“Oh,” she said. “Right. Of course. See you then.”
It seemed like a billion years ago and just yesterday that they’d been in that staff meeting, discussing the holiday party coming up later in the month. Now that it was upon them, Lauren’s anxiety was a tangled knot in her gut. She’d made an ass of herself in front of Asa at the first holiday party, and then again at the second. All she could hope for was that the third time really was the charm.
If it’s not fun, don’t do it. She could be fun. She just had to show him.
Chapter
Eighteen
Asa broke his own rule when wrapping Lauren’s present, but to be fair, it was hard to wrap a large, flat picture frame without using more than three pieces of tape. He’d just finished it earlier that day, vacillating between fear that it was too little and fear that it was too much.
Learning that Lauren had spent at least some of her childhood in foster care had made something click into place. He thought he understood better why she needed to feel in control, why she reacted so strongly to any risk of losing it. He hated that she apparently thought of him as some fuckboy, but he also couldn’t deny that he hadn’t done as much as he could to prove otherwise.
Hopefully she would see the gift as what it was, a gesture of how serious he was when it came to her.
There was a knock at his bedroom door, and a performatively long pause after he said come in, which meant he knew it was Kiki before she even poked her head in.
“Am I . . . interrupting anything?” she asked.
He flipped the wrapped gift over, using a Sharpie to write the To and From directly on the paper. “Ha ha,” he said sarcastically, “but you should wait after knocking, it’s kind of the whole purpose, so if this comedy bit means you respect people’s private spaces more, I’m all for it.”
“I’m just mad you didn’t tell me you and Lauren were a thing,” she said. “Obviously I wouldn’t have kept droning on about Daniel if I knew you were in play.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re wrecking my pretense of being the soul of discretion here, but from what I saw you are definitely in play.”
“It’s—” Asa started to explain that it was more complicated than that, before realizing that it was probably better he didn’t go into all of it. “Can you give the soul-of-discretion thing another shot? For the party, at least? I really don’t want it to be weird.”
“Of course.” Kiki mimed zipping her lips and putting the key in her pocket before having second thoughts, digging the key out, and tossing it over her shoulder. “Are you ready to go, by the way? John’s the designated driver since he has to work the event.”
As in past years, Asa’d convinced Dolores to book John’s band to play at the party. They were used to playing lots of covers at weddings and other events, and they did a great job performing a medley of holiday songs for the first half of the evening and providing the backing music and lyric books for the karaoke portion of the evening after people had gotten enough liquid courage in them. Last year, Dolores and Daniel had done a version of “Happy Xmas （War Is Over）” where Dolores did John Lennon’s part and Daniel took Yoko Ono’s with the most beleaguered look on his face the whole time. Asa really hoped they reprised it again this year.
The only one of them who didn’t have a reason to be at the Cold World party was Elliot, but they’d never missed it. Asa put the wrapped present in the trunk of John’s beat-up Camry and piled into the back seat with Elliot and John’s guitar case. He had that tingling, almost sick feeling he remembered from Christmas Eve when he was a kid, like you knew you were only hours away from finding out if all your dreams would come true. It had been melodramatic to feel that way about digging into his stocking when he was ten, and it was melodramatic to feel that way now. But he couldn’t help it.
“Don’t let the guitar fall,” John said, glancing in the rearview mirror.
“Don’t drive like a maniac and it won’t,” Elliot said, but they also put a protective hand against the case in the event it tipped. Asa did the same on his side, but he hoped he wasn’t called into service, because his mind was already at the party.
* * *
? ? ?
Not for the first time, Asa thanked his forethought in requesting the next day off. Since they had to wait until after hours to even get the party going, it often ran till two or three in the morning, with an open bar and punch that was so dangerous he hadn’t touched it since his first holiday party after turning twenty-one. He swore that it was nine tenths straight rum.