Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating

by Christina Lauren

With an expectant look tossed to each of us Trin asks, “Did you guys date?”

  Josh pales. “Oh my God. Never.”

  Holy crap, I forgot how much I like this guy.

  ··········

  That little shyster Dave Goldrich, principal, waits until I’ve had three margaritas before telling me I officially have the job as Riverview’s newest third grade teacher. I’m pretty sure he does this to see what astounding response comes out of my mouth, so I hope he isn’t disappointed with “Holy shit! Are you fucking with me?”

  He laughs. “I am not.”

  “Do I already have a thick HR file?”

  “Not officially.” Bending from somewhere up near the International Space Station, Dave drifts down to plant a kiss on the top of my head. “But you’re not getting the favorite treatment, either. I separate work life from personal. You’ll need to do the same.”

  I pick up on the only thing that matters here. “I’m your favorite?” I bare my teeth, flashing my charming dimple. “I won’t tell Emily if you won’t.” Dave laughs and makes a dramatic reach for my glass, but I evade him, leaning in to add, “About Josh. Is he a tea—?”

  “My sister didn’t tell me you’re joining the staff at Riverview.” Josh must be part vampire because I swear he just materializes in empty spaces near warm bodies.

  I straighten, flapping at the air in front of my face and trying to clear the confusion. “Your sister?”

  “My sister,” he repeats slowly, “known to you as Emily Goldrich, known to our parents as Im Yujin.”

  All of a sudden, it clicks. I’ve only ever known Em’s married name. It never occurred to me that the beloved big brother—or oppa—I’m always hearing about is the very same Josh I barfed on all those years ago. Wow. Apparently this is the grown-up version of the metal-mouthed tween brother I’ve seen in the row of photos in Emily’s living room. Well done, puberty.

  Turning, I yell over my shoulder, “Emily, your Korean name is Yujin?”

  She nods. “He’s Jimin.”

  I look at him like I’m seeing a new person in front of me. The two syllables of his name are like a sensual exhale, something I might say immediately preorgasm when words fail me. “That might be the hottest name I’ve ever heard.”

  He blanches, like he’s afraid I’m about to offer to have sex with him again, and I burst out laughing.

  I realize I should be mortified that Past Hazel was so dramatically inappropriate, but it’s not like I’m that much better now, and regret isn’t really my speed anyway. For the count of three quick breaths, Josh and I grin at each other in intense shared amusement. Our eyes are cartoon-spiral wild.

  But then his smile straightens as he seems to remember that I am ridiculous.

  “I promise to not proposition you at your sister’s party,” I tell him, pseudo–sotto voce.

  Josh mumbles an awkward “Thanks.”

  Dave asks, “Hazel propositioned you?”

  Josh nods, holding eye contact with me for a couple more seconds before looking over to his brother-in-law—my new boss. “She did.”

  “I did,” I agree. “In college. Just before vomiting on his shoes. It was one of my more undatable moments.”

  “She’s had a few.” Josh blinks down when his phone buzzes, pulling it out of his pocket. He reads a text with absolutely no reaction and then puts the phone away.

  There must be some male pheromone thing happening, because Dave has extracted something from this moment that I have not. “Bad news?” he asks, brows drawn, voice all low, like Josh is a sheet of fragile glass.

  Josh shrugs, expression even. A muscle ticks in his jaw and I resist reaching out and pressing it like I’m playing Simon. “Tabitha isn’t going to make it up for the weekend.”

  I feel my own jaw creak open. “There are real people named Tabitha?”

  Both men turn to look at me like they don’t know what I mean.

  But come on.

  “I just—” I continue, haltingly. “Tabitha seems like what you’d name someone if you expect them to be really, really . . . evil. Like, living in a lair and hoarding spotted puppies.”

  Dave clears his throat and lifts his glass to his mouth, drinking deeply. Josh stares at me. “Tabby is my girlfriend.”

  “Tabby?”

  Swallowing back a strangled laugh, Dave puts a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Hazel. Shut up.”

  “HR file?” I look up at his familiar face, all bearded and calm. It’s dark out now, and he’s backlit by a few strings of outdoor lights.

