by Helena Maeve
“Some of us have to work in the morning.”
The drudgery of a morning shift aside, she didn’t want to be there when Ward finally crawled out of his room—if he was even at the loft—or came back home, if he was not. She’d sooner avoid seeing him again altogether if she could help it. Ward Parrish was the timer on the bomb. The more time she spent fiddling with the wires, the more likely it was that the block of TNT would detonate.
Dylan insisted on seeing her off. He walked her down to the car in a pair of loose-fitting sleep pants and a thin T-shirt. Hazel let him press her into the hood of the Volvo and kiss her with icy lips. The once familiar lilt of cicadas was absent in the over-paved, concrete-everywhere suburbs that had enveloped Aulden Way. The night seemed to be holding its breath.
“Go back inside before you catch your death…”
“I’m fine where I am,” he murmured against her lips.
“Really? Because I’m pretty sure I’m feeling some shrinkage.”
His laugh was warm and generous, and Hazel told herself that it was genuine, too. She’d never been very good at spotting liars.
Dylan pecked her on the cheek before he withdrew, hugging his sides.
“You’re not going to do that thing where you stand on the curb and watch me drive off, are you?” Hazel wanted to know.
He shook his head, grinning. “Absolutely not.”
“Because that would be lame.”
“Totally lame,” he agreed.
Hazel got behind the wheel and clicked the door shut. It took a couple of tries to get the key into the ignition. Her fingers felt big and clumsy, a side effect of wallowing in bed for the better part of two hours. She had to concentrate to gun the engine. The Volvo sputtered a couple of times before roaring to life. Dylan was still on the sidewalk when she glanced up, rocking on his heels.
“It’s just two weeks, right?” Hazel asked, then repeated the question once she’d rolled down the window. She had to pitch her voice over the rumble of the car to make herself heard.
Even then, it was touch and go enough for Dylan to rest both elbows on the door and duck his head inside. “What?”
“It’s two weeks.”
“Until?”
Hazel cocked an eyebrow. “You come back?”
“Oh. I thought you meant until the next time you let me warm your ass with a paddle.”
A tingle raced down her spine at the hungry cadence in his voice. She flexed her hands around the steering wheel. “We’ll see.”
Dylan slid a finger under her chin and made her look at him. Hazel didn’t take much prompting. She yearned for the brush of his lips against hers even as she still felt the imprint of his kisses buried deep beneath her flesh.
He didn’t oblige this time. “Two weeks,” he said, “then you’re all mine.” He pulled back before Hazel could come up with a clever retort. The chassis vibrated with the thump of his palms. “Drive safe, okay?”
“Okay.” Hazel put the Volvo in gear and slowly eased out of the parking space. She tried to resist glancing in the rearview mirror, but temptation won out.
Sure enough, Dylan stood on the curb, hugging his sides and shivering in his weather-inappropriate attire. His reflection diminished with every asphalt-scraping roll of the tires, but his presence lingered inside the car like a specter.
When she was far enough to be sure that Dylan wouldn’t see it, Hazel allowed herself a sigh of relief. She took a left at the first intersection and let Dylan disappear from her sights. Two weeks was nothing, a mere drop in the bucket. Per experience, it was also more than enough time to forget and be forgotten.
The sodium street lights cast dull shadows over the Volvo, washing out the angry red in Hazel’s cheeks and obscuring the bone-white pallor of her fingers around the steering wheel. She was supposed to be good at cutting and running. She had done it before.
What was so different about Dylan?
The answer was simple. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
* * * *
The first day after Dylan flew off, Hazel sped through her morning shift like an automaton. She was so efficient getting orders in and out of the kitchen and refilling glasses of Diet Coke that Marco even asked if she was on drugs. She spent the hours after her shift cleaning up her apartment.
She hadn’t realized how cluttered it had gotten until she’d spent a few hours at the loft. She channeled her simmering anxiety into scrubbing dinner plates with various bits of takeout still stuck to them and separating her laundry. She vacuumed every square inch of the floor—which wasn’t hard to do, considering how small her apartment was—and washed the windows. And when she was finished with that, she took up reorganizing the inside of her wardrobe.
