Take Me Home

Chapter Four

What the guy at reception had not mentioned was that their room had a name. Ash stopped short at the brass sign on the door that said: THE LOVEBIRD SUITE. Beside him, Hazel let out a soft snort.

Just ignore it, he decided. It was just a room. Just a place to sleep before getting back on the road tomorrow. They didn’t even really need to address the issue of the lone, queen-size bed because of course he would insist she take it.

But when he pushed open the door, the casual line he’d rehearsed on the short walk upstairs dissolved under the assault of mustard-yellow bird wallpaper on every wall, a peacock-feather-patterned comforter, brass flamingo bedside lamps, and a gallery of pink-and-teal picture frames holding crudely drawn bird sketches. He jumped back when he realized even the carpet was a sea of alternating right-side-up and upside-down bird silhouettes.

Hazel pushed past him and turned in a slow circle in the center of the room. “This is…”

“Disorienting,” he said. “Oppressive. A hell custom-designed by Lisa Frank.”

“Amazing.” She dropped her bags just past the entryway, where Ash was still standing, then threw open the closet, gasped, and yanked a robe off a hanger. Immediately, she pulled it on over her gray sweaterdress. It was a muted spa green on the outside, but the lining had colorful parrots printed all over it. She cinched the belt and pulled a second matching robe out for him.

“Uh, no.”

“Put it on, Asher.”

“Ash. And you look ridiculous.” Ridiculously cute with her bright eyes and open smile, but whatever. She was swimming in the material, and he was pretty sure she’d taken the man’s robe and was offering him the slimmer-cut woman’s version.

“Well, I like it.” She tightened the belt for emphasis and trust-fell onto the bed.

Aaand he’d missed his chance to get ahead of the bed conversation. Her shoulders tensed as she sat up and studied her hands against the peacock comforter. “So, how should we…?”

Ash let the door close behind him. The room became way too quiet. “Uh, you paid for the room, which—I’ll add it to your gas money. But I can just sleep on the…” He gestured aimlessly at the floor, where the endlessly flip-flopping birds made him feel like he was swaying. He crossed to the closet, hoping for an extra blanket, but found only three extremely flat pillows. He grabbed them anyway, then turned and collided with her.

“You don’t have to pay me back,” Hazel said.

Shaking his head, he dropped the pillows into the narrow space between the bed and the wall. He suspected the manager had jacked up the price when desperate people began turning up. “I’m paying my half. It’s not your fault there was a warm air wedge.”

“If you’re paying for half, you should get half the bed.” Uncertainty flitted across her face, but she committed. “I mean, you should. We can be adults about it, right?”

Ash expelled a tight laugh. “Yeah, no problem. We are adults.”

But he’d already spent several hours in her passenger seat trying to look at anything other than her thighs in her smooth leggings, her soft curves in her dress, the low neck of which kept slipping down and exposing her right shoulder. Multiple times, when she’d gone quiet, he’d fallen into a daydream-like state and vividly saw himself leaning over to kiss that little curve of exposed shoulder.

At some point, she was going to sleep in something else entirely. Who knew what Hazel Elliot wore to bed? He didn’t want to know.

Actually, now, he desperately wanted to know.

Ash yanked the comforter off the bed like a matador with a cape. “I’ll take the top half.”

“What?”

“Yeah.” He tossed it into the corner. “You take the mattress. That middle blanket looks warm enough. And I’ll take the comforter.” A completely sane plan.

“That’s not what I—”

He folded the blanket in half like a sleeping bag and lay down on top of it, crossing his arms behind his head.

“Are you sure?”

“Yep.” And because he was nothing if not committed now, he closed his eyes.

A moment later, the bed creaked as she shifted above him. “Hey, Asher,” Hazel whispered.

He cracked one eye open to find her face hanging over the side of the bed inches from his own. “Ash.”

“It’s only six o’clock.”

Well, hell.

“We should eat.” She opened the nightstand drawer. “Do you think they have room service here?”

Ash sprang to his feet. He needed out of this room. “I saw a diner down the street. My treat.”

After watching a car slide across the inn parking lot and T-bone a truck, they decided to walk the two blocks. The almost painful shock of the cold was also a relief. Already Ash’s head was clearing from the dizzying spell of that room, which was ten percent Technicolor chaos and ninety percent bed.