  “The party doesn’t count,” he assures me, “but you’re a maniac. Ease Josh in a little.”

  “I think the fact that I’m a maniac is partly why I’m your favorite.”

  Dave nearly breaks, but he manages to turn and walk away before I can tell. I am now alone with Josh Im. He studies me like he’s looking at something infectious through a microscope.

  “I always thought I caught you in . . . a phase.” His left eyebrow makes a fancy arch. “Apparently you’re just like this.”

  “I feel like I have a lot to apologize for,” I admit, “but I can’t be sure I won’t be constantly exasperating you, so maybe I’ll just wait until we’re elderly.”

  Half of his mouth turns up. “I can say without question I’ve honestly never known anyone else like you.”

  “So completely undatable?”

  “Something like that.”

  TWO

  * * *

  JOSH

  Hazel Bradford. Wow.

  Pretty much everyone we went to college with has a Hazel Bradford story. Of course, my old roommate Mike has many—mostly of the wild sexual variety—but others have ones more similar to mine: Hazel Bradford doing a mud run half marathon and coming to her night lab before showering because she didn’t want to be late. Hazel Bradford getting more than a thousand signatures of support to enter a local hot dog eating contest/fund-raiser before remembering, onstage and while televised, that she was trying to be a vegetarian. Hazel Bradford holding a yard sale of her ex-boyfriend’s clothes while he was still asleep at the party where she found him naked with someone else (incidentally, another guy from his terrible garage band). And—my personal favorite—Hazel Bradford giving an oral presentation on the anatomy and function of the penis in Human Anatomy.

  I could never quite tell whether she was oblivious or just didn’t care what people thought, but no matter how chaotic she was, she always managed to give off an innocent, unintentionally wild vibe. And here she is in the flesh—all five foot four of her, a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, huge brown eyes, with her hair in an enormous brown bun—and I don’t think anything has changed.

  “Can I call you Jimin?” she asks.

  “No.”

  Confusion flickers across her face. “You should be proud of your heritage, Josh.”

  “I am,” I say, fighting a smile. “But you just said it ‘Jee-Min.’ ”

  I’m given a blank stare.

  “It’s not the same,” I explain, and say it again: “Jimin.”

  She takes on a dramatic, seductive expression. “Jeee-minnnn?”

  “No.”

  Giving up, Hazel straightens and sips her margarita, looking around. “Do you live in Portland?”

  “I do.” Just behind her, in the distance, I see my sister walk up to Dave, pull him down to her level, ask him something, and then they both look at me. I’m positive she’s just asked where Tabby is.

  I knew, when Tabitha took the job in L.A.—her dream job to write for a fashion magazine—that there would be weekends when one or the other of us would be stuck and unable to fly south (me) or north (her), but it sucks that on three out of four of her weekends to come up here, she’s flaked last minute.

  Or maybe not flaked so much as had a last-minute work emergency.

  But what kind of emergencies do they have at a style magazine?

  Honestly, I have no clue. Whatever.

  Hazel is still talking.r />
  I turn my attention back down to her just as she seems to wrap up whatever it was she was asking. She stares at me expectantly, grinning in her wide-open way.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  She clears her throat, speaking slowly, “I asked whether you were okay.”

  I nod, tilting my bottled water to my lips and trying to wipe away the irritation she must see slashed across my mouth. “I’m good. Just mellow. Long week.” I do a mental tally: I averaged eleven hours and thirty-five clients a day this week alone so I could be free all weekend. Knee replacements, hip replacements, bursitis, sprains, torn ligaments, and one dislocated pelvis that made my hands feel weak before I even attempted to work on it.

  “It’s just that you’re sort of monosyllabic,” Hazel says, and I look down at her. “You’re drinking water when there are Dave’s margaritas to be had.”

  “I’m not very good at . . .” I trail off, gesturing with my bottle to the growing melee around us.

  “Drinking?”

  “No, just . . .”

  “Putting words together into sentences, and then sentences together into conversation?”

  Pursing my lips at her, I say primly, “Socializing in large crowds.”

