Chapter Twelve
He could have kissed her. Should have kissed her. Her lips were stained cranberry red, and he could have devoured her mouth when he backed her against the mirror. He’d told her not to move, a last-ditch request that every fiber of his being wanted her to disregard. If she had, if she’d pushed forward even the tiniest bit, he’d have given in to the flash flood of desire. But Hazel hadn’t moved. And he’d made an escape out of the dressing room stall before he did something he couldn’t take back, like tug the loose straps out of her grasp to free her breasts, push that skirt up over her hips, press every aching part of himself against her…
“Asher,” Hazel said, apparently not for the first time.
He was following her through the attached gift shop of a restaurant called Country Kitschin’ while they awaited a table for dinner, but even a half hour after the zipper incident, he couldn’t get his head out of that dressing room.
“So…no, then?” She waved her hands between them, indicating bright pink mittens.
“For your brother?” he teased.
“Stepbrother.” She cast him a weary look as she dropped the mittens back into the bin. “My dad apparently told them all this stuff about me, but I barely know anything about them.”
“At least they’re nice, though. Sounds like they want you to be a real part of everything.”
“If I were looking to expand my circle, sure.”
“But you’re not?”
“I just don’t see why anything needs to change.”
A little pang twinged in Ash’s chest. She was a fortress, drawbridge always up, archers ready. Her father and his new family weren’t the only ones who wanted in.
“There’s a window for getting new siblings. Once you don’t live at home anymore, it kind of doesn’t matter. But they’re putting in all this effort, buying me presents, wanting my dress to match in pictures—”
One mention of the dress and Ash was right back in that changing room. To get control of himself, he turned his attention to a shelf of mugs.
“Now I have to fake this closeness I don’t feel. It’s like I showed up for my first class on the day of a final, and everyone else has been going to extra tutoring, and they have a cheat sheet. It feels so unbalanced.”
“What would make it balanced?”
Hazel lifted a mug and handed it to him before winding through the tight display area. The mug read TALK NERDY TO ME. “Speaking of talking.”
“There’s a segue,” he deadpanned.
“We always end up talking about me.”
He hadn’t missed her agitation earlier when he asked about her parents. But as uninterested as she seemed in letting people in, she was actually pretty forthcoming, like she wanted to talk to someone. Then she seemed to regret it—or regretted that she’d shared those things with him. “What do you want to talk about?”
She slipped a headband behind her ears. A unicorn horn jutted out from her forehead. She raised her chin, daring him to tease her. “Your hopes and dreams. Darkest fears. Deepest desires.”
Desires? Nope. Not doing that in the Country Kitschin’ gift shop.
He plucked it off her head and slipped a different headband into its place. She reached up and patted at the sprig of faux mistletoe dangling above her, then pulled it off to look at it. “Oh,” she said softly. She turned to put it back in the bin, stopped, considered, and finally dropped it in.
Before she could think too hard about it, he said, “We should buy all our Christmas gifts here and be done with it.”
He was joking, but it wasn’t a terrible idea. Necessity was the mother of invention and all that. The shop sold a bit of everything—kitschy trinkets, games and nostalgic collectibles, Christmas decor, clothes, housewares, artsy ceramics, candles.
“Make it a competition?” she challenged.
“You sure about that? I actually know and like my family.”
She released a real, spontaneous laugh. “Okay. Terms. If I find a gift for everyone on my list, you have to tell me a secret. Something personal.”
“And if I get everyone on my list?”
“What do you want?”
You.
He scratched his eyebrow. “I need to think about it.”
For the next twenty minutes, they searched the cramped gift shop. By the time he made it to the cash register, she was already collecting several bags from the counter. The hostess called his name, and Hazel went ahead to their table while he paid.
When he entered the dining room, Hazel was dumping sugar into her coffee. He smiled, warmth blooming through him. The room was packed and loud, and he had to squeeze between the tables. A sudden urgency to reach her edged out the warm feeling, a sense that the evening would end too soon.
“I did it,” she said as soon as he sat down.
“You got everyone?”
“Check this out.” She presented a wood and glass object that looked like a snow globe. “It’s a storm glass—basically an old-school barometer. It’s probably wildly inaccurate and not actually antique, but my dad will think it’s cool.” She pulled more items from her bags. Bamboo bracelets and a beaded purse with a white bird on it for Lucy, a University of Texas collectors’ set of dominoes for Raf, and a macrame plant hanger and hand-painted alpaca salt and pepper shakers for Val. “She likes alpacas,” she said triumphantly, like she’d cracked a code.
