“God forbid the Crown Prince of Cold World doesn’t get what he needs,” Asa said.
“Could you please—” She pulled him by the arm toward her office, afraid that Daniel might be able to hear them if they stayed outside Dolores’ door.
“Could I what?” he prompted once they were in her office, the door shut almost all the way. He’d crossed his arms over his chest, and Lauren tried to ignore the way that made his T-shirt pull.
“Could you wear a long-sleeved shirt, like everyone else? We all know you have tattoos, you don’t have to . . .” She gestured vaguely toward him. “。 . . show them off all the time.”
“You’re the one fixated on my tattoos,” he said, looking down at his arms in bemusement. “And that can’t be what you were actually about to say.”
“No, I was going to say could you please shut up.” Lauren knew she was being rude, but she felt oddly unhinged by everything that had happened with Daniel, the whirlwind of hearing his bonkers proposal, then wangling an invite to his mother’s big dinner. She couldn’t decide if she was mortified or nervous or excited about the latter thing, and she felt like she couldn’t think as long as Asa kept talking. “None of this is your business, okay? Whatever report Daniel wants or what I’d do for a date with him or why I want to go to this dinner. None of it has anything to do with you, and I don’t understand why you keep coming around. So I’m saying could you please just . . . stop.”
This whole time, she’d thought of his eyes as being blue. Maybe that was because of the hair, some effect where it made them appear blue from farther away. But now that they were standing so close to each other, face-to-face in her small office, she saw they were a smoky color closer to gray.
She also thought he’d always disliked her. Since the cancel Secret Santa incident, definitely after the horrible mistletoe kiss debacle, and maybe especially after their recent rivalry around this stupid contest or whatever it was. But she realized she’d never quite seen his eyes look that cold, his jaw that set in anger. Maybe he hadn’t always disliked her, but he sure as hell did now.
“Consider me stopped,” he said, setting the legal pad down on her desk next to her own where she kept her task list. “Have fun tonight.”
Her throat felt tight, and she couldn’t have replied even if she wanted to. But maybe that was for the best. She wished she could rewind and start the whole day over, apologize to Asa in the break room for snapping at him yesterday, find a way to avoid snapping at him again.
His notepad wasn’t completely blank. There was an illustration up in the top corner, little circles of snow, a few larger snowflakes, and the start of a girl’s profile turned up toward the falling snow. There wasn’t much to it, but it still kicked her in the stomach.
She should go after Asa. She should get started on the report for Daniel. She was caught in between, so instead she just dropped her head to her desk and tried to take deep breaths. The worst of it was, she didn’t even have a single clue how to make Cold World better. She just knew it seemed like, every day she showed up at work, she was making it incrementally worse.
* * *
? ? ?
When Kiki knocked on her office door just after six o’clock, it was clear from her tentative greeting that she must’ve been filled in on at least some of what happened from Asa.
“You’re here late,” she said.
“I’m trying to run this analysis,” Lauren said, wiping her hand down her face. “But honestly, none of the numbers are making sense anymore.”
The issue was that the underlying proposition made no sense. It was like trying to solve a word problem that had been written by someone with no knowledge of what concept they were trying to teach. She had spent an hour researching issues with fake snow production on such a mass scale, which had been quite informative but not particularly helpful for finalizing a report that Daniel would want to show Dolores.
“Asa mentioned something about a date?”
Lauren had to restrain herself from asking exactly what Asa had said, and how long ago, and in what tone. But she knew that if she and Asa were going to be in an all-out war, Kiki would have to take his side. She lived with him. She knew him way better. Lauren didn’t think she had it in her to lose her only friend at work as the cherry on top of the sundae of this horrible day.
“Not a date exactly,” she said. “But Daniel did invite me to have dinner with his family tonight.”