  This earns me a laugh, and I watch as her shoulders lift toward her ears and she snickers like a cartoon character. Her bun wobbles back and forth on the top of her head. A guilty pulse flashes through me when I realize that despite being goofy, she’s sexy as hell, too.

  I can feel the reaction work its way from my heart to my groin, and cover with “You are so weird.”

  “It’s true. I’m around kids all day—what do you expect?” I’m about to remind her that it seems like she’s always been this way when she continues, “What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a physical therapist.” I look around the yard to see whether my business partner, Zach, has shown up yet, but I don’t see a flash of orange hair anywhere. “My partner and I opened our practice about a year ago, downtown.”

  Hazel groans in jealousy. “You get to talk about cores all day, and working things nice and deep. I would never get any actual work done.”

  “I mean, I occasionally get to tell people to take their pants off, but it’s rarely the people you want to see naked from the waist down.”

  She gives me a thoughtful frown. “I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if clothes were never invented.”

  “I literally never wonder that.”

  Hazel rolls on without pause. “Like if we were just naked all the time, what things would have been developed differently?”

  I take a sip of my water. “We probably wouldn’t ride horses.”

  “Or we’d just have calluses in weird places.” She taps her lips with her index finger. “Bike seats would be different.”

  “Very likely.”

  “Women probably wouldn’t shave their labia.”

  A jarring physical reaction cracks through me. “Hazel, that is a terrible word.”

  “What? We actually don’t have hair inside our vaginas.” I stifle another shudder and she levels me with the fiery stare of a woman scorned. “Besides, no one winces at the word ‘scrotum.’ ”

  “I absolutely wince at ‘scrotum.’ And ‘glans.’ ”

  “Glaaaans,” she says, elongating the word. “Terrible.”

  I stare at her for a few quiet seconds. Her shoulders are bare, and there’s a single freckle on her left one. Her collarbones are defined, arms sculpted like she exercises. I get a flash of a mental image of Hazel using watermelons as weights. “I feel like you’re making me drunk just by speaking.” I peer into her glass. “Like some kind of osmosis is happening.”

  “I think we’re going to be best friends.” At my bewildered silence, she reaches up and ruffles my hair. “I live in Portland, you live in Portland. You have a girlfriend and I have a huge assortment of Netflix series backlogged. We both hate the word ‘glans.’ I know and love your sister. She loves me. This is the perfect setup for boy-girl bestship: I’ve already been unbearable near you, which makes it impossible to scare you away.”

  Quickly swallowing a sip of water, I protest, “I’m afraid you’re going to try.”

  She seems to ignore this. “I think you think I’m fun.”

  “Fun in the way that clowns are fun.”

  Hazel looks up at me, eyes on fire with excitement. “I seriously thought I was the only person alive who loves clowns!”

  I can’t hold in my laugh. “I’m kidding. Clowns are terrifying. I won’t even walk too close to the storm drain in front of my house.”

  “Well.” She threads her arm through mine, leading me closer to the heart of the party. When she leans in to whisper, my stomach drops somewhere around my navel, the way it does at the first lurch of a roller coaster. “We have nowhere to go but up.”

  ··········

  Hazel sidles us up to a pair of guys standing near the built-in grill—John and Yuri, two of my sister’s (and now Hazel’s) colleagues. Their conversation halts as we approach, and Hazel holds out a firm hand.

  “I’m Hazel. This is Josh.”

  The three of us regard her with faint amusement. I’ve known them both for years.

  “We go way back,” John says, tilting his head to me, but he shakes her hand, and I watch her methodically take in his shoulder-length dreads, mustache, beret, and T-shirt that reads SCIENCE DOESN’T CARE WHAT YOU BELIEVE. I hold my breath, wondering what Hazel is going to do with him because, as a white dude with dreadlocks, John has made it pretty easy for her, but she just turns to Yuri, smiling and shaking his hand.

  “John and Yuri work with Em,” I tell her. I use my bottle to point to John. “As you may have guessed, he teaches science to the upper grades. Yuri is music and theater. Hazel is the new third grade teacher.”