“Not bad,” he agreed.
The server came to take their order, and when she left, Hazel leaned across the table. “Well?”
“Looks like we tied.”
“Does that mean we both win? You never told me what you wanted.”
The middle of a crowded restaurant, their server interrupting at any moment, didn’t feel like the right setting for a confession. “I’m still thinking about it.”
“Well, I still want a secret.”
“Fine. What kind?”
She thought about it for a moment. “Something you’re afraid of.”
He didn’t know what he’d expected her to want. Maybe an embarrassing anecdote, like her Pug Boy story. But being afraid was exactly his problem right now. Because if he somehow maneuvered them through their budding friendship and into something more, it would start a clock, ticking down to the inevitable after, when she would cut her losses and move on. For all he knew, as soon as he admitted he liked her, they’d already be in after territory. He had to tell her something else.
The next pressing fear, though, was about his father. A sick weight dropped in his stomach. Ash rubbed his neck, looking for the waitress.
“There,” she said. “Whatever you’re thinking about right now.”
“You scare me a little,” he admitted, stalling.
She rolled her eyes. “Be serious.”
“I am.”
Hazel crossed her arms, mirroring his own defensive backward lean, willing to wait him out.
His feelings for her were off the table for now, and if he told her he didn’t want his father to deteriorate before his eyes, this whole evening, light and flirty and warm, would stop dead in its tracks. That was the last thing he wanted.
“Geese,” he said finally, an absolute cop-out. “They’re mean as hell.”
The light in her eyes dulled. “Geese. Hmm. I guess that’s true.”
She moved the conversation on to other topics. To the untrained eye, she looked like a young woman with a friend or on a date, smiling, talking with her hands, nodding when he spoke. But something small had shifted underneath. A switch from the Hazel he’d been getting to know—the Hazel who had cried in front of him last night despite how hard she worked to appear unfazed, the Hazel who was afraid of afters and small spaces and, he suspected, giving her whole heart to anyone without an escape hatch—to surface Hazel. Still warm, still friendly. She made eye contact with the waitress when she thanked her for a refill. He liked that about her, that she was always courteous, always gave her full attention to servers. But that was also how she was now looking at him, with polite, distant friendliness.
“Okay, you want a secret?” he said once their plates were cleared. “The place I intern for is going to offer me a job after I graduate.”
She smiled that same ninety-percent-Hazel smile.
He made sure she was looking at him and added, “What I haven’t told anyone is that I might not take it.”
And now that smile was down to seventy percent. She was humoring him, but she looked disappointed, like this revelation still didn’t seem particularly personal. “Why?”
“I thought I wanted to do all this cutting-edge, green tech stuff. A lot of it is pretty cool. But I shadowed an architect on a restoration last summer, a protected landmark. They can be tricky. You have all these constraints. It would have been cheaper and easier to demo it and rebuild from scratch. But the challenges made it interesting, and there’s this art to it, and…I don’t know, it was pretty satisfying to save something with so much history.”
There it was—her full Hazel smile. “You’re sentimental,” she said. It didn’t sound like criticism.
“If I don’t take the job at my current firm, I’ll have to find someone to take me on for the postgrad hours toward my license. Sustainable architecture is a growing field. There are more job opportunities, better security. It makes better sense long term.”
“You can’t worry about that,” she said immediately. “You have to do what you love. Don’t settle before you even start. Besides, isn’t restoration architecture still pretty green? So it’s not like you’re abandoning your principles and contributing to overconsumption.”
“True.” If he didn’t have to worry about the future—that the twins could afford college, that he could bail out June when too many auditions didn’t pan out, ease the burden on Maggie when Nick was on assignment, make sure his mother didn’t have to work until she died—he would have already decided on it.
Hazel didn’t know all these considerations. Maybe that was another reason he still hadn’t told her about his father’s MS and his role as his family’s security net, because he wanted her to say exactly what she’d said. She spoke with such conviction that it made doubting her—in turn, doubting himself—nearly impossible.
“Like you love working for Dr. Sheffield?” he challenged. “What about Dr. Tate and her prison study?”
She shrugged.
He laughed. “Why are you shrugging? That’s what you want to do. You gave an entire TED Talk on the unjust collateral damage of incarceration in my kitchen yesterday.”
She pulled a curl over her shoulder and mindlessly twirled it. “You should have rescued me from all their questions.”
“You didn’t need rescuing.”
She shook her head, but she couldn’t suppress a tiny, pleased smile. “I wrote a request to switch labs, but I don’t know if I’ll submit it.”
