by Anne Marsh
She shifts the Sharpie to the Con column. Great. Now we’re moving on to my flaws. She may need more wall for that.
UPTIGHT.
“Hey,” I protest. “I am not.”
Hazel points the Sharpie at me. “You have the moral conscience of Michael the Archangel.”
“That’s a plus.”
Hazel snorts. “Michael is judgy.”
“You’re just messing with me.”
Her next words prove it.
TRUST ISSUES.
This one is in all caps and underlined. Wow. Hazel’s not pulling her punches.
“You’re wrong.” I take a deep pull on the bottle. It’s almost empty.
“You trusted Molly and she hurt you. Now you’re hiding up here like the troll under the bridge so no one can trample on your feelings again. You need to find someone you can be one hundred percent you with.”
“All this because I didn’t go to a party?” I set the empty bottle on the floor.
“Why do you think your marriage to Molly ended?”
Max, Dev and me? We’re equally relentless. We don’t know how to lose because losing, quite simply, isn’t an option, whether it’s surfing, the boardroom or life. Wipeouts? Sure. Neck-breaking, skull-pounding slams into the ocean floor? Bring it on—I’ll be back on my board in no time. Life isn’t easy, but I’ve always been good at what I do. No. Scratch that. I’ve always been the best, so Molly’s leaving doesn’t compute. I went all out, I did everything by the book, I did everything I could for her.
And it wasn’t enough.
Hazel makes a buzzer sound and chucks the Sharpie at me. “Wrong. You don’t need to know whatever bullshit reason Molly had for ending things between you. That doesn’t matter.”
“Walk me through your marital credentials again, Ms. Single Gal. I’m pretty sure that caring about my wife’s feelings was part of the marriage ceremony.”
“That was then. This is now, so you need to rethink. Like, was the marriage acceptable to you?”
“Marriage is about two people.”
“And you’re one of them.” She rolls her eyes. “Did you like your relationship?”
Fuck it. I’ve spent so much time lying. Lying to myself, to Molly, to the rest of the world. Was I happy? I wasn’t unhappy, but that wasn’t really enough for a lifetime, was it? So I’ll give Hazel the truth.
“No.”
The word hangs in the air between us. Not so much a bomb as one of those stun grenades the FBI or the Marines use when they want to clear a room of hostiles. I shouldn’t have said that, but it turns out that maybe I’m an even worse liar than I thought, because Hazel doesn’t look at all surprised.
“So what do you want, Jack?”
Suddenly her face is near mine, so close that I can feel each word on my skin, my face, my mouth. Did she come closer? Did I move? I look around for answers, but the answer is standing right there in front of me. It’s not what I want—it’s who.
I think I fall on her and our mouths meet. Or she falls up. Down. The mechanics don’t matter because there’s definitely some kind of cosmic, completely-beyond-my-control accident that undoes all my plans.
I’m kissing Hazel.
Her lips are soft and plush. Her cheek brushes mine as she adjusts our fit and then glides her tongue over my lower lip. Wow. I did not see this coming. Or maybe it’s not true. Maybe I’ve had a fantasy or two, but I certainly never planned on kissing her.
She opens her mouth and I take charge. Being the boss of Hazel is a limited-time offer and we both know it—she likes to be the one in control. Her hands are running over my body, pulling me here, touching me there. I sink my hands into her hair and hold her face still. She tastes like champagne and Hazel, sparkly and effervescent, wicked and deceptively sweet.
She presses her satin-covered boobs against me as our kiss deepens. She’s an amazing kisser. Her mouth covers mine, her tongue exploring while her hands learn the shape of my jaw, my shoulders. I shouldn’t want this kiss, but I do. She hooks a leg around my waist, shifting until I can feel... Oh yes...the soft, hot heat of her pressed against my thigh. Hazel’s as hot for me as I am for her.
But.
She’s my business partner.
My best friend.
My Hazel.
