by Helena Maeve
“Whoa, Sadie.” Hazel held up her hands. “I swear I wasn’t trying to imply anything…”
Had she? The past few days had been an exercise in restraint. She’d tried to walk the fine line between being a good friend and letting Sadie trample her underfoot with as much grace and fairness as she could muster.
For the most part, it had worked. Sadie was finally moving out and her relationship with Dylan would once again go back to being that of acquaintances who maybe saw each other once a month. Hopefully.
Hazel had been counting on Sadie recovering her blithe, sunny self at the same speed. She didn’t know how to tackle the prickly woman standing beside her at the bar.
The bell chime above the door seemed so much less important by contrast.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” a female voice intoned unctuously from the other side of the counter.
Hazel knew who it belonged to before she spun around. Suspicion did nothing to stop her jaw from dropping. Familiar faces she associated with Missouri were supposed to stay in Missouri. Or, if not, somewhere in the eighth circle of hell.
“The fuck do you want?” Sadie snarled, slightly less than hospitable. Ten years was not enough to shroud an old friend’s features in anonymity.
Brunette and rail thin, Penelope Pryce pursed her rouged lips in feigned hurt, as generously made up now as she’d been then. “Since you both missed the reunion, I thought we’d have a nice little get together. Kind of an intimate thing, just the three of us…”
She glanced from Hazel to Sadie and back, letting her gaze slide down Hazel’s uniform meaningfully as she smiled. Contempt suited her so well.
“And,” she added, “Malcolm.”
* * * *
Hands shaking, Hazel only released Penelope’s bony elbow when they were on the other side of the street. Traffic drowned out the whoosh of blood in her ears. The urge to give Penelope a slight shove into the path of a moving vehicle was almost more than Hazel could control.
She pictured it clearly—Penelope’s purple and gold scarf fluttering like a flag, one lonely, red-soled pump scattered by the curb.
And bloodstains, of course, like an oil slick stretching outward.
Another vision intruded, as vivid as the first, of herself between Penelope’s splayed thighs, gauging and adjusting her strokes according to the pitch of Penelope’s moans. The memory of Malcolm’s slap hauled her back into the present with a jolt.
Her voice quaked when she spoke, “You have some nerve coming here and threatening me.”
Penelope had the nerve to titter. “Oh, stop. No one’s watching. Sadie’s gone back inside. Your depressing clients are well out of earshot. You can drop the act.”
“And you can go to hell,” Hazel retorted, matching the saccharine sweetness of Penelope’s pitch as best she could. “What do you want?”
“I told you. A reunion.”
Hazel folded her arms across her chest. “I didn’t graduate.” That shameful feature of her early twenties came as a handy excuse from time to time. It did so now, when faced with her ex-boyfriend’s wife, a woman Hazel had known a little too well in college.
Penelope didn’t have the patience for lies. “Malcolm wants to see you,” she declared. “He’s in town.”
“How did he find out where I work?”
“He didn’t.”
Despite the swell of panic threatening to burst through her ribcage like something out Aliens, Hazel found herself snorting a guffaw. “Sorry, sorry… I just had this image of you in your nice little Chanel get-up going through every diner in LA to find me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Penelope scoffed.
“So just everything east of Beverly Hills, huh?”
Penelope glowered. Hazel had always thought she had a pretty face—a little waspish, the point of her nose and the nadir of her chin giving her features a faintly angular slant. But she had almond-shaped eyes and a mouth made for kissing, so it wasn’t like Hazel could claim she wasn’t competition.
Malcolm had once called her his little songbird—not that Penelope had much of a voice for singing.
The memory stung, even after so many years.
“You can tell Malcolm that I don’t want to see him. And if he keeps following me around the country, I’ll have to get a restraining order.”
“He’ll love that.”
“I don’t care,” Hazel sighed. “Penelope, I’m done. I was done a whole fucking decade ago—”
“You said something to your father, didn’t you? Some lie?” Penelope pressed in close.