“Why the hell not?”
“For one thing, Dr. Sheffield is going to be pissed. I still have to take classes with him, see him around the department. Plus, like I already told you, I can barely keep up with my assistantship as it is. I’ve always been able to handle everything academic with no problem, but this semester has been a shit show. I’m not sure that I’m—”
“What, cut out for it? That’s ridiculous.”
She laughed, surprised. “It’s not ridiculous. I’ve slipped up. I transcribed twelve hours of the wrong audio files one week because I misread an email. Twelve hours. I kissed a student.”
He waved these off. “You’re human. Those aren’t major mistakes. Doesn’t everyone in grad school go through crippling self-doubt at first?”
“I don’t know,” she said sarcastically, but not meanly. “Do they?”
“Pretty sure it’s a widespread phenomenon. Imposter syndrome. You’re not an imposter.”
She made a skeptical sound in her throat.
He waited for her to meet his eyes again before he threw her comment back at her. “You have to do what you love, right? Don’t settle before you even start? Even if it means upsetting some old guy you don’t want to work with anyway.”
“Fine, I guess it’s not as simple as I made it sound.”
But maybe all of this—choosing a career, going for what he really wanted—was that simple. That new possibility swelled within him, until they were outside in the parking lot, loading their bags into her car. When Hazel closed the trunk and turned for the driver’s seat, he stepped into her path.
She looked at him expectantly, hair blowing across her face. He tucked it back behind her ear, a gesture that came so naturally he didn’t even register the intimacy of it until he saw the change in her face, the slight furrow of her eyebrows, the parting of her lips.
“Campbell?”
Ash turned reluctantly to find Travis and Derek Cline, old friends he’d have been happy to see any other time than right now. He went through the motions of introductions, though they all vaguely remembered each other. Every second of it pulled him further from what he’d wanted to say, that he knew what he wanted for his prize—to see her every day, here and back at school after their trip, and not just because he happened to work at her favorite café.
Travis and Derek were headed to the bar across the street and invited them to come along.
“If you want to go, we can,” Hazel offered.
“You don’t need to get back?”
Travis and Derek stood by in awkward silence, shoulders hunched against the cold.
“Please,” she said, “my entire purpose in life right now is avoiding that place. I don’t want to keep you from whatever you would normally do. If I weren’t here, would you go with them?”
“I can’t promise you won’t see someone you know,” he said, grasping at straws. He didn’t want to share her.
“Someone in particular?” Travis cut in.
“Anyone we went to school with.” Silently, he willed her to take the out. “Mr. Newton, shirtless.”
Travis and Derek exchanged perplexed looks.
Hazel lifted her chin, eyes flaring. “I’m a big girl,” she said, then spun on her heel and charged forth.
The bar was crowded and stuffy. With all its dark wood, green wallpaper, and a constant soundtrack of Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly, it was a typical Irish pub, except for the back wall dedicated to West Texas taxidermy—a handful of bucks, two pheasants in flight, a vicious-looking javelina, a set of longhorns, and a mounted squirrel—all adorned with Santa hats and white twinkle lights. While they waited for their drinks, Ash shouted over the noise that the pheasants reminded him of the Lovebird Suite.
“Hmm?” Hazel’s gaze flitted to him distractedly from Derek Cline, who was rubbing the cuff of her sage-green sweater between two fingers and using the crowded bar as an excuse to move in closer.
“I like this color,” Derek said, plucking at her sleeve. “I just realized it matches your eyes, too.”
Christ. Ash was in hell.
“Wow. This is smooth. Are you seeing this, Asher?” Hazel asked.
Derek released her sweater, raising his palms and turning to Ash. “Sorry. Are you two a thing?”
She arched an eyebrow at Ash, a challenge in her eyes. Maybe she was annoyed that he’d called her out for worrying about seeing people she used to know in front of them. Or did she want him to stake a claim? Just try. I dare you. As enlightened as he liked to think he was—raised by sisters, privy to their complaints about guys, sometimes even a target for their lectures on toxic male behavior—the desire to wedge himself between Hazel and Derek, to wrap his arm possessively around her waist, to say, Keep your hands off her, was a primal vibration in his bones.
“Seems like a question for her,” Ash finally said.
She looked impressed by the side step and told Derek, “Save your lines. Maybe for those ladies over there.” She nodded to a group that had just walked in.
Because she was into Ash, or because she wasn’t into Derek? He saw the same question pass over Derek’s face. It hung there, unanswered by Hazel, until the bartender set their drinks on the bar.