Hazel survived the first day with nary a thought about Dylan.
It got worse as the week wore on.
One evening as she was waiting for her shift to start, the diner almost empty around her, the hubbub in her head got so bad that Hazel found herself dialing the one number she’d never been able to forget.
Her mother picked up on the second ring. “Hazel? What’s wrong?”
They traded that question back and forth every time they called each other on something other than a holiday.
“Nothing. Everything’s good. I was just…wondering how you were. Over there.” Hazel ran her fingernail through the scuff marks on the wall. A suspicious stain marred the plaster about two feet from the floor. Hazel decided to stop touching dubiously clean surfaces. “How’s Buddy?”
“All right…”
The squeak of hinges echoed down the line. Hazel pictured her mother stepping out of the kitchen, past the screen door, and onto the porch.
The Midwest was two hours ahead. It was a miracle Mrs. Whitley was still awake.
“And Rhonda?” Hazel pressed.
“She’s all right, too… The baby’s coming any day now.”
Hazel heard the question in her mother’s voice. Will you fly down for the christening? She spoke before it could be asked. “Bet Rhonda can’t wait.”
“Oh, she’s been great. Reminds me of when I was pregnant with Buddy…” The story was a staple of their family life, dredged up every May fifth, along with streamers and fireworks, and the mountain of presents Buddy never solicited. “You, on the other hand!” Hazel’s mother hummed. “Just goes to show, I suppose…”
“Guess so,” Hazel echoed. I was a troublemaker before I was even born. Ain’t that nice to hear? She twirled the telephone cord around her finger, watching the skin go from pale to dark brown. “Were they very pissed off at me…you know, for missing out on the shower?” She said ‘they’ but what she really meant was Rhonda.
Perfect Rhonda who was a delight even when she was pregnant, whom everybody loved.
Hazel desperately wanted to hate her. She had a feeling that it would be easier to stomach than simply not being liked by her.
Her mother was silent too long to be honest. “They understood.”
Because you explained it to them.
“Good.”
“I have to go, Hazel. It’s late.”
“Oh, right.” Hazel swayed back and forth on her heels. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
“I’ll tell your father you said hi.”
“Sure.
There was nothing more to say after that and yet Hazel still felt a pang of hurt when the line went dead. Who knew? You can’t medicate one ache by setting yourself up for another. Hazel promised herself she wouldn’t call her mother again, no matter how loudly the thought of Dylan clamored in her head. No matter how lonely she felt.
Work was there to distract her—and when that failed, she had Sadie.
Chapter Ten
It had been a bad idea when Sadie first insisted and it became an even worse one when she wouldn’t let Hazel weasel out.
“You have to come,” she had wheedled again that afternoon. “You’re turning into your mother right before my eyes and I will not let that happen.”
/> Maybe it was the dreaded M word or maybe it was a matter of feeling lonely after a few days with not even an unwanted visitor to spoil her routine. Regardless, a week into Dylan’s business trip, Hazel allowed Sadie to drag her out of the house under the pretext of drinks and loud music—and more, if Sadie got her way.
The real objective of the outing became clearer once Med School Frank showed up. He painted a quiet, unobtrusive picture at Sadie’s elbow, never straying farther than an inch or two at a time. The strobe lights reflected in his glasses.
“What about him?” Sadie asked, shouting to make herself heard over the music.
Hazel tracked her gaze to a handsome brunet grinding between a couple of likewise stunning women. They had freaky one-night stand with awkward walk of shame written all over them.
“Think he’s taken.”
“Well, keep looking!”
Med School Frank shot Hazel a pitying smile. He and Sadie had just passed the two-month mark. Sadie seemed to have settled into the relationship—inasmuch as Sadie settled into anything. She constantly name dropped Frank into conversations with Marco. She texted him every hour, only to then gush about his latest quip to Hazel. More and more when she asked Hazel out for a drink after work, it was a given that Frank would be joining them.