Hazel smothered the instinctive urge to step back.
“He reneged on his deal with Malcolm.”
“Good.” Thank you, Dad.
“I don’t think you understand—your family needs Malcolm. All that money you grew up with? It’s running out. And let’s face it, Dunby isn’t exactly an up-and-coming town, is it?”
Tucked in the boot heel of the state, too far from any major city to count as a potential suburban haven for nature-loving commuters, Hazel’s hometown had been clinging to the good old days for the better part of the last forty years or so. Resilience was the first word in the town motto.
“There will be other investors,” Hazel said, injecting confidence into her voice.
Penelope’s sneer would have cleaved her certainty in half, had she felt any.
“Don’t come back here.”
“Or what?” Penelope smirked, folding her arms across her slim chest. “You’ll have your boyfriends evict me?”
“I’ll do something much worse. Tell Malcolm I have a copy of the movie.”
“Oh, would you stop acting as if I do everything he tells me! I know all about your little tape, remember?”
Years back, in college, Penelope and Hazel had been part of a group of young women disillusioned with the average male. A little awkward, a little sheltered, they had attracted the eye of a select clique—sons of politicians and businessmen who had a very specific idea of the kind of women they wanted.
Penelope had learned to embody that ideal, while Hazel had fallen off the wagon along the way.
It came as a shock to discover that she pitied her old friend.
“Whatever you need to tell yourself… I can still mess up his reputation,” Hazel pointed out, “make things bad for Mal and his folks. You two stay away from me and we won’t have to discover what the rest of your friends think about what he did.”
Before Penelope could dismiss the threat, Hazel spun on her heel and started down the street, back to the small, dingy diner where she had wound up after trudging through the dust tracks of Penelope’s great life.
You got him to yourself in the end, just as you wanted.
Hazel hugged her sides and, despite the afternoon heat, suppressed a shiver. One wrong step and playing messenger could’ve been her lot instead of Penny’s.
* * * *
After their morning tangle, Sadie gave Hazel a wide berth until the end of the shift. She took Travis up on his offer of a ride home when he swung by the diner. Hazel thought Sadie must have called him. She pretended not to notice them leaving together—Sadie’s laugh a sonorous, bright thing, as though she wanted to be heard. In her absence, there were tables to be bussed and napkins to fold.
“You pulling a double shift?” Marco asked, when he noticed Hazel making busy around the diner an hour after her shift had purportedly ended.
“You want me to go?”
Marco mulled this over. It was no secret that he lacked the cash flow to pay overtime. He brought it up whenever anyone complained about needing extra hands at peak hours.
“If you think you can stick around till morning, tell Emmalee to head on home,” he decreed. “And can you tuck those menus right? Drives me insane.” He pointed with a meaty finger to the leather sleeve into which were crammed all the laminated one-page menus that passed through their patrons’ greasy hands.
Hazel tackled that first. She didn’t r
elish the thought of spending the night in Marco’s diner. Her feet were already killing her. But the alternative was to head home and pretend everything was all right. She couldn’t imagine telling Ward and Dylan about Penelope’s visit. The less they talked about her sordid past, the better.
It would be easier to pretend it hadn’t happened in the morning.
“Hey, if you want to head on home, Marco says it’s cool,” she told Emmalee.
She glanced up from a thick textbook, highlighter in hand. “You want to swap shifts?”
Hazel shrugged. Might as well, since I’m too chickenshit to go home. She had an apartment she could run to if she needed the space, but that place had been tainted, however indirectly, by Malcolm’s foray into film-making. “What are you doing, anyway?” she asked, changing the subject. “Looks like homework.”
“That’s ’cause it is. I’m taking a couple of night classes at the community college. Nothing fancy,” Emmalee added with a self-deprecating laugh. “Just, you know, I was thinking I’d make a pretty good shop assistant or something. But they want college degrees for that now, can you believe it?”
