Chapter Eighteen
“This is my best sandwich,” Hazel said, dropping his mother’s apron around her neck.
When she reached back for the ties, Ash pushed her hands away and knotted them for her. He lingered, sliding his palms over her hips. She gathered her hair to twist it into a bun, and he bent to kiss the back of her neck. He could do this now, see a part of her he wanted to touch and do it.
Less than an hour ago, in the barn, before his shaky breaths calmed, before the full-body shudder leveled back out, reality had flooded in—the cold, sawdust-covered table beneath Hazel’s bare butt, the rusty wrench that had clattered down by his feet, and the mess between them, his fingers still curled inside her, her hand still loosely gripping him. He might have joked about the cringey convenience of blue, industrial strength paper towels within reach above the workbench, but he was still coming down, still too cracked open to say a word before he tore one off and set about cleaning them both up.
Had it ever been like this, after? This fragile feeling, like he’d break if she breathed a certain way? He couldn’t remember. But then, he couldn’t remember a during like they’d just had, either. Never had he felt so desperate to worship every inch of a partner before he chased his own need. And then, Hazel had demanded reciprocity—not a plea for her own pleasure but for his, for him to fall apart with her—and the vulnerability in her eyes had snapped something in him, whatever final thread of restraint had allowed him to savor her while keeping himself at bay. All of this with only his hands and his mouth. How would it be when they managed to get where they both so desperately wanted to go?
Hazel had let him wipe at her stomach, sighing contentedly back against the pegboard.
“Sorry,” he muttered, self-conscious when she took over with a fresh paper towel.
“For what? That was…” She shook her head slowly, abandoning the search for words. She bit into one side of her kiss-swollen lip to stop a grin, and the gesture was so sweet and reassuring, he wanted to thumb her mouth free so he could see the full force of her smile.
Instead, he zipped up his pants and searched for the rest of their clothes.
“Now that that’s out of the way,” Hazel said, “whose barn is this?”
Ash was grateful for the question, light, pushing them straight past any awkwardness. He pulled his T-shirt back on, keeping his body half turned in case she needed privacy. “Travis and Derek’s.”
He heard her hop down off the table, her zip rise. “Okay, now I’m certain we could have found condoms in here.”
“But we would have had to stop what we were doing.”
She made a sound of reluctant agreement and touched his shoulder, prompting him to turn. She took her clothes from his hands. “Rain check, though. Right?”
She was so goddamned pretty, swollen lips, unruly hair, skin still flushed from her cheeks down to her— Ash had to physically retreat to keep from escalating things again. “Absolutely.”
Now, she was preparing to make him a sandwich in his kitchen, and he was almost dizzy with the fact that he got to be with her here, like this, unfiltered, unrestrained, so achingly casual. He was most at home here—a thought that made him huff a laugh against her skin. Of course he felt at home, it was his literal home. But it was more than that. She belonged here.
“So, tell me about your best sandwich.”
“It’s not that fancy,” she warned, setting a skillet onto the stove. She broke their contact as she fetched things from the fridge and their grocery bags, and he gave her space, leaning back against the counter.
“Don’t downplay it now, Hazel.”
“I shouldn’t have built it up.”
“My expectations are very high.”
“You’re the worst.”
He nodded solemnly. “Can I help?”
“No. The main thing going for it is that it’s unexpected. So, if you watch, it’ll lose its mystery.”
Ash laughed. “Okay, but just know that this is still a lot of buildup.”
“Do you want to…” She spread butter across four slices of bread, and he felt how intentionally she didn’t look at him. “Do you want to stand over there and not watch me cook and finish what you were saying before? About the golf balls?”
Earlier, once they’d dressed, and he’d returned the golf balls, club, and nearly empty bottle of whiskey to their place in the corner of the barn, she’d asked, “So hitting that oil pump is something you guys do for fun?”
“No, not for fun.”
And then a silence opened up that she waited for him to fill. He’d brought her out there for exactly this—this chance to explain in the only way he’d ever really known how to talk about his father. It was time. But her stomach had growled loudly, and he had promised to talk once they’d had lunch.
Even now, he wanted to stall again. But for how playful she’d been before, explaining her psychology theory, the need for reciprocal disclosures, he understood she felt the scales were out of balance when it came to this.
“Travis and Derek’s dad sold their mineral rights to some oil company about five years ago. It was a bad deal for them.”
Hazel hummed sympathetically as she sliced into a block of sharp cheddar.