The thin jacket Hazel had thrown on over her sweaterdress seemed to be doing nothing to block the frigid wind, but despite her violent shivering, she snagged his sleeve just short of the diner. “Wait. Look.” She tipped her face up to the sky.

He’d seen snow. West Texas got a dusting every few winters, occasionally a few inches. But not like this. The fine, icy precipitation had turned into genuine, fat Christmas movie snowflakes that were already sticking to the sidewalk. Ash wasn’t sure if the sudden flurry in his stomach was from the novelty of real snowfall, or the pretty way, when Hazel opened her arms and turned in a careful circle, the flakes caught in her dark hair, on her lashes, her scarf. Lamplight bathed her cheeks golden.

As it turned out, even the biting cold sneaking down the back of his collar couldn’t completely freeze out the heat that had ignited under his skin in that room.

“Look up,” she insisted again.

He squinted up into the falling snow.

“It’s pretty,” she said.

“It’s pretty,” he agreed.

But the awkward thickness that blanketed his voice must have sounded like sarcasm because she huffed, “Fine,” and left him standing there.

According to the half-burnt-out neon sign above the door, the diner was called, simply, DINER. Hazel tilted her head, considering the No Shoes No Shirt No Service sign. Someone had Sharpied No Animals at the bottom and, below that in blue pen, This includes hamsters, Keith!

“Wait,” Ash said. “Is it no service if you bring an animal, or no service if you don’t?”

“So many questions,” she murmured, opening the door for him. He caught the top of it and nudged her through.

The smells hit him first: maple syrup, burnt bacon, very burnt coffee. The dining room was empty, two rows of booths to the left and a short counter to the right, split by a narrow walkway to the kitchen. Meat Loaf’s “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” played from behind the swinging doors, accompanied by someone confidently belting out the words off-key. Whoever was back there hadn’t heard the bell jingle with their entry, just kept shout-singing the chorus.

Hazel opened the door again, rattling the bell a second time, and the music abruptly stopped, followed by a clatter and a sharp curse. An older woman with a neck tattoo and her gray hair in braided pigtails burst through the kitchen doors like a bull out of a chute. Her breathing was labored like she’d been on a table doing air guitar back there, but her stern glare made absolutely no acknowledgment that they’d walked in on her mid-power-ballad. “Y’all never been here before.” Unclear if this was a question or a statement.

“No,” Hazel answered, scooting closer to Ash.

“Take a seat,” the woman barked, chest still heaving. “Dial nine when you’re ready to order.”

“Dial…nine?” Ash asked, scanning the dining room again. Flickering fluorescent lights. Pepto-pink walls. Framed art, all wrapped for the holidays in green paper with armadillos wearing cowboy hats. Which was weirder than if they’d had Santa hats. At least that was ostensibly Christmassy.

“It ain’t even a rotary phone. Shouldn’t be that hard to figure out.”

He saw it then. A cream-colored telephone, grimy from what looked like decades of diner guests’ greasy hands, mounted to the wall above the nearest table. And more phones at all the other tables.

“Don’t tell me you’re one of these young Z-boys who’s afraid to talk on the phone,” she snapped, hooking her thumbs behind a longhorn belt buckle the size of a dinner plate. She was still panting, still pretending she wasn’t.

“Z…what?”

Hazel choked on a laugh and turned abruptly to hide it. She was so close he could smell her mint gum. Her eyes were wide with joyful desperation, checking that he was fully absorbing all of this.

Pop Rocks sparked through his entire body, cutting through the fog of disorientation that was apparently part and parcel of this town. He liked this—her looking to him, being on the same side of the joke.

“Gen Z,” Hazel squeaked. “I think she means Gen Z.”

He rolled his lips between his teeth to contain his own laugh since no one was shielding him from the woman’s impatient glare.

“We call,” he said, “from the table?”

“Why else,” she huffed, “would it be called the Phone It In Diner?”

Was it called that? Nowhere in all the other signage had that phrase appeared. Before he could say as much, Hazel shoved him into the nearest booth and buried her face in an enormous menu.

When the woman retreated to the kitchen, Hazel grabbed his wrist across the table, eyes still enormous, and said, “What is this place?”

“Well, obviously, it’s the Phone It In Diner. Didn’t you see the enormous sign?”

“Is that a theme? Phones?”

“Yeah, the classic diner theme: call a scary stranger on the phone.”

Hazel laughed, and he liked that, too—making her laugh. She slumped back into the booth, apparently exhausted from holding it in. “She was kind of right, though. We do fear that.”