It had been the case already when Hazel had first come to LA, four hundred dollars in her wallet and no idea how she was to make ends meet. She hadn’t looked for a job since Marco had taken her on. Waiting tables was grueling, blistering work, but it saved her the indignity of being turned down at recruitment office after recruitment office.
As if guessing her thoughts, Emmalee asked, “You went to college, right?”
“For a couple of years,” Hazel confirmed.
“You graduate early?”
“Nope.”
“Ah.” Emmalee flashed her a commiserating smile, foundation cracking after a day spent bathing in steam and greasy fumes under unflattering fluorescent lights. “Well, shouldn’t be hard to get those credits transferred.”
“Yeah,” Hazel echoed, “so I can be a waitress with a college degree.”
They already had one of those.
Emmalee arched her thinly penciled eyebrows. “Who says you’ll be a waitress forever?” Books packed into her arm, she squeezed Hazel’s shoulder. “Anyway, you’re the best. I’ve got a ton of reading to get done.”
“Sure…”
Hazel leaned against the vinyl booth to watch her saunter into the back of the restaurant, a woman who knew what she wanted out of life. To Hazel, hers was just one more table to set to rights for clients that might or might not show up until the shift change in the morning.
She gave it another half hour to make sure Emmalee was well and truly gone before she dug out her cell phone from her locker and texted Ward to say she wouldn’t make it home tonight. His reply was almost instantaneous, a tongue-in-cheek plea not to have too much fun with her other lover. She didn’t dignify the tease with a response.
Penelope’s venomous barbs still kicking around in her head, Hazel found herself thinking that maybe Emmalee had a point. The thought of going back to college was nearly enough to make Hazel break out in hives, but it didn’t have to be a full-time thing.
She needed a back-up plan, in any event. Her family’s money was running out and she couldn’t rely on Ward and Dylan to put her up forever.
She couldn’t let herself become their Penelope.
* * * *
Yawning, Hazel pulled the parking brake, then slammed the car door shut. The Volvo squeaked in protest as she turned the lock. Not for the first time, the battery in the remote control had opted to take the night off. Her cell phone was similarly indisposed.
Hazel tugged a hand through her hair and hefted her handbag.
It took her a moment to grasp that she had driven to the wrong address. The graffiti-festooned concrete walls of her apartment building loomed on the other side of the street, shrouded in the darkness of busted street lights. The sun wasn’t up yet and wouldn’t be for another hour. A strangely lugubrious aura hung over the tower in the absence of illumination.
Don’t be stupid.
There would be people of all ages sleeping behind the windows of their apartments. Parents would wake kids to pack them off to school in a little while. Harried men and women would rush out to their first minimum wage job of the day.
Hazel sucked in a deep, fortifying breath and crossed the silent street. Too much Aulden Way was messing with her worldview.
She hadn’t meant to come here, but her inner autopilot must’ve decided that she needed the reality check. It had been one of those days. Hazel pushed past the front door of the building and stepped into the pervasive scent of fried onions. She picked her way up the stairs in the dark, using her cell, once it deigned to switch on, to cast a dull bluish glare over the three or so feet ahead of every step. It was slow going, the elevator out of commission again, but without any surprises, she made it to her door in just a couple of minutes.
The lock was untouched, wood sticking to the frame like an added security when she pushed through. All her fears about online trolls paying her a visit in real life seemed unfounded. No one had even bothered to leave a bouquet on her doormat. Still, for safety’s sake, Hazel flicked on all the lights in her apartment and checked every nook and cranny before she truly let herself breathe easy.
“Home sweet home,” she told the living room couch. The cushions sighed as she dropped down, too exhausted to make it to the bed in the next room.
After a good couple of weeks spent exclusively in the loft, every crack in the walls registered as a personal affront. The mismatched furniture had been an achievement once—going from nothing to something always was—but Hazel suddenly felt that it wasn’t enough. She toed off her ballet flats and laced her fingers behind her head. This, right here, was the source of her fears.