“Around that time was when my dad…” He drummed his fingers on the counter behind him. “He wasn’t diagnosed right away, but he was having symptoms, seeing doctors, running tests. They initially thought it was ALS. That was senior year.”
“When we met?” Hazel asked, surprised.
He nodded and chose to ignore the little frown she cast at the cutting board.
“From pretty early on, he’d lose feeling in his feet, his balance. Once, my mom tried to help him to his bed. You’ve seen their height difference. He was heavier back then, too. He knocked her down, and she broke her wrist.”
Hazel’s hands, now arranging precooked bacon on a paper towel, froze.
“After that, I did most of the physical stuff. His legs would go numb, or he’d be so fatigued, I’d have to haul him to his bed. They were still trying to keep the worst of it from June and the twins. Maggie was away at college, and my mom wouldn’t let us tell her. And we weren’t supposed to stress him out because stress can make it worse, so we just…didn’t talk about it.”
Ash’s jaw clenched as if in residual resistance. He’d stood in almost this very spot the day of the broken wrist. His mom wrapped an ice-filled towel around her arm, her back to him at the stove, then cracked eggs one-handed into a skillet for breakfast while June overslept and the twins bickered through the bathroom door. “Are you hurt?” he’d asked, and she’d turned around, blotchy-faced and teary but with a cheerful smile. “Everything’s fine. Eggs?”
Only once he was away at college did she talk—in those panicky, breathless dumps over the phone, like she could only admit the full scope of her fear with distance, her worries so much heavier than she’d ever let on in person. Although he wanted to know the truth and wanted to help, some part of him walled off at her crying.
Again, he regretted the way he’d thrown this like a weapon at his parents in the hospital earlier.
“Anyway,” Ash said, realizing he’d gone quiet. Hazel had assembled two sandwiches, and the butter on the bread sizzled in the skillet. “I went over to Trav’s one night, and he and Derek and their dad were hitting golf balls at that pump and getting trashed, and it seemed like as good an idea as anything else to deal with how—” He clasped the back of his neck, the word stopping in his throat. He swallowed. “How angry I guess I was. And then, for a while, when I felt that way, I went and tried to hit that pump. Sometimes, when we drank too much and couldn’t aim for shit anymore, we’d talk.”
“You and Travis?”
“He’s got his own stuff. I guess everyone does. But yeah, he knows more than anyone else what things were like back then.”
“Even Justin?”
Ash hesitated. He still wasn’t sure how sore a subject Justin was for her. “You know my dad coached all our Little League teams growing up?”
“No.”
“Justin was good. Natural talent. But his dad also pushed him hard, got rough sometimes.”
She nodded. “He yelled a lot at games.”
“Yeah. He was worse when we were little, if you can believe that. Justin spent most of his time at my house, avoiding him. He would talk my dad’s ear off about baseball. We’d run drills in the backyard. We were practically brothers. I mean, every memory I have from childhood, he was there. With so many sisters, it was nice to have another guy around. My mom used to call us peanut butter and jelly. I was a shy, careful kid. He was always looking for fun, or making it himself.” He nodded at Hazel. “You know. He brought out some different sides of me, and I kept him mostly out of trouble. But when my dad got sick, he stopped coming around, just like that. He didn’t get why I was distracted, why I quit the club season right before senior year.”
Ash swallowed. He never talked about this. “Early that summer, my dad had one of his first bad episodes and, uh…wet himself during a game. I saw it from home plate, my mom trying to help him down the bleachers. Justin didn’t notice until my dad wasn’t there for our usual postgame breakdown. He was such an ass about it. I was trying to get ahold of my mom to find out what had happened, and Justin was mad my dad wasn’t there to heap praise on him.”
Ash shook his head, the frustration of that day fresh. “I got it. His dad backed off when mine was around. But he wasn’t…there. For us. For me.”
“I hate him for that,” Hazel said quietly.
Ash didn’t like to think about it.
“When everything came out at graduation,” he said, meaning Justin’s college plans, “and you guys broke up, we went to a party a couple weeks later. He acted like he’d done nothing wrong, and I lost it. It was just everything, all year. He never got what was going on with my dad, or me. He only cared how it affected his game. When I got benched for missing practices—because my dad was having these flare-ups—and he pitched that bad game—”
“When he tackled his own catcher,” she recalled.
“Yeah. And that coach rescinded his verbal offer, Justin blamed me for not playing. Said he would have pitched better to me. Even if he didn’t, I would have kept him from losing his cool. And I actually felt guilty about it. I mean, shit. He didn’t have other options. College ball was his dream since forever. I guess that’s why I kept quiet for him with you, even though I didn’t like it. But I snapped at that party. We beat the shit out of each other, didn’t speak again all summer. When I see him here, we pretend it never happened, but we’re not close.”
