Chapter Twenty-Nine
A few days in Houston turned into a week. Hazel spent it catching up with Sylvia, sleeping in way too late, and playing with the little orange kitten, which to her boyfriend’s horror, Sylvia had named Baby Dave. Being with her best friend replenished something vital Hazel had been missing, though she still checked her phone obsessively, hoping Ash would text and anticipating Dr. Sheffield’s response to her transfer request.
The latter came on New Year’s Eve, just as she, Sylvia, and Dave were finishing dinner.
Ms. Elliot,
I’ve reviewed your request to transfer your assistantship to Dr. Tate. As she has indicated a willingness to take on the extra load, I see no reason to block the transfer, though I will admit I had higher hopes for our illustrious Benning Scholar to rise to the standards of my lab. I’ve removed you from the listserv and revoked your access to our digital spaces. A final word in my role as your advisor: The PhD isn’t for everyone. If you are, in fact, questioning this path, do yourself, your colleagues, and Dr. Tate the courtesy of honest reflection before you return and waste anyone else’s time.
—R.S.
Hazel let go of the breath she’d sucked in at the sight of his name in her inbox, and out with it came a laugh. His response was exactly as harsh as she’d expected it to be, but instead of falling into a spiral of doubt and worry, Hazel felt pure relief. Sure, she would still see him on campus. She’d know he thought of her as someone who couldn’t hack it, who had taken the easy way out. But what did that matter when she’d gotten what she wanted—research she cared about and an advisor who was eager to hear her ideas? For the first time since school had started in the fall, Hazel felt excited.
And the person she most wanted to tell was Ash.
But Sylvia was more than up to the task of celebrating her good news since it bolstered her argument for ringing in the New Year dancing in Midtown. She dragged Hazel from the table all the way into her closet. “Shave your legs and put this on,” she said, thrusting a shimmery red number at Hazel. “Chop chop.”
Hazel did her best to enjoy the evening, but when the clock struck midnight, and Sylvia smacked a kiss on her cheek before pulling Dave in for the real thing, it hit Hazel like a gut punch. No matter the distance or passage of time, she would always have a place with Sylvia, but right now, this wasn’t where she was supposed to be.
She pulled out her phone, desperate for a missed call, a text, anything from Ash, but her screen was blank. She felt like one big blank herself, empty through and through.
“Okay. We did the thing,” Sylvia announced over partygoers drunkenly singing “Auld Lang Syne.” She tossed her party glasses and cardboard top hat onto a table. “Let’s go and cry over street tacos.”
“I’m not going to cry,” Hazel said right as the first tear fell.
Two blocks away, under a gas-powered outdoor heater, with tacos in their laps and their shoes discarded, Dave asked, “So, that’s it, right? He didn’t text on New Year’s, and now we’re moving on?”
Sylvia slugged his arm. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Hey! I’m just saying, if he was thinking of her, he would have texted.” He squeezed Hazel’s ankle in an awkward consoling gesture. “Sorry.”
“No.” Sylvia fixed Hazel with a stern eyebrow. “No. We asked for space, so we’re not reading into him not texting.”
“He didn’t want to ride home with me,” Hazel pointed out. Every time she mustered the courage to reach out to him, this was what stopped her.
“We asked for space,” Sylvia repeated. “We don’t get to hold it against him when he understands the assignment.”
“When did this become a ‘we’ situation?” Hazel asked.
Dave clutched his chest. “I’m deeply invested, personally.”
“And you know I’m staying on you like white on rice after the last few months.” Sylvia scooped up Hazel’s unwanted jalape?os and popped them into her mouth. “So, what are we going to do now?”
Hazel could text him. If he’d truly missed her the way she’d missed him but was giving her space, as she’d requested, then the only person who could break their silence was her. She could send a simple Happy New Year and see what he said back.
Except a text wasn’t good enough. She’d left him, gone dark, despite him begging her to stay and work things out.
She stood abruptly. “Shit. I have to go home.”
Sylvia jumped up, too, and they both stumbled, still tipsy. “We’re ready? We love him?”
“This ‘we’ thing is getting weird. But yes,” she said on a laugh-sob. “We love him.”
Sylvia made her wait to leave until the following morning when she was sober and somewhat rested. But now, at midmorning on January first—another fresh start, she hoped—Hazel pulled into the café parking lot. She was a little hungover, her back hurt from driving, but she was here. She was here for him.
Her spirits deflated at the glaring absence of Ash’s car in the lot. But it had been in the shop. Maybe it still was.
The bell chimed above her head. There was movement in the kitchen. She waited. Finally, a college-aged woman Hazel didn’t recognize emerged, stuttered her step when she saw Hazel, and said breathlessly, “Oh, sorry. I didn’t hear you. I’m a little—” She looked over her shoulder like she was expecting someone else to come out and rescue her. “I’m new. The other girl is on her break. I’m not usually the only one.” She tugged at her name tag nervously. It said JADE. “What can I get you? Oh, but the espresso machine is down, so…”
Hazel would have smiled if she weren’t recalculating her carefully rehearsed steps. She hadn’t accounted for Ash not being here. He was always here.