It was lucky he improved on acquaintance, Hazel mused, leaning her elbows on the bar and tilting her gaze away from the numerous hot, nubile bodies bumping and grinding on the dance floor. She wasn’t in the mood to join them.
“How’s tricks, Frank? Classes going okay?”
“Mostly labs now,” he answered, nodding. He seemed as out of his element in the club as Hazel felt, but he wasn’t the one meant to be on the hunt for a rebound.
Sadie elbowed her in the ribs. “Oh, what about the cute one over there? I think he’s making eyes at you.”
Hazel reluctantly followed her gaze to a skinny Romeo with black-framed glasses and spiky, gelled hair. Improbably, he was indeed looking at Hazel.
Her cheeks began to heat as he flagged down the bartender. He definitely pointed toward Hazel. The bartender nodded. It took a matter of seconds to assemble a Cosmopolitan, which he brought over to Hazel’s end of the bar.
“For you,” the bartender said, and set the Martini glass on the bar in front of Sadie. “From a secret admirer.”
At the other end of the bar, Romeo smiled coyly.
Hazel laughed. Her stomach had dropped like an actual stone, burrowing somewhere deep in the basement of the club, where not even the dull thumping rhythm of the music could reach it. “Oh, man. I should’ve seen that coming.”
“I’m so sorry…” Sadie made a face at the bartender, mortified. “You can take this back. I’m not… I don’t want it.”
The bartender stared like she’d grown a second head, reacting only when Frank curled a proprietary arm around Sadie’s waist
“Oh, I’ll have it,” Hazel said, rolling her eyes. “It’s paid for, right?” She raised the glass in toast to Sadie’s secret admirer, whose cheeks had begun to tint a winsome shade of pink. “Free booze is free booze.”
Sadie smiled weakly. “I’m sorry…”
Hazel waved a hand. “Forget about it.” She took a sip of the cocktail. It tasted of the lies brimming on her tongue. “You know what? On second thought, I think I am going to dance. Watch my drink.” Cranberry juice sloshed up to the rim and threatened to spill over the lip of the Martini glass.
She turned away before Sadie’s pained expression could graft itself any deeper under her skin. This wasn’t the first time they’d gone out together and men had noticed Sadie first—or at all—while ignoring Hazel. It also wasn’t the first time Sadie had actively tried to find her a dance partner only to discover that there were no willing candidates.
Dunby High had set the tone when they were kids. Everything since was simply predestined.
Hazel brushed her fingertips under her eyes as surreptitiously as she could, nodding along to music played too loud for her ears to distinguish anything more than pounding drums and a sweeping, electric hum. She fervently hoped that her makeup wasn’t running. It would add another layer of cheerlessness to the evening—more so than the awkward, partner-less bobbing Hazel was doing as she wove deeper and deeper into the throng.
When she looked back, she couldn’t see the bar or Sadie’s blonde hair—done up in a Princess Leia inspired do for the evening.
She startled when someone sidled up behind her, whirling around to find a smarmy stranger grinning as he thrust his hips in her general direction. Hazel wondered if this was the kind of rebound Sadie had in mind when she decreed that they needed to get her laid. Lothario over there had two arms, two legs, presumably a working dick. He cleared the threshold of desperation.
“No, thanks,” Hazel shouted over the music.
The guy mimed ‘what?’ with a flick of his wrists, still approaching. He was bigger than Hazel by about a head, his shoulders testing the too-small muscle shirt he’d donned for the evening.
Before Hazel could extricate herself, he wound an arm around her waist and pulled her into his lap, grinding into her backside with his denim-clad dick.
Hazel went rigid, a hot flash rushing to her cheeks, turning the inside of her mouth to arid desert and her fists to useless lumps of coal.
A camera flash lit up the dark with the stop-start of strobe lights. Just for us, baby…
The vision rose out of the depths of memory, adrenaline spiking in her veins.
“Get the fuck away from me!” Hazel shoved as hard as she could, sending the guy teetering back into another couple. The woman shouted, affronted, and the man shoved back.