“I can’t tell if the phone thing is nostalgia, or if this place has been here since the telephone was boldly futuristic.” He pushed spongy stuffing spilling from a gash in the vinyl seat back in.

“Either way, I’m not calling that lady. You’re gonna have to do it.”

Shit. Speaking of calling…Ash sent a quick text to Maggie to let her know he wasn’t going to make it tonight after all.

Hazel checked her own phone, mumbling an apology then holding out her palm. “Give me your pen.”

“My pen?”

“You always have one.”

He dug it out of his pocket, and she wrote the date on a napkin, then held it under her face and took a selfie. “My old roommate, Sylvia, randomly demands proofs of life.”

“Like…a hostage situation?”

“Yep. Watch, she’s going to say it’s not legit unless it’s a newspaper.”

“Well, sure. Everyone knows that.”

She smiled when the text came in and showed him—That date could have been written a week ago just to throw me off!—then turned her phone down on the table.

“So, you said you’ve been summoned home.” He opened his menu. “For Christmas?”

“And a wedding.”

“Whose?”

She forced a smile. “Channel 2’s own Dan Elliot.”

“Your dad? You’re…not psyched?”

“I don’t have strong feelings one way or another,” she said as she straightened the salt and pepper shakers. Then she scratched aggressively with her nail at a spot of dried syrup on the table.

He watched her over the top of his menu. “Touchy subject?”

“Nope. I haven’t even met her yet.”

“Have they not been together long?”

“He moved in with her and her kids last spring, I think.”

“You think,” Ash repeated.

“I didn’t commemorate the event in my diary.”

Ash smiled at her mild petulance. “She has kids?”

“Two.”

“And you’ve never met any of them? Have you at least FaceTimed or something?”

She cringed at the sticky gunk now caught under her nail and grabbed a napkin. “Why would I FaceTime with them?”

“They’re about to be your family, right?”

Hazel balled up the soiled napkin then turned her full attention to the menu, which was so long it would give a CVS receipt a run for its money. “Technically. But I won’t ever see them.”

“Because you never go home?”

She narrowed her eyes at him, clearly growing impatient with his questions.

Ash rubbed his forehead, unsure whether to keep pushing or to drop the subject. But he was curious. He didn’t know anyone else who hadn’t returned home at least once since high school.

College is for new experiences, not old baggage, she’d told him once.

He’d thought a lot about that party freshman year, before she’d all but told him to go bother twenty thousand other girls instead of trying anything with her. Part of that night had been all right. Good, even. Until she remembered her shitty ex was his best friend. She had no idea of the fight Ash and Justin had that summer or the rift that remained, nor how utterly disloyal to Justin his thoughts about Hazel were that night. How she looked edgier, sexier with her new, shorter hair. Or how, for the first time since they’d met, she didn’t look past him to search the room for Justin. How he’d thought, briefly, things could be different.

But Justin’s friend was all she’d ever really seen him as. Justin’s broody friend, apparently. The guy who ferried her and her boyfriend around to a handful of parties senior year because otherwise Justin would drive drunk. Ash’s reward: getting to watch them make out in his back seat.

“Afraid you’ll run into Justin or something?” Ash guessed.

Hazel pressed her mouth into a tight line but otherwise didn’t react. He couldn’t quite tell what was real with her. Mild annoyances flashed, fiery and unfiltered, in her eyes, and she could tap into biting sarcasm on a dime, but other times, she was freakishly cool and impassive. He found himself swinging to the same extremes around her, mirroring her energy, trying to stay on even footing. But holding his every reaction in check had been exhausting enough in high school. It took even more out of him now. He knew why he’d done it as a teenager—he wasn’t trying to steal his best friend’s girl—but he wasn’t sure why he’d started doing it again when she walked into his café two months ago. Except that, because she couldn’t totally read him, she kept trying to.

The epitome of casual, Hazel asked, “Is Justin back in town?” And maybe she was always hiding something. Maybe her first instinct was to cover her real reaction until she calculated the risk and decided to have it.

“Yeah, he tore his rotator cuff sophomore year, lost his scholarship. He works for his dad.”

“Huh.” Ash caught the glimmer of concern in her pinched brow, the same little kick he felt when he pictured Justin’s dad barking orders at him again, only now without Ash or a coach to buffer.

“So, he’s not the reason you never go home?” Ash asked.

She closed her menu and folded her hands atop it. “I’m ready to order. Are you?”