  They offer congratulations and Hazel curtsies. “Do third graders get music?” she asks Yuri.

  He nods. “Kindergarten through second is vocal only. In third they begin a string instrument. Violin, viola, or cello.”

  “Can I learn, too?” Her eyebrows slowly rise. “Like, sit in on the class?”

  John and Yuri smile at Hazel in the bemused way that says, Is she fucking serious? I imagine most elementary school teachers nap, eat, or cry when they have a free period.

  Hazel does a little dance and mimes playing a cello. “I’ve always wanted to be the next Yo-Yo Ma.”

  “I . . . guess so?” Yuri says, disarmed by the power of Hazel Bradford’s cartoon giggle and bewitching honesty. I turn and look at her, worrying about what Yuri has just gotten himself into. But when he checks out her chest, he doesn’t seem worried at all.

  “Yo-Yo Ma began performing when he was four and a half,” I tell her.

  “I’d better get cracking, then. Don’t let me down, Yuri.”

  He laughs and asks her where she’s from. Half listening to her answer—only child, born in Eugene, raised by an artist mother and engineer father, Lewis & Clark for college—I pull out my phone and check the latest texts from Tabby, each of them sent about five minutes apart. I hate that I get a tiny bit of pleasure knowing that she kept checking her phone.

  Don’t be mad at me.

  I told Trish this was the last Friday I could work so late.

  Do you want me to try to come up tomorrow, or would it be a waste?

  Josh, Josh, don’t be mad at me, I’m so sorry.

  I blow out a controlled breath, and type,

  At Em’s party, so only seeing these now. I’m not mad. Come home tomorrow if you want, but it’s totally up to you. You know I always want to see you.

  ··········

  “She said you were going to be best friends?” My sister frowns at a shirt and drops it back on the pile at Nordstrom Rack. “I’m her best friend.”

  “It’s what she said.” A laugh rises in my chest but doesn’t make its way out when I remember Hazel accepting her fourth margarita from Dave and asking me to s
taple her shirt to her waistband. “She’s a trip.”

  “She’s made me weird,” Em says. “It’ll happen to you, too.”

  I think I know exactly what Em means, but seeing the effect Hazel has had on my sister—making her more fun-loving, giving her social confidence that only now, in hindsight, can I really attribute to Hazel—I don’t consider this oddness a bad thing. And Hazel is so unlike Tabby and Zach—so unlike everyone, really, but maybe the polar opposite of my girlfriend and best friend, who both tend to be quiet and observant—that I think it might be fun to have her around. Like keeping interesting beer in the fridge that you’re always surprised and pleased to find there.

  Is that a terrible metaphor? I glance at my sister and mentally calculate the amount of physical damage she could inflict with the hanger she’s holding.

  “She’s half ‘hot exasperating mess’ and half ‘color in a monotone landscape.’ ” Em pulls the shirt from the hanger and hands it to me. I fold it over my arm, letting her—as usual—pick my clothes. “I can’t believe Tabby isn’t here, again.”

  I don’t bite. It’s the third time she’s tried to bait me into a conversation about my girlfriend.

  “Doesn’t she know that relationships take work?”

  Sliding my gaze over to her, I remind her, “She has a deadline, Em.”

  “Does she really, though?” Her voice is high and tight and she takes out her frustration on a pair of shorts she throws back down on the stack in front of her. “Doesn’t this evasion of hers feel like . . . like . . .”

  I prepare for this with a deep breath, hoping my sister doesn’t go there.

  “Like she’s cheating?” she asks.

  And she went there.

  “Emily,” I begin calmly, “when Dave is working crazy hours at the school, and you come over and eat dinner at my place and vent about how you haven’t seen him in days, do I tell you, ‘Well, maybe he’s got someone on the side’?”

  “No, but Dave is also not a flaky asshole.”

  This trips my fuse. “What is your deal with Tabby? She’s only ever been nice to you.”

  She flinches at my volume, because it’s pretty high, which I know is rare. “It’s not even that you’re too good for her, or she’s too good for you,” she says, “it’s like you guys are in different circles. You have different values.”