I pull back, staring at her face while my brain scrambles to catch up with what my mouth just did. My fingers cup her shoulders, tracing the strap of her tank top. Someone’s slipped the silky material to the side, exposing the hollow of her collarbone. I imagine pressing my lips to that soft, secret spot of Hazel.
Kissing—
She opens her mouth and I can’t even begin to imagine what she’ll say. With Hazel, I never know. I just know that I can’t.
I can’t kiss her.
I can’t do this.
Most of all, I can’t lose her, so I shoot off the bed. She flops backward with a startled laugh as my hands turn her shoulders into a spring pad.
“I have to go,” I blurt out.
“Baby.” She gives me a face, but I’m not looking—I’m not. I’m definitely not listening to her or trying to decide if that one word is some weird kind of relationship-ish nickname or just a sweeping indictment of my social skills.
I’m out the door, flying down the stairs to the ground floor and then out the door toward the ocean. There’s no way this could work. Whatever this is. I zoom down the steps to the beach tucked away at the base of the cliff my house sits on. Halfway down I realize I’m taking stupid chances and slow to a hasty retreat. Sun-warmed wood creaks underneath my feet.
I kissed Hazel.
As soon as I hit the sand, I grab the surfboard I keep by the stairs. I keep going until I’m waist-deep in the chilly California ocean. Cold water sucks at my jeans, slapping the wet denim against my legs and dick. I deserve every second of the discomfort. I straddle my board and paddle hard for the outermost edge of the tiny cove, where the waves break. I think I know what happened back there, in my bedroom. I made a mistake. That’s all. I was lonely and there’s just something about Hazel. She doesn’t so much light up a room as she makes it explode because she’s always thinking, always questioning. She’s just really alive and so totally unlike Molly that I was tempted. She’s like the recipes I bookmark in Bon Appétit, flavors you’d never expect to work together, but then one taste and you want more because that one mouthful is an epiphany.
Except I don’t get to have more.
Good guys don’t kiss their business partners.
Smart guys definitely don’t. I don’t need an HR presentation to tell me what the right thing to do is here.
In the morning, I’ll figure this out. I’ll figure out how to erase the last hour, when I put my hands on Hazel and I kissed her and she kissed me back. I’ll figure out how to forget her hum of surprise and then the rougher, greedier sound she made as she opened for me. But tonight, it’s me and the frigid ocean water, which slowly freezes my dick back into the state I need it in.
CHAPTER THREE
THIRTY-SIX HOURS AND two cold showers do not erase my memory of how Hazel’s mouth felt beneath—and over—mine. The plush, slick warmth, the way she opened up for me and then the way she gave as good as she got, her mouth devouring mine as if she couldn’t get enough of me. Hazel wants me. She wants all of me. So, of course, my brain freeze-frames, reliving each second of our kiss over and over.
And over.
I ran five miles this morning, swam and took an icy shower, but here I am: going to work with a hard-on for Hazel. I park my BMW in the first spot I find. Parking is tight for our building and I have a reserved spot by the door—the perks of being the boss—but Hazel’s Volvo is already parked in her spot next to mine. She’s crooked, I tell myself, so parking next to her would put my paint job at greater risk than normal. I’m safer with the length of the lot between us.
There must be something more awkward than drunk-kissing your business partner, but right now I’m drawing a blank.
I need a plan. There has to be a way to get past making out with the wrong person. The important thing is to figure out the first step. Then I’ll figure out the second step. And then the third. Numbers are a beautiful thing. One precedes two, two precedes three and there’s no confusion about how things go. You can’t screw up math.
Okay. Step one. I drum my fingers on the steering wheel. Do I acknowledge the kiss, or do I wait for Hazel to say something? She didn’t call or text after I hightailed it out of my own house, so I’m voting for ignore as a strategy. I won’t say anything.
Step two? No alone time. We need group hangouts only. Lots and lots of people around us. Unless Hazel has a well-hidden interest in group sex, this should safely move us past Saturday’s kiss.
Step three.
Act normal.
That’s all I have to do.
I run through the steps as I get out of my car. Fake it until you make it, right? I stride into the building as if I have nothing more on my mind than counting my billions.