Hazel’s personal Lothario only had eyes for her. He drew himself up, glowering, and made to take a step forward, into easy reach of her fist.
“No need for that,” Hazel heard, just before someone caught her forearm.
She spun around, ready to face Moron Number Two, and her jaw just about dropped. “What’re you doing here?”
Ward didn’t get the chance to answer. Lothario covered the distance between them with a couple of broad strides. “You’d best tell your woman that if she raises a hand, she better be ready to—”
The tail end of his boast was lost to a poorly telegraphed right hook that nevertheless caught him right in the jaw.
Ward shook out his wrist, wincing. “Fuck, that hurt…”
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” Hazel cried out. A few heads had turned, but most people seemed intent on turning a blind eye to the fool crawling around the floor of the club.
Hazel pushed Ward back, marching him away from the scene of the crime. If Lothario had some buddies with him, their best bet was an ice bucket and a broad number of witnesses, neither of which could be found outside the club.
Ward let her bully him as far as the bar, where he dropped sullenly onto a stool. “You’re welcome.”
Hazel ignored him in favor of scanning their immediate vicinity for signs of Sadie and Frank. They were nowhere to be seen. Probably dancing, Hazel reasoned, which was just as well. She didn’t want to have to explain Ward or the grabby asshole.
“Let me see,” she ordered, pulling Ward’s hand away from his reddened knuckles. His thumb was already swelling with a purplish bruise. “Jesus, did you hit him with a closed fist?”
“Really? You’re going to criticize my technique?” Ward scoffed. “That’ll teach me to come to your aid…”
“I didn’t need your help. I had it under control.”
Ward rolled his eyes. “He was a head bigger than you.”
“So?” Hazel lifted herself up with a hand on the bar and propped a knee on the stool to scoop ice out of a nearby bucket. The bartender called out an objecting note. Hazel ignored him. “Here, hold this.”
“You can’t do that,” the tender griped, furrowing his pierced eyebrows. “This isn’t a self-service—”
“Would you rather I call the cops?” Hazel shot back.
“Excuse her,” Ward scoffed. “She’s a little high-strung. Ow!”
Hazel smiled through clenched teeth and closed his abused fist around the fast-melting ice cubes. “Look who’s talking.”
Ward didn’t heed her. “I’ll have a whiskey,” he said, sliding a twenty across the bar, “and your discretion.”
The bartender shook his head and he snagged the crisp bill. He walked away muttering under his breath about a lover’s tiff.
Beneath his makeshift compress, Ward flexed his fingers weakly. “Aren’t you all Florence Nightingale? You can give it a rest, you know. He’s not here.”
Hazel didn’t have to ask who Ward was referring to. She withdrew her hands from his chilled fingers, annoyance sparking in her gut. “I know he’s not here. He’s in Shanghai, right? Business trip or something…” You’re not the only one he talks to, jerk. Then again, she wouldn’t have been surprised if Dylan had come back early and failed to share the good news. They didn’t have that kind of relationship.
They didn’t have much of a relationship at all. Hazel banished the thought.
Ward’s expression remained pinched and oddly quizzical.
“He didn’t tell you.”
“What?” It shouldn’t have surprised her to discover that Dylan had more secrets. He compartmentalized well. Hazel was a rank amateur by comparison.
“He went to see his birth parents.”
Hazel cocked an eyebrow. “If he didn’t tell me, then I’m not supposed to know.” She meant it as a rebuff. She didn’t need him to funnel intelligence. She didn’t need him widening the chasm she’d already started digging between herself and Dylan.
“He didn’t tell me not to tell you,” Ward defended, pedantic. He exchanged the melting ice cubes for the whiskey. Hazel saw herself reflected in the fast-growing puddle on the counter. She should’ve pinned her hair up, like Sadie. She should’ve touched up her makeup. Ward’s accented lilt interrupted the self-reproach. “Dylan knows I’m all about explicit requests.” His throat bobbed as he swallowed.
Hazel made a point not to look away. This was one fight she didn’t want to back away from. “Was it explicit when you lied to him?”
