Chapter Four
Reid
“So, he was like, tall and handsome and built, like covered in tattoos with a motorcycle…”
Bachelorette number five was not Haz. And while she was describing me to a T, her voice really grated on my nerves.
“And like he just couldn’t understand that I’d spent too much money on my extensions to cover it with a helmet and risk the wind pulling one loose. So, I like insisted he drive his car, and it totally didn’t match his personality. He drove a freaking used Mazda 3, and it didn’t even have like tinted windows or anything. It was like totally boring.”
And she was clearly superficial as hell. I’d asked her about her ideal type of man, and she went on some rant about her ex-boyfriend. She hadn’t stopped talking since and every other word out of her mouth was like .
When the bell rang indicating this round was over, I scrubbed my hand over my face, scratching the hair covering my jaw. I’d been debating getting rid of the beard for months, but at this point in my life, it was my emotional support facial hair. Weren’t beards supposed to make every man exponentially more attractive?
And Colorado winters were cold as fuck, so it was like having a built-in face warmer.
“It was like nice to meet you,” she chirped, and I braced myself for the next woman. Charley hadn’t warned me I’d be bored out of my fucking mind during this.
Adding one last crosshatch to the bottom of the letter E on my paper, I drew a line through the #5 written at the top of the page and chuckled at the incredibly detailed block letters spelling out the word LIKE that covered the like page.
It was clear I did not like number five.
Number four wasn’t much better. She didn’t talk unless I asked a question, and even then, she gave one sentence answers. After asking most of the questions on my prompt sheet, we lapsed into awkward silence for the last minute. She didn’t even say goodbye when the bell rang, and I wondered why some of these women had taken part if they weren’t taking it seriously.
I was trying to, but after three more soul-sucking rotations, my patience was waning. Number three whispered everything, and after I asked her to repeat herself multiple times, I just ended up sketching a very detailed set of lips across the page with tiny words floating around it.
By the time I got to bachelorette fourteen, I was ready to just lay my head down on the table and take a nap. If I wasn’t afraid of Charley grabbing the pink bat she now kept stored underneath the counter at the bar and whacking me with it, I would have.
“Hi,” she greeted, and a grin pulled across my face. Finally. Even from one word, I’d know that soft dulcet anywhere. It had been haunting my dreams for months.
“Hey,” I responded, pitching my voice slightly lower so she hopefully wouldn’t recognize it. While actually talking to each other over the last few months was a recent development, we’d spent enough time shooting the shit at the bar while she cleaned glasses after a shift for her to know what I sounded like.
“Okay, I’m just going to ask…” she trailed off, and I sat up straighter, ready for her to call me out. If she flat out asked me who I was, I wouldn’t lie to her.
“Hmm,” I hummed, hoping that was enough of a prompt for her to continue.
“Are you super bored right now?”
Laughing, I looked down at the once blank sheet with the #14 written on the top. The soft jawline of a woman had curved around the page, my fingers moving on autopilot as I shaded a slight dimple in her right cheek, the shape of her lips long committed to memory.
“Like you would not believe.”
Her soft laughter did something to my chest that I was not going to acknowledge right now. But this was the first rotation where I dreaded the clock counting down and our turn being over.
“So, we should probably get to it. Do you want to ask the first question, or should I?”
“Go for it, H…” I trailed off, clearing my throat before course correcting after I almost said her name. “Hun.”
“Ah, a nickname guy. Do you call everyone hun ?”
“No, not really. At least not in everyday conversation. I’m more of a nickname in the heat of the moment kind of guy.”
“Oh, really?” she laughed. “And what’s your go to?”
“This is our first date, and you already want to know what I call women in bed? Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself? We’re supposed to be asking getting to know you questions.”
Her laughter warmed my heart, and I was almost embarrassed for myself at how much I lit up when I talked to her lately. I was a thirty-one-year-old grown ass man, not a sixteen-year-old.
“You can tell me,” she coaxed, her voice taking on a throaty quality that had other parts of me taking notice.
“Are you going to be a good girl and use the questions on the sheet if I do? Hmm?”
She let out a little squeak of surprise and I turned my attention to the page I had absentmindedly been sketching on. The image of Hazel’s lips on the paper prompted me to lick mine, and I shifted in my chair because that unassuming noise should not have been turning me on.
“I think you just gave yourself away, handsome.”
“How do you know I’m handsome?” I asked, deciding to tease her a bit.
“Just a hunch. Any man with a voice like yours and delivery of a good girl that smoothly has to be attractive. You’ve clearly got practice with those words coming off your lips. ”
“Is that so?” I hummed, wanting to keep her talking. Even though we were completely off the rails and only had a few minutes left, I was enjoying this flirtatious side of her.
“Oh yeah, and the deep flirty tones coming out of you without hesitation means you’ve got practice at seduction. Which I find incredibly attractive. What do you find attractive, bachelor number seven?”
“Women with a sense of humor.”
“Then you’re in luck, I’m freaking hilarious. People laugh at me all the time.”
Deciding not to rise to the bait of her putting herself down, I continued with my list to see how she’d respond.
“A woman who loves her family.”
“Considering I can’t seem to escape mine; I must love them a lot.”
“That didn’t sound too convincing. Do they meddle in your life too much?”
“Not really,” she sighed, clearing her throat. “I just have a very protective older brother, who is also my boss. So, it’s hard to step out of my comfort zone when I feel like he’s watching my every move.”
“It’s probably because he cares about you and doesn’t want to see you make mistakes.”
“Or because he’s the world’s biggest cock block.”
I choked, trying not to laugh at her assessment of Hudson.