Robert, our receptionist, greets me cheerfully. His weekend has clearly gone much better than mine. His face has that relaxed glow that no amount of sunshine or spa time can bestow. Nope. Robert’s clearly gotten laid and is feeling good about it. I gamble that he’s too distracted by his weekend memories to notice I’m ever so slightly off my game today.
“Is Hazel in?”
I think I sound suitably nonchalant, but Robert gives me a long look before deciding that my question is actually serious.
“She has a breakfast meeting,” he says. “The two of you thumb-wrestled in the kitchen to decide who had to sit through it.”
I’m sure he assumes I’m crazy or had a stroke in the parking lot. I don’t forget details like this.
“Great.” I think I’m smiling too widely. “I’ll catch up with her later.”
It turns out, however, that Hazel’s badly parked Volvo is the most I see of her because she Ubered to her breakfast meeting and then hopscotched from there to four more. We try to not both be out of the office on the same day, and if I’d been less rattled after our kiss, I might have remembered that Hazel had called dibs on Monday.
Tuesday is my day to take off-site meetings, but I have to swing by the office to grab some files that no one can email to me for inexplicable reasons. Hazel is bent over her desk, typing away furiously on her laptop. Based on the staccato beat of her fingers on the keys, she’s either pissed off at someone or has had what she refers to as “an evil-genius breakthrough.”
She’s dressed formally in a dark jacket, suit pants and a soft, silky blouse with a loopy bow that rests on top of the boobs I am absolutely not looking at. There’s a gold necklace nestled in the hollow of her throat. I squint, but I can’t quite make out what it says. All of Hazel’s necklaces have messages, like mini billboards for her upcoming week. An elephant for good luck. A lightning bolt when she wants to “strike ’em dead.” A cactus for exploring new frontiers and ideas. At least this one isn’t an ax or a gun or some other murder weapon. Maybe she doesn’t want to kill me dead.
She looks up as I saunter past her office because I’m going to pretend everything is normal up until she tells me that it’s not. I can’t tell if she’s staring off into space or if she’s ignoring me. I’ll just have to fix this. Somehow.
This is the first time I’ve seen her since our kiss. Given we have an office full of people, I settle for muttering “hi” in the direction of her office door before burying myself in spreadsheets. I need to talk to her without the audience. Kissing her was the wrong thing to do, which makes apologizing the right thing. I’m just not sure that a handful of words can fix this. Does she think I’m a horndog? A player? A desperate ass?
Wednesday and Thursday pass much the same. Coleman and Reed has the bandwidth to take on one or two more projects, so we’re actively shopping for candidates. Thursday, we bring in one of those candidates to pitch. The company founders look like their average age is fourteen. They’re suited up, nervous and awash in cologne. If their pitch doesn’t overwhelm me, the fumes will.
Since I’m first into the room, I do the meet and greet. Hazel bursts in five minutes later. In the office, she wears her hair slicked back in this bun thing. There’s no good way to describe it. A bun is something you buy at the bakery—a squashy, delicious treat—and it doesn’t begin to describe Hazel’s neat knot of hair. I compared it once to the black racer snake that Hazel found sun-basking on her doorstep. She didn’t like that comparison, so I quit before she either killed me or sicced a snake on me. Plus, when she lets her hair down, that’s really when you need to watch out. Hazel has crazy hair. It waves and curls and tries to be straight—all at the same time.
Despite the balmy California weather, she’s wearing her favorite Theory suit, the one with slim blue velvet pants and a matching fitted jacket. I know from her previous complaints about the gymnastics required to pee that the shirt thing underneath her jacket is actually a bodysuit, that there are three snaps on the crotch, and that she’ll be commando because she thinks it’s silly to wear an extra layer underneath...
Danger.
Do not think about Hazel’s panties.
She introduces herself to our visitors, reaching over the table to shake their hands. I try to reconcile put-together Hazel with the woman I kissed on Saturday night. I kissed Hazel. My partner. As kisses go, that one is definitely in my top ten. The way she ran her hand down my chest. Her teeth scraping gently at my upper lip. Her breath catching on my mouth. The greedy pull of her mouth as if I was her favorite flavor and I made her feel just a little savage.