Clearly, he’d pushed as far as she intended to let him.

In addition to the menu being a novel, someone must have been high when they named the items, because each was more ridiculous than the last. He wasn’t dying to order the Big Bubba’s Belly Blaster Burger or the Dreamy Creamy Broccoli and Cheese-y Soup. “What are you getting?”

She shrugged, a little too casual, and said, “Dial nine.”

He lifted the receiver and pressed the button. A shrill, piercing tone rang out just behind Hazel’s head, and she ducked, startled. The kitchen doors swung open, and out charged the same woman to lift the phone from the wall by the counter. She stood no more than four feet from Ash and, making aggressively direct eye contact, snapped, “What?”

“Uh, we’re ready to order.” He eyed her name tag. “Emeline.”

“It’s pronounced Emeleen.”

Hazel slunk even further down into her seat and probably would have melted right onto the floor in a laughing fit if he hadn’t reached under the table and squeezed her knee. At his touch, she yelped, lurched back, and banged her elbow against the wall.

“Go on then,” the woman said. “Into the phone.”

Something about her intense eye contact at such a close range made Ash’s palms sweat. He forgot what he’d planned to order and opened his menu again, squeezing the receiver between his shoulder and ear. It slipped and clattered onto the table, and Hazel made a strangled sound. He glared first at her and then at Emeline in a silent plea to let the phone thing go and just take their order like a normal person.

She pointed her pen at his receiver.

He lifted it back to his face. “I’ll have the chicken and waffles.”

“The what?”

He closed his eyes, breathed in through his nose. “Chicken and waffles.”

“That’s not on the menu.”

He pointed at the photo right there on page five.

Her eyes stayed locked on his, refusing to let him weasel out of saying it.

Pushing his shoulders back, he enunciated slowly so he wouldn’t have to repeat himself. “The Mother Cluckin’ Breakfast Platter.”

“You want it with Granny’s Sloppy Tots?”

“I…do not.”

“What else?”

Hazel snaked a hand forward and pressed her fingertip halfway down the page.

“Really?” he snapped, covering the mouthpiece as though this woman couldn’t both perfectly hear him and read his lips at this proximity.

Hazel squeezed her eyes and mouth shut and nodded.

He turned a polite smile up to their server. “She’ll have the Rootin’ Tootin’ Fruitin’ Flapjacks.” Quickly, he added, “No sides. And coffee for both of us. Creamer and twenty sugars for her.”

Emeline hung up the receiver so hard it dinged, dropped an extra bucket of creamer and sweeteners onto their table, and left without a single other word.

Laughter tripped out of Hazel. Twice, she tried and failed to speak before wheezing, “I wanted those tots.”

“Be my guest,” he said, extending the phone to her.

A lingering tremor of amusement shook her shoulders. “Okay, because you were such a good sport with that,” she said on a happy sigh, gesturing vaguely at him, “I’ll bite.”

Ash had entirely forgotten what they’d been talking about.

“You want to know why I don’t go home?” She made a thoughtful face, then straightened and pushed up her sleeves. “Have you ever moved? Before college, I mean.”

“No.”

“Okay. Well, my parents got divorced when I was eleven, and after my mom left, my dad and I moved two streets away. It wasn’t like going to a new city or something. Our old house was still right there. Only, this new family lived in it, and they changed all these things—repainted the door, took out the hedges. They had a boy, and I remember thinking he probably put Star Wars posters on my walls.”

Ash scoffed in disgust on her behalf.

She sawed her teeth into her bottom lip. “You know what bugged me?”

“What?”

“My parents used to mark my height on the wall in the kitchen. Does your family do that?”

He nodded. “On the back of the laundry room door.”

“When we sold the house, we had to paint over all the marks. And then in the new place, my dad forgot. Or maybe it would have been weird to start a new one halfway up the wall.”

“Sure. I guess.”

“I don’t know why I thought of that now.” She pushed up her sleeves once more and laughed self-consciously. She was quiet a moment, then, “Whatever. Anyway, I used to make my dad drive by the old house all the time so I could see it, and he would, even though he hated going there. And then I’d regret it because I’d see the other family or the things they’d changed, and I’d feel sad. I remember wishing it had burned down or been bulldozed. Eventually, I stopped going back. Even years later, when I got my license, I drove the long way around so I wouldn’t have to see it.”

