’t? So far, all he had to show for his brainstorm sessions were a few doodles on a sketchpad. He felt like he could see what a new, improved Cold World could look like, but only in abstract terms. He might’ve teased Lauren about her potential science fair exhibit, but at this point he’d be walking into Dolores’ office with nothing more than a few swatches of watercolors on paper.
Lauren was crouching down now, looking at something in the sand, and Asa stood up. He’d never answered John’s question, but he knew his housemate wouldn’t care—he was already cracking open his book again.
He reached Lauren before he actually knew what he planned to say to her. So instead he just knelt next to her, getting a closer look at whatever had grabbed her attention.
It was a swirled cone of a shell, pearlescent white on the outside. It was pretty enough, but nothing that special for the beach. But then he noticed four claws curled around the edge, looking almost like long, reddish-colored fingernails. They flicked out further, sending the shell scooting backward.