Travis thumped Ash’s back in a way that felt consoling and directed the group to a spot between a boisterous table of men and a group playing pool.
Soon, Ash was three drinks in, literally backed into a corner, ducking the occasional jab of pool cues from the table they were vulturing, and sulking while the Cline brothers regaled Hazel with a story about running their dad’s tractor into a ditch. Just over a year apart, Travis and Derek had no shortage of such stories. While Travis primarily contributed a droll punch line here and there, Derek knew how to spin a yarn and loved to be the center of attention. To Ash’s annoyance, Hazel was riveted.
“Wait, why were you naked?” she wanted to know.
Derek waggled his eyebrows. “That, sweetheart, is a whole different story.”
“Jesus Christ.” Ash tipped the last of his beer into his mouth.
Just then, the rowdy men to Ash’s right abandoned their table. He snagged the round two-top and indicated for Hazel to take one of the stools underneath. She hitched up one hip to perch on it, but the stool teetered. On instinct, he reached out. He meant only to keep her from toppling over, but now, as her eyes darted down to where his hand gripped the front edge of the small seat, he realized he’d grabbed it directly between her thighs, the soft denim of her jeans brushing against his wrist.
She straightened, bumping her back into the table, thighs closing around his hand. Why was he still holding the stool?
“You drunk already, Hazel?” He aimed for a teasing tone, but his voice came out low and hoarse.
“It’s off-balance.” He barely heard her over the music, all breathy and flustered, her cheeks and neck awash in a pretty pink blush.
“Here.” He tugged the stool out from the table to give her more room. Her eyes snapped to his in surprise. His hand was still between her thighs. The stool rocked onto its shorter leg again, and her hand shot out to clutch his forearm.
A whole montage of untimely, intrusive images played before his eyes.
He dropped down to shove a wad of napkins under the short leg, and while he was there, Ash thought of taxidermy, snow down the back of his shirt, one of the Cline brothers belching loudly somewhere above the table. When he finally rose back up, she looked dazed, and he wondered if she was struggling like he was. “Better?”
She crossed her legs. “What? Yep. Yes.”
Mercifully, Travis and Derek had missed the entire exchange. Hazel tugged her hair down over one shoulder, and her mouth twitched into a little smile that rocketed through his veins. Then, she pressed the smile away and yelled over the noise, “These dudes are never giving up their table.” She meant the four guys occupying the pool table, who had just started another round.
Travis nodded toward the back wall. “Dartboard just opened up.”
They came to a quick consensus. Hazel, smaller and more able to squeeze between the crowd of mostly men with a flash of smile and a cheery, “Sorry! Excuse me!” reached the board quickly and began plucking the darts from it before anyone else could claim them. Derek lagged, having already started flirting with some older women in the brief minute they’d been at the table. Travis followed close behind Ash and, when they were halfway across the room, yelled over the noise, “Say the word if we need to get lost.”
“What?”
“So y’all can hook up.”
“We’re not hooking up. We’re…” He stopped the word friends in his throat.
“Something wrong with your—”
“No, nothing’s wrong with my dick, asshole.”
Travis laughed, hands raised. “All right.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Well, here’s some free advice. Work faster. Pull the trigger.”
“Yeah, okay,” Ash said sarcastically, jostling around men who had parted politely for Hazel but were immoveable boulders for him. “It was super helpful that you invited us here where I can’t even talk to her, but sure, I’ll just ‘pull the trigger,’ whatever that means.”
Travis laughed again and clapped his hand hard against Ash’s shoulder, shaking him roughly. “That’s always been your problem.”
“What’s my problem?”
“You think too much. You into her?”
Ash sighed. There was no point in denying it. “Yeah.”
“So, do something about it. Teach her how to throw a damn dart.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a fucking cliché. She won’t be into it.”
“Man, every girl is into that shit. In fact, if you don’t do it, you’re pretty much saying you’re not into her.”
Ash figured it was pointless to clarify that he didn’t want only to hook up with Hazel. “Just so we’re clear, your brilliant advice is to mansplain darts to her. Revolutionary, truly.”
“Pull the trigger, Campbell.” With that, he shoved Ash the last few steps, right into Hazel.
“Sorry.” Ash removed his hands from her hips, where he’d caught himself. “I think we lost Derek to those cougars.”
“But what a way to go.”
“So.” He scratched his arm. He felt Travis’s smirk beside him but blocked it out. “Have you played before?”