“I just want to break out of this mold he’s shoved me into. But maybe now that he doesn’t have a psycho bitch for a girlfriend, his new one can keep him distracted enough that I can finally breathe. Even if he stole my best friend.”
If I didn’t already know the story, I would have asked more questions about that. But now that I was fairly certain this bachelorette was Hazel, I suddenly wanted to march over to Charley and break her damn timer.
“And now that you can breathe, what do you plan to do with your freedom from cock blocking older brothers? ”
“Well,” she hummed, and the sound sent a shockwave through me. Now that her nerves were calmed by the anonymity of the opaque screen between us, I felt like she was letting her personality really shine through. I’d been trying to get her comfortable around me for months, but our history had clearly made her more skittish than I’d realized. “I want to finally be brave enough to do the things I’ve always wanted.”
“Which are?”
“Dance all night. Find a guy who understands me and doesn’t try to change me. Steal my brother’s motorcycle just to feel the wind on my face… Get a tattoo.”
“You know you should wear a helmet if you steal his bike.”
She laughed, and I glanced at Charley, who was standing at the end of the barrier screens, imploring her to not call out the time like I knew she would in less than a minute. She winked, and I sighed in relief as she flashed her phone. The screen was paused on the two-minute mark, and I knew she was waiting for Hazel to lose interest before she called out time.
Part of me felt sorry for the guys stuck with like girl and the whisperer, but maybe they were into that.
I was into the woman on the opposite side of the screen from me.
“You sound just like him.”
“Or maybe I just want to protect the pretty face of the woman on the other side of this screen.”
“Yeah,” she scoffed, her voice taking on a tone that had me wanting to knock this screen over and take her by the chin. “That would involve me being pretty. I’m average at best.”
Hazel had a natural beauty about her, nothing superficial like so many of the women that came into the bar. Her high cheekbones, dark brown eyes, freckles that dusted her cheeks, and silky auburn hair…
Damn, she was a stunner. Even if she didn’t see it.
“Well, I find your laugh very attractive. ”
“Oh, don’t worry. My personality is quite sparkling. Well… when I’m not rambling about random things because I’m nervous. Or turning bright red when I’m embarrassed, which is often because I have a word vomit problem. And I know lots of random facts I add to conversations to make them more awkward. Then there’s the whole interrupting people and over-sharing. Yup. So hot. It’s a wonder I’m here with all the men beating down my door.”
“I’d happily beat down your door. I enjoy listening to you.”
She laughed, “Well, buckle up. Cause if we ever meet in person, I’m sure I’ll word vomit all over you. Or just freeze and run away. I’m good at that too.”
Yeah, I was well aware of her propensity to run away from uncomfortable situations. She’d been running away from me for years.
“Then I’ll have my running shoes on so I can catch you.”
“Oh, you’re smooth,” she chuckled, and I could just picture her blushing while she chewed on her lower lip.
“Seeing as we don’t have too much time left, why don’t we ask a few questions from the sheet?”
“Oh…yeah…the sheet. I completely forgot about that. Sometimes my brain gets started on a tangent and I can’t seem to get my train of thought back on the tracks.”
“You first, what question do you want me to answer?” I offered, curious which one she’d pick.
“What is one mistake you never want to repeat in life?”
Fuck. There were a lot of mistakes I wouldn’t want to repeat. Starting with not realizing how attracted I was to my best friend’s little sister. But it also would have been torture, because she needed to settle into who she was as an adult before some older guy tried to rope her into a relationship.
But there was one I was determined not to make now. And that was letting this opportunity go. Getting to know her better was worth the deception. At least on my part. Hopefully, in a few weeks, it would be on hers as well. If she freaked out, then I could just bow out after the reveal. It wasn’t like she hadn’t perfected avoiding me over the last few years. We’d get past it, even if she hated me.
“Not chasing opportunities. There are too many times in my life where I played it safe and regretted not taking the risk. The greater risk, the greater reward, right? I used to think that was bullshit, but there have been times I waited too long and missed the opportunity altogether.”
“So, are those regrets with women, or…?”
“No, not really. I just played life a little too safe when I was unsure of my direction, and now I’m playing catch up to get where I should have been in the first place.” I could’ve started my own shop earlier, but the fear of failure had kept me away from home years longer than I’d intended. I’d spent years in a city I hated, working for someone else when I could have taken the chance on myself, since I eventually ended up doing that anyway.
“I can relate to that.”
“How so?” It had always seemed that she knew exactly where she wanted her career to go. I knew she was doing freelance—and that wasn’t without its own set of risks—but she seemed so confident in her work.
“I let my fear of rejection keep me from putting myself out there. Now I feel like I’m way behind on life in general.” She paused, my heart rate increasing while I waited for her to finish her answer. “And I’m tired of watching other people get what I want. I want to be adventurous and do things that scare me for once in my life. I’ve been scared of things and some people for too long.”
“What people are you afraid of?”
Charley had said Haz was scared of me, but I wanted to know why. Other than the obvious incident that happened a few years ago. One I wish I could take back because of how it’d driven a wedge between us.
“There’s a… friend I used to have who I distanced myself from when something embarrassing happened a few years ago that I miss. We used to talk a lot when I was younger, but then he moved away. He’s been back for a while now, but I saw something I shouldn’t have, and I let it get in the way of our friendship.”
“Sounds like you might want to be more than friends.”
She laughed, and it wasn’t her typical carefree one. “There’s no chance of that happening. And I’m tired of obsessing about it, so maybe something like tonight is a good opportunity for me to let go of childish fantasies.”
Fuck.
I didn’t want to take the conceited route and think she was talking about me. But I knew she was. And the last thing I wanted her to do was let me go.