A vise tightened in Ash’s chest. He hadn’t known her at eleven but had at seventeen and could picture her back then, with long hair she used to straighten and an easy, sweet smile. She hadn’t yet wrapped herself in so many defensive layers. She’d fallen for his best friend, who was fun and charismatic, sure, but also reckless and selfish. Those facts about Justin never bothered Ash until Hazel was under his arm. He’d felt pulled to shield her, though from what exactly he didn’t interrogate too deeply.

Then again, vague worry had always been a default setting for Ash.

He imagined teen Hazel driving herself on a wide detour, neatly cordoning off her old street and house and all the complicated feelings she had about them. “That must have sucked,” he said.

She refused his sympathy with a firm single shake of her head. “The point is, no, I don’t want to run into Justin. But that’s true of pretty much everyone in Lockett Prairie. I didn’t keep in touch with anyone.” She shrugged. “I’m just not that great with afters.”

“Afters?”

“After moves, breakups, quitting a job. Once I leave, I don’t go back. Ever.”

“That’s—”

“I know it’s crazy.”

He frowned. He was going to say it seemed sad, though what he’d really meant, on second thought, was lonely. “So, relationships are…”

“Fine while they last. Then, it’s—” She made a cutting motion with one finger across her throat. And with that gesture, he saw the exact moment when she locked up the brief access she’d given him. “You’re probably still friends with all your exes, right?”

“Sure, we’re cool, I guess.”

“Even the one you lived with? What happened with her?”

Ash half groaned, half laughed into his hands.

“What?”

“She cheated.”

Hazel’s eyebrows shot up. “And you’re still friends?”

“We’re…” He searched for a word to encompass his feelings about Brianna. “We just weren’t a good fit. She said my world was like this little shoebox, safe and cozy. Then, I guess, not so cozy. She said she cheated because she wasn’t feeling it anymore, but I kept trying to fix everything. She didn’t see another way out.”

“Wow, she really overshot on that one.”

Still, his feelings had never quite swung from hurt to hate. His sisters had blown up a group chat with so much vitriol toward Brianna that he’d ended up talking them down instead of the other way around.

“The guy she cheated on me with cheated on her, so…” He shrugged. “Karma took care of it.”

“Sure. Karma.” She slapped her palms on the table, leaning across the table at him. “No, Asher. She cheated on you. Karma doesn’t ‘take care of it.’?”

“It was a long time ago. Now she’s engaged to one of the trainers for the basketball team. Got me tickets to a few games this season.”

Hazel covered her face and mumbled into her palms, “Oh my God.”

The kitchen door swung open, and Ash straightened at the sight of Emeline bringing their food, braced for another discomfiting exchange. “It’s hot,” she barked, slapping his hand hard. Then, she set everything down with record speed and quite a lot of noise and left.

“I think I’m witnessing you develop PTSD in real time,” Hazel remarked.

“And enjoying it.”

Despite the terrifying service, the food at least looked good. He drizzled syrup over his chicken and waffles and passed the pitcher to her.

Hazel scraped all the fruit off her pancakes before drowning them in syrup.

“Hold on. There were regular pancakes on the menu if you didn’t want the fruit.”

She beamed at him. “I know.”

He shook his head and cut into his chicken. “So, what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Any relationships since high school?”

“Nothing serious.” She lifted an enormous, dripping bite into her mouth and hummed a throaty moan of approval that tickled the hairs on the back of Ash’s neck and made him reach for his water.

“So what do you do for human contact when you’re not third-wheeling it to basketball games with your ex and her fiancé?” she went on, oblivious to the distress she’d stirred in him.

“I can get my own dates.” At her skeptical squint, he added, “It was easier when I had more classes outside architecture. I’m barely on main campus. And I’d feel weird asking out someone at the café or city hall.”

“So, how do you date?”

“Apps a couple times,” he admitted. “Maggie and June occasionally play matchmaker with their friends. And friends of their friends. I’m kind of a project for them.”

“Your sisters want you to sleep with their friends?”

He was mid-sip, and the water shot straight to the back of his throat, down his windpipe. He coughed and sputtered, eyes watering.

Hazel laughed delightedly and thumped his back. Once he recovered, she said, “I tried apps, too, but between the dick pics and knowing Sheffield’s students might find my profile, every new DM gave me hives.”

“So, how do you date?”

She ducked her face. Was that a flush climbing up her neck? Ash leaned his elbows on the table on either side of his plate, more curious now than when he’d lobbed the question back at her.