Hazel raised an eyebrow. “Why? Are you going to teach me how?”
Travis barked a laugh and said something about the restroom.
“Do you want me to?”
She squinted at him. “What if I’m actually a professional dart player? Bet you’d feel pretty dumb trying to teach me my own sport.”
“Are you a professional dart player, Hazel?”
“I’ve never thrown a dart in my life. But—” She pressed a fistful of darts against his chest. “Are you any good at this? Because I don’t want to learn from someone with terrible form.”
Ash shot one. It landed in the ring around the center.
She looked impressed then forcibly unimpressed. “I guess you’ll do.”
Somewhere in the shadows, Travis was probably laughing his ass off, but Ash decided to go with it anyway. He’d seen enough rom-coms to know how this part was supposed to go. “Shut up and turn around.”
She gaped at this. But then…she straightened and did it.
He slid in close behind her, nudged her heel forward with the toe of his boot, shifted her hips. Leaning in close, he murmured in her ear, “Not so tense,” as he pressed his palm flat to one shoulder blade. Reflexively, she rolled back into his touch. He positioned her elbow then reached around to adjust her grip on the dart, his fingers curling around hers.
She looked from their fingers to his face and chuffed a breathy laugh. They were dangerously close to breaking their cover, the flimsy charade of it all. She knew what he was doing, and he felt borderline stupid doing it. But he didn’t flinch at her scrutiny, and instead of rolling her eyes at him, she bit into her full lower lip and leaned ever-so-slightly back against his chest.
“I think she gets the idea,” Derek said, coming up behind them.
Ash stepped back. She threw the dart. It landed closer to center than his own, and her hands flew up in victory, smile breaking wide.
Travis returned, and they split into teams. He’d have liked to team up with Hazel, but he was beginning to understand that her preferred method of flirting was trash talk. “Maybe I should be teaching you,” she crowed. He feigned exasperation, which made her smile. A dance they knew the steps to.
Despite being in competition, Ash managed to stay close to Hazel. Their arms brushed as they waited for Travis and Derek to shoot. She swatted at his chest when he gloated, which he did only because she wanted him to, because it made her green eyes flare with something fierce and free. After a bad throw, she chucked him under his chin and said, “Aw, better luck next time, Campbell.” And by their second game, after Hazel and Derek won the first, she was openly cheating, nudging the toe of her boot into the back of his knee or reaching around to cover his eyes with her hands.
“Get a room,” Travis hollered, and she didn’t blush or hide her face, just openly stared at Ash so long he nearly asked, Should we?
Something unreadable passed over her expression, like he’d actually said this out loud, and she grabbed a fistful of his shirt, dragging him into the hall that led to an ancient payphone, the bathrooms, and an emergency exit.
It was finally happening.
Hazel backed herself flat against the wall and yanked him in against her, leaving no question that she wanted it, wanted him. “Damn it,” she breathed. She pressed her face into his neck, right under his chin, a puff of warm breath tickling his throat. “Ash.”
He laughed—he felt just as wild-eyed as she looked—but it came out as a grunt. He braced one hand on the wall above her shoulder, skated the other from her hip up her side, catching the hem of her cropped sweater, ghosting warm skin, and continuing up to her neck, where he threaded his fingers into her hair and tilted her face up to his. No more dancing around each other. No more toeing the line. They couldn’t pretend any longer that they weren’t dying to rip each other’s clothes off. He dipped down and caught her mouth in a firm kiss.
Years he’d waited, studying that sexy little dip of her cupid’s bow, wondering what her mouth would feel like, taste like, and the answer was perfect. Peachy and sweet from her drink. Soft and a bit tentative. Then, he felt her whole body melt further into the kiss, into him, and he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t believe this was finally happening, couldn’t go slow anymore—and maybe never again. He deepened the kiss, a little reckless, a little rough, until a groan in the back of her throat snapped him to his senses.
When he pulled away, already breathing hard, already aching to kiss her again, a whole emotional journey passed over her face—surprise, confusion, hesitation, then clear as day, desire.
She released his shirt and pulled his mouth back down to hers. The first kiss seemed to have caught her off guard. Maybe she’d expected him to swerve to safety at the last second yet again. But this time, she came for him confidently, greedily, her tongue exploring, her hips tilting into his. He couldn’t keep his hands off her, pulling her to him at every possible point. He wanted to be all over her. He wanted to somehow envelop her so completely that she became a part of him.
“This—” He tore his mouth from hers to kiss her cheek, her neck, her collarbone. He cradled her face. “This is what I wanted.”