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “Don’t. You didn’t owe me. He made his choices.” Then, “It’s hard to talk about? The stuff with your dad?” Her voice was achingly tender, sweet.
“It’s not that I didn’t trust you with it.”
“You were afraid it would feel too serious.”
“I was,” he began, quiet around an ache in his throat. “But not just because you might pull away. The opposite, actually. I knew if you saw this…” She turned, spatula hovering, and he gestured feebly around them at his home. “I was the one who would want to hide out until I had it handled. I’m just now realizing I’m not actually very good at this part.”
She tilted her head, sympathy and confusion both in her eyes. “What part?”
“Talking about it before it’s okay. My parents don’t— My dad doesn’t like to be managed, and my mom doesn’t like to dwell on anything negative, so we just silently handle the situation and then…move on.”
“Like the other day when your dad got up to go to the living room,” Hazel said. “Suddenly you and your mom were there, helping him, like you guys had this sixth sense.”
“Yeah, I guess we do.” He sat for a moment with that—that she’d seen something even his own sisters barely noticed, that she’d been paying such close attention. “I’m not used to talking about it much at all, but especially when I don’t know what’s going to happen. Or I didn’t, before this morning.” Then, out of habit: “Everything’s all right now.”
That his father had been cleared today should have made it easier to tell her all of this, but everyone’s frustration when Ash had pushed to call the doctor, then the fight in the exam room, the fact that his father still hadn’t looked at him since and the rest had barely spoken to him, even his mother, made his chest ache.
“I overreacted this time. June told you, right? But it’s frustrating. Sometimes, they want me to step up and help. Then they don’t. They’re the parents, I’m the kid.”
“Like they didn’t expect you to manage it with them when you were just a kid.”
“I’m not complaining.”
“I know. But you were seventeen with all that on your shoulders? I wish I’d known. Those nights you drove us around, I thought you were annoyed I was tagging along. When you fell asleep in class and missed practices, I thought you just didn’t care. You must have been so stressed out.” She turned the burner off and faced him, a deep furrow in her brow. “God, you were helping take care of your dad, your sisters, your mom, even Justin and…” She didn’t say me, but he saw the realization on her face.
He clutched the back of his neck.
“Ash.”
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. All of it, everything—” She gave a frustrated huff. When she spoke again, her voice was so soft it needled straight into his heart. “Who was taking care of you?”
“Come on,” he said with an attempt at a quick, reassuring smile. “I was fi—” But his throat finally succeeded in sealing itself off. Pressure built behind his sinuses and then his eyes, and blinking it back brought it instead to the surface. Tears—fucking tears—gathered.
She took a half step, opened her arms, but stopped. “Can I?”
He shrugged because to say that, yes, he wanted her to cross the short distance and hug him felt embarrassingly weak, but this was all she needed to push into his space, to wrap her arms tightly around him until the ache in his throat released and the sting behind his eyes passed. After a while, he murmured, “Our food will get cold.”
She squeezed tighter, breathing him in. “One more minute.”
“This is really fucking good.”
Hazel tossed her napkin at him.
“I’m serious. I’m adding this to the café menu when we get back. ‘Hazel’s Best Sandwich.’ It’ll be a bestseller.”
“You’ll have to pry the turkey and Swiss from Frank’s cold, dead hands first.”
“Dark.” Ash smiled around another big bite. “What made you think to put pears in a sandwich?”
“Actually,” she said, something sparking in her eyes, “that wasn’t me. After the divorce, my dad didn’t know how to cook much of anything. He used to order pizza or buy these awful premade meals. We lived on those and PopTarts and cereal forever. After a while, I got so annoyed that I basically yelled at him for not feeding me a real meal and sitting at the table to eat it together. He had no idea how to do the things my mom used to do. I’m talking basic cooking, cleaning, laundry. He didn’t unpack the boxes from our old house for months.”
She cleared her throat, sat up straighter. “I mean, I’m sure it was all a lot—feeding me, coordinating babysitters around his crazy work schedule—”
Ash caught her wrist across the table. She did this a lot, this downplaying and redefining of things she hadn’t quite meant to say.
She took a breath and started again. “The day I lectured him about food, he pulled out all the ingredients we had, and we came up with this. A pear and bacon grilled cheese.”
“It’s delicious.”
“Thanks.”