“I haven’t in a while,” she said, wary of his interest. “I see Sheffield’s students all over the place. I don’t go to bars anymore, or restaurants, or movies. I—” She shook her head. “God, why am I telling you this?”

“Tell me.”

“You’ll think I’m weird.”

“I already think you’re weird, Hazel.” At her scowl, he raised his palms. “In a good way.”

“Fine. But you can’t judge me.”

He crossed his heart.

“I told you Intro to Psych has a ton of students, right? I know a lot of them now because I’ve tutored them one-on-one, but I haven’t memorized the faces of all two hundred. I definitely couldn’t have picked most of them from a lineup back in October. Also, I used to have this…casual thing with a friend. But he moved after graduation, so it had been a while since…”

She shot him an uncertain glance, gauging, he guessed, his reaction to her having a fuck buddy. He rolled his hand over at the wrist. “You’re a normal, hot-blooded twentysomething. You have needs.”

“Gross.”

He laughed. “And what happened? You swiped right on a student by accident?”

“Worse.” She groaned dramatically. “Okay, so I went to the Fox one night, and there was this guy. He had just gotten this ridiculous tattoo of a pug with an overbite. Its face frowned deeper when he flexed his arm.”

“Classy,” Ash deadpanned.

“It was funny. And he was cute. We danced.” She shrugged. “He was cute,” she said again.

“Hold on. Are we talking dimples-and-muscles cute or, like, vulnerable-kitten cute?”

“Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

“We made out, and I was going to leave with him. But I went to the bathroom, and when I came out, he was gone. The next day, I was collecting quizzes in class, and there, to my shock and horror, was Pug Boy.”

“Yikes.”

“So, not only did he ghost me, but he was also a freshman. I made out with basically a child. After I panicked about whether or not I could get fired or kicked out of my program or, I don’t know, charged with a crime, I realized that, even though I didn’t recognize him, he absolutely knew who I was. Not only do I sub in on lectures, but every other class, Dr. Sheffield has some technical problem and beckons me to the front to fix it. He makes this awful joke about how he’d be lost without his trusty teaching assistant and how the T and A stand for tech and audio. You can imagine how the boys have latched on to that.”

“I can.” Well, that was gross and terrible.

Unbidden and immediately undercutting his moral authority over a bunch of eighteen-year-old idiots, an image intruded: Hazel striding into the café in one of her Friday outfits. He had pieced together, after several weeks of observation and blatant eavesdropping on her conversations with Cami, that Friday was the day she often taught this professor’s class for him. On those days, she wore black pencil skirts with fancy tops that tied in a big bow at the throat or had sheer sleeves or lace and tiny buttons up the back of her neck. She swept her hair up in a bun and wore glasses, as well as black tights with delicate patterns on them. She was probably aiming for professional and off-limits to undergraduates, but the whole look checked just about every box of the hot-teacher fantasy.

“Guys are dicks,” he said apologetically. “Some of us less than others, though.”

She shoved another huge bite of pancakes into her mouth with a look like, We’ll see about you. “The other issue,” she added, “is that I run into Sheffield’s students constantly. You’d think my office hours were a Disney attraction—just a constant line outside my door for tutoring. A while ago, I extended my hours because I didn’t want Sheffield to think I wasn’t keeping up, and more of them came. Then, they’d find me at the library or after my lab. And now, it’s all over town. The gym, Starbucks, my bus stop. They find me. I know it sounds paranoid, but I’m half convinced they’ve developed some kind of sophisticated system for tracking my movements.”

“They find you,” he echoed ominously, amused. “You’re right. That does sound paranoid.”

Hazel threw her balled up straw wrapper at his forehead. “Just wait until you’re the one at H-E-B buying wine and a cookie cake in your pajamas, minding your own business, and some freshman makes you explain Kohlberg’s theory of moral development on the spot while openly judging your purchases.”

Ash raised his palms at the defiant edge in her voice but did nothing to stop his grin from spreading. “Hence your attachment to my café.”

She raised an eyebrow at that possessive pronoun.

“So, no younger men,” he summed up. “Hey, if you get desperate, you said yourself Frank seems lonely. I bet he’d take you out.”

She watched him carefully, and he wondered if that little fantasy of her in her teacher clothes had been visible on his face.

“I can’t date someone from the café. When Frank and I break up, which we would eventually, I wouldn’t be able to go there anymore. And like I told you, it’s the one place where I can work in peace. Or relative peace, aside from this one obnoxious barista.”