If she fought for Dylan but lost herself along the way, was it still a victory?
The creaking, rattling hot water pipes vibrated in the walls as if in silent answer. Hazel squeezed her eyes shut, mind made up.
Chapter Six
“You didn’t make it home this morning,” Dylan noted, his hand a gentle weight against the small of Hazel’s back. “Marco riding your ass?”
Hazel didn’t struggle too hard to suppress a smirk. “Why? Jealous?”
She had slept away the morning in her own apartment before driving to the loft. The boys were gone by then and she’d had the massive shower adjacent to Ward’s bedroom all to herself. The indulgence hadn’t felt earned, but Hazel tried not to dwell on it as she carved up the chicken. Dylan’s state-of-the-art range had browned it nicely and his carving knife sliced through the meat as though it was heated butter. Hazel could bend to her task and tolerate Dylan’s breath on the nape of her neck.
She just didn’t want to.
“Here.” She turned and pressed the utensils into Dylan’s hands. “You do it.”
He pouted. “But I like watching you work.”
“Oh, flattery,” Hazel tossed over her shoulder, already stepping away. “Did Ward say if he’ll be home for dinner?”
“I didn’t hear anything…”
“Hmm, better save him a plate anyway. You know what he’s like when he’s hungry.”
“Same as he is when he’s not?” Dylan guessed.
His smile looked genuine enough, but Hazel had a hard time shaking the sense that they were performing the role of a happy couple. A happy triad. Whatever. She set the table while Dylan filled their plates, trying to find her footing before he figured her out.
“You enjoy your time off?” Dylan wondered.
“Yeah.”
“Do anything interesting? Slept, shopped…”
Hazel shook her head. My life is painfully uninteresting. The fact that her horizons were so limited had never failed to rankle before, but for the first time since she had hooked up with Dylan, it annoyed her that she didn’t even make an effort.
How could Dylan and Ward be expected to find her exciting if she bored herself?
“Oh, I met one of your neighbors.”
/> Dylan sat down at the head of the table, leaving the seat directly across from Hazel to Ward’s ghost. “Did you?”
“Mm. Cute guy. Late forties, maybe? The one with glasses.”
She laughed when Dylan arched a probing eyebrow.
“No, no. Go on. Sounds promising.”
“It was.” Hazel smoothed down the corners of a folded napkin. “He wanted to know how much I charged.”
Dylan nearly choked on his wine. “Come again?”
“He was looking for a housekeeper.” And Hazel, in her battered jeans and washed out T-shirt, had fit the part. After yesterday’s barrage of reminders about her wasted potential, it wasn’t the nicest thing to hear. “Don’t get me wrong,” Hazel added quickly, trying to play it off, “I’m flattered that he thinks I’m worth sixty bucks an hour…although between you and me that sounds a lot like something a guy would offer when he’s hoping for a little polishing on the side.”
She flashed Dylan a rueful grin, less than shocked when he didn’t return it.
“You don’t need me to tell you there’re a lot of assholes on this street,” he muttered after a beat. “I’m sorry that happened. I can—”
“Have a stern talk with him? Defend your property?”
It felt perversely good to see Dylan balk at the proposition. He had the kind of face that lent itself best to dangerous or seductive. Bewilderment softened the shelf of his jaw. Hazel reached out a hand and knuckled his mouth closed.
“I’m fine. It was just a misunderstanding.” Any resemblance to real hurt feelings was thoroughly inconsequential.
She could tell that Dylan didn’t want to drop it, but for reasons Hazel was not privy to, he went back to his dinner rather than push the point. They ate in silence—Dylan mostly picking at the chicken with birdlike bites while Hazel methodically devoured a pair of drumsticks. The peas were nothing to write home about. Neither was the tiramisu she had attempted in the late afternoon as a distraction from her computer, while she waited for some divine sign as to whether or not it made sense to disburse a couple of hundred dollars on a whim.