“So,” he said, hesitant to bring up what he’d witnessed that afternoon at the festival. Ash had watched her watch her father filming her stepsister’s performance and felt helpless to reach her across his family sitting between them. That her father really thought she’d no-show after everything Hazel had done to show up gut-punched him as sharply now as it had in the moment. He’d wanted to whisk her away, to rewind time and not be such an ass about the gingerbread house, to not have walked out when she started to shut down.
“What?” Hazel prompted around a delicate bite of her sandwich.
“Why’d you come home?”
Her stare was pointedly blank, like he was being obtuse. “I was summoned.”
“Yeah, but you had a choice.”
She mulled this over. “Didn’t really feel like a choice.”
“You’ve never come home before. Not for holidays. Not for summer breaks. Pretty typical times when you’re expected to visit, but you always chose not to. And it sounds like your dad doesn’t make much of an effort to come see you, either. So, why now?”
“He’s getting married.”
“Yeah,” Ash said carefully, “and you told me you don’t need any more people in your inner circle.”
She shook her head, less a denial and more of a helpless flail. “If I didn’t come, it would seem like it was about the wedding. Like I had a problem with it.”
“Which you…don’t?”
“I don’t.” Hazel wiped her mouth with her napkin. “It doesn’t affect me at all.”
“You’ve said that. A lot, actually.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What are you getting at? That I’m protesting too much? That I’m a big baby, and it hurts my feelings that he’s suddenly this great dad to someone else’s kids?” Her voice dipped into a mocking sneer on the last bit.
Ash opened his palms on the table. He wanted to close them around her hands, but she pulled them into her lap. “I think if that’s how you were feeling, no one would call it childish. If you were hurt or angry, it would be justified.”
“It’s not like it’s some huge burden to be here.”
Ash wasn’t sure about that. For one thing, she had resisted it so vehemently from the beginning that, even if she didn’t think it should be a burden, it clearly felt like one anyway. For another thing, Ash had wanted to come home, chosen it freely, and he still felt burdened by the position his parents had put him in, sometimes responsible for their problems, sometimes shut out like he was being controlling instead of concerned. At least their relationship could survive the discord. His father wouldn’t let him leave without speaking to him again, no matter how angry he was. From what Ash could see, Hazel felt obligated to come home, but that obligation ran in only one direction.
Hazel chewed on her lower lip and looked out the window. It was dim in the kitchen. They hadn’t turned the lights on, and the feeble daylight was fading. He waited for her to say more, but she remained quiet. The thing about Hazel, he realized, was that when something really got under her skin, her usual fierceness and quick, combative spirit were nowhere to be found. She would fight for a chair in a café, or to follow her own driving directions instead of his, or to win at a silly bar game, but corner her on something real and she’d close right up.
He wanted more of her, not less. “Point is, I’m Team Hazel. That’s all I’m trying to say.”
She finally cast a tentative glance back at him. A little smile quirked the corner of her mouth, and she lifted her sandwich. “We should get you a team shirt then. It’s pink. And sequined.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“And very fitted.” Her eyes dropped to his shoulders and torso, and he watched her openly appreciate his body.
“I’m not scared.” If he flexed a little, sue him.
“Good.”
“Hey. Finish eating. I want to go upstairs with you.”
“Wow.” She laughed. “Subtle.”
“Not for that. I mean, not not for that. I just want to…” He rubbed his face, chuckling into his palms. Why was he embarrassed, especially after what they’d already done in the barn? “I want to hold you. In my bed.”
She chewed slowly, feigning deep thought, dragging it out.
“Haze,” he groaned. A bubbling affection for her washed over him.
“You told me you didn’t want to spoon me.”
“When did I—”
She clasped her hands on the table between them, utterly serious. “In the Lovebird Suite. You said—”
Ash pushed back from the table and hoisted her out of her chair and over his shoulder. “I lied,” he said, loving the loud laugh that burst from her.
She swatted ineffectually at his back, exclaiming in mock horror, “Oh my God, you lied? You were dying to spoon me?”
He set her down at the door to the stairs and smoothed her wild hair back from her bright, smiling, perfect face. He shook his head at her, pressed a firm kiss to her forehead. “You have no idea.”
“Well, we’d better—”
The front door opened.
“Greet your family,” she finished, amused at how he deflated against her.
“They can’t see us. We could hurry up there. They’ll never know we’re here.”
“Except for my car and all the dishes we left out.” She kissed his cheek then laid a loud, hard slap on his butt. “Buck up, private.”