She’d insisted nothing could change between them, coerced Ash’s promise to cede the entire building if this trip made her hate him, and in his desperation for the ride home, he had agreed without really thinking. But now he understood how serious she was about the pact. She had cut out old friends, an ex-boyfriend, her entire hometown. When she left, she left all at once and all the way.

“Well.” His swallow took surprising effort. “In that case, I will dissuade Frank from asking you out. But I’ve seen rom-coms. A lot of meet-cutes happen in cafés.”

“Watch a lot of rom-coms, do you?”

“Four sisters,” he reminded her. “But I guess you probably don’t believe in all that. True love, second chances. You’re already breaking up with Frank, and you haven’t even given him a first chance.”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t not believe in love. As for second chances, I think people stay longer than they should in most relationships because they see quitting as failing. But if I didn’t believe in second chances at all, I doubt we’d be sitting here.”

“Because…?”

“It’s no secret you didn’t like me in high school, and we haven’t exactly had a better run the last couple months.”

A pang of regret cut through him. Back then, it had been easier to let her think he barely tolerated her than to open himself to her bright smiles, knowing he’d want more of her. He ached to correct her interpretation of all those scowls.

“But here we are,” she continued, steering a bite through her lake of syrup, “having a civil dinner together in the strangest diner in Texas.”

She glanced back through the window, back out at the thickest, most magical snowfall he’d ever seen, and this whole situation, this strange town, seemed like time outside of time. Some entirely alternate reality where the rules didn’t exist anymore. And if he tried to recount any of it to his sisters tomorrow, he knew it would sound as unreal as a dream.

“If this is really a second chance,” he said, “we could actually get to know each other. For real.” The line landed with an earnestness that made his ears burn, so he added, “You know, like, more embarrassing Pug Boy stories or whatever.”

“I can’t believe I told you that. You’re disturbingly easy to talk to.”

“That’s a bad thing?”

She bit her lip, a flash of wariness in her eyes. It triggered his own impulse to guard himself, but he fought the urge.

“I don’t usually dump on people like this,” she said quietly, ducking her chin. “I guess it shows that I haven’t had anyone to—”

He could feel how it unnerved her, to leave the abandoned confession hanging between them. Here, he was supposed to reach for their usual teasing, to lob some borderline insult back, keep them riding the safe surface of mock-hostility. But this tiny admission of hers was real, just like how she felt about her childhood home and all that stuff about afters, and he didn’t want to do what they always did.

She narrowed her eyes at his refusal to play along, tugged at her dress. The wide collar slipped down her shoulder again, and whatever she’d reached to say died in her throat as she followed his gaze to her bare skin. Her foot, which had been tapping for the last several minutes, came to a rest. Everything between them sharpened, the soft husk of her exhale, the little dip above her upper lip, his own loud swallow.

He should have disguised the momentary snag of his attraction to her. But that dress. What on earth was the purpose of a dress like that, long-sleeved and cozy everywhere except one delicate swath of collarbone? He couldn’t tear his eyes away, despite feeling like she’d caught him stealing something.

Then, as if in some cosmic admonishment, the restaurant went dark. Through the window, the streetlamps blinked out.

The kitchen doors banged open, and a flashlight beam cut through the darkness. “Don’t you dare dine and ditch,” Emeline warned, her ghostly lit figure appearing behind Hazel. “Cash only.”

Ash pulled more than enough from his wallet. “Keep the change.”

Hazel was rewrapping her red scarf around her neck, scooting to the end of the booth, that invisible line between them neatly severed.

Just as well. Whatever had sparked was probably best to quell before they made it back to that nightmare of a room.

Hazel pushed out into the dark night but immediately spun back into his chest, knocking him back on his heels. His arm instinctively wrapped around her. As soon as he had a hold on her, though, she took a big side step, saying, “Sorry. Jesus, it’s cold,” and huddling into herself, giving him space he did not want. And just like that, all logic about being sensible, about not feeding into the electricity between them, went fuzzy.

“Hazel.” He held his arm back out to her, chest tight from the cold and the possibility that she’d refuse him. “Come on. I’ll be your human windshield.”

Wind whipped her ponytail across her face. She smoothed it back with both hands, holding it there while she deliberated. Already, her teeth were chattering. She sniffed, nodded once, and ducked neatly under his arm.