Hazel drops into the seat next to where I’m sprawled, still imagining her naked. She reaches beneath the table under the guise of adjusting her chair and smacks my thigh where it brushes hers.
She smirks at me. “Personal space, Reed.”
Hazel is a relentless campaigner against man-spreading, but do her fingers linger and brush over my dress pants? She smells good and I fight the urge to turn toward her body and pull her closer, because the handful of inches between us is too much. I definitely want to kiss her again, press my lips against the vulnerable base of her throat. But maybe it’s just me. Maybe Hazel’s already forgotten our kiss even though she has the memory of an elephant.
I don’t remember much about the meeting. I nod and pretend to take notes on my laptop, but the young, anxious baby executives could be pitching me luxury condos on Mars for all I know. It’s irresponsible of me to be so distracted, because there is a lot of money on the line, not to mention the future of their company. I asked them here and I should be listening.
It doesn’t surprise me that Hazel busts me as soon as we’ve walked our guests out and are headed back to our offices.
“Earth to Jack.”
“Sorry.” I scrub a hand over my head. I’m totally off my game, and we both know it.
“Do you even know what those guys pitched?”
I have the slide deck. I’ll review later this afternoon. “Did you like it?”
Hazel shrugs and pauses in front of her office door. “What’s not to like about a monthly sex-toy-box subscription service?”
Wait. What...?
“Gotcha.” Hazel bounces into her office.
Later that afternoon the mailroom guy deposits a polka-dot cardboard box on my desk. When I unfold layers of tissue that stink like exotic flowers, I discover a small white cardboard card: Merry Thursday. Love, Hazel. She’s sent me a dozen different kinds of sheet masks that smooth and plump. Lavender to hydrate, cherry blossom to brighten, tomatoes for turbo-charged radiance. There’s also a bright pink pot for scrubbing my lips that makes me wonder about our kiss. Is that a hint?
I impulsively fire off a text: Was I too rough?
<
br /> Shit.
This is why I don’t do impulsive. Hazel’s phone gives off a deafeningly loud ding in the office next to me. She claims she doesn’t hear it unless the volume is set to stun.
Should I go over there and delete my text before she can read it? Plead temporary insanity? Fuck if I know, but I’ll have to kick my own ass if I’ve offended her.
I clear my throat and pitch my voice loud enough to be heard through the wall. “Ignore that, ’kay?”
Hazel’s response is a snort-laugh. That’s a good sign, right? I’ll fix this. I did kiss her, so I’ll take the consequences. I haven’t got to the next step in my baby plan, however, before a sharp rat-a-tat sounds on our shared wall. Right. Hazel claims she’s a Morse code master, but I’ve yet to figure out what she’s trying to convey.
Think. Figure this out.
My phone dings discreetly. Fuck it I’m coming over.
“Don’t get your boxers in a wad, Reed,” she bellows.
That’s good advice, even if it does come from Hazel and I don’t wear boxers. Which she doesn’t know, although apparently I was willing to let her learn that fact for herself the other night. Play it cool. I can totally do that. I lean back in my chair and stretch my legs out beneath my desk. My tie’s threatening to choke me, so I pull it free and toss it on the desk. My sleeves are already rolled up, putting my ink on display. My suit jacket is...somewhere. I’m about as stripped-down naked as I can legally get in a California office. I don’t know why I think more clothes would help this situation, except that everything seemed to snowball this weekend when I was half-naked. Perhaps I should have worn a suit of armor to the office today.
Hazel barrels in at a speed that seems like it should be impossible given that she’s wearing four-inch heels. She told me once that she likes to be eye level with her prey. I believed it then; I believe it now. The only difference is that right now I’m the prey in her sights. A laptop and a huge flip chart load down her arms and her hair brushes her jaw as she shuts my office door with her butt. Crap. It’s going to be one of those conversations.