“Did you want coffee? Or tea?”
“I’m looking for Ash.” At the girl’s blank stare, Hazel prompted, “Tall guy who works here?”
“Oh, right. I don’t think he works here anymore, though.”
“He doesn’t work here anymore?”
“I think?”
“He quit?”
“I’m not sure. But he’s not on the schedule.”
“Like, in the last week, he just stopped working here?”
Jade pressed her lips together and nodded as if she thought ceasing verbal replies might break this unproductive loop.
Hazel fumbled an abrupt goodbye and speed-walked around the corner of the building to the other entrance, taking the staircase two steps at a time. She knocked on Ash’s closed door and called his name. Her voice echoed in the tight space. She knocked again then tried the knob. Locked. But when she jostled it, the door cracked open.
And inside, she saw…nothing. The entire apartment was empty. No bed. No coffee table. The models that had once lined the living room wall were gone.
She deflated against the doorjamb, stomach churning. If his Christmas Day text message felt abrupt and final, then this was an atom bomb. He’d moved out. He’d quit his job. He’d left the building altogether in one week. Just like we agreed, she realized. He’d given her exactly what she’d said she wanted.
She walked back to the café, unsure what to do. She sat in the green chair, everything just as it had always been, except nothing felt right. Ash was supposed to be smirking at her from the counter or dropping into the wobbly chair across from her and messing with her stacks of papers. Even the chair itself, which used to inspire feelings of greatness, of being exactly where she should be, doing exactly what she was meant to do, felt wrong.
When the tears threatened to spill, she gathered herself up and headed for the door.
And that was when she saw it: an envelope with her name on it in familiar, assertive black pen. She ripped it open to find an address written on the inside and a single line: Whenever you’re ready.
Her heart was a hummingbird in her chest when she arrived at a small apartment complex near the edge of town and willed her shaky legs up a metal staircase. She knocked before she could chicken out. And when she heard the slide of a lock, she mentally reached for her speech, only to realize she’d lost it entirely.
Ash filled the doorway in a navy T-shirt and gray sweats, his hair mussed on one side, stubble almost thick enough to call it a beard. His eyebrows arched in surprise, but otherwise he was cautious, guarded, his grip tight on the edge of the door. “Haze.”
“Hi.” She was panting from running up the steps, and the tightness in her chest only ratcheted up her panic at forgetting what she’d meant to say. There’d been a checklist, one point setting up the next. But at the sight of him, all she could think was, Please.
“You moved,” she blurted. “And you quit the café.”
Ash looked at his hand on the door, the other rising to scratch his neck. She couldn’t read him.
“Because of me? Because of our deal?”
“Yes and no. That’s hard to answer.” His eyebrows drew together in debate as he started to say more but stopped. He fought a smile, and her heart flipped at that tiny, lifted corner. “Um, what does this mean? Why’d you come?”
She blinked. Even though she held his message in her hand—his handwriting, her name—she feared she’d somehow misunderstood or made the whole thing up in desperation. “Sorry,” gusted out of her.
“No. Just—”
A rush of cold wind blew her hair off her neck, and her teeth chattered. She hugged herself, turned from the wind, from him.
He stepped out onto the landing in his socks, halving their distance, and warmth enveloped her wrist as he circled it with his hand. His inhale made a scraping sound like the wind through the leafless trees around the parking lot below. “It’s cold. Come inside?”
His apartment was sparsely furnished with stuff from his old place. He gestured for her to sit on the futon, but he remained standing by the door. If she’d known he wasn’t going to sit with her, she would have stayed on her feet. “I came to—”
Something red underneath the coffee table caught her eye. Distracted, she bent to grab it, assuming it was a throw blanket that had fallen to the floor. But loose yarn trailed from one end. It wasn’t a blanket. It was much narrower and still in progress. Knitting needles fell to her feet with a faint clicking sound. “What is this?”
He held her questioning gaze for so long, she wondered if he’d even heard her. But finally, he dragged a hand down his face. “Something I’ve been doing to pass the time.”
“You’ve been…knitting?”
“Not well,” he said with a grunt.
She surveyed his work in her hands. Some of the lines were wobbly at one end, but by the middle, he’d gotten the hang of it.
“You’ve been knitting,” she repeated.
“Maggie said…” He shook his head, color tingeing his ears. “When she can’t do anything, she knits. You said you needed space. I’m not that great at just sitting around. So, every time I wanted to call you, I just…did that instead.”
“You wanted to call?”
He laughed, and it was tight, a bit incredulous. “Hazel. You came here with something to say, right? Can you please just say it?”
She set his knitting on the coffee table and searched mentally for the loose threads of her speech. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For leaving the way I did and turning off my phone.”
He nodded, face carefully neutral. She recognized the cautious restraint. It was in her, too, insisting she get a peek at his cards before she showed all her own.
But restraint had made them stop talking for a week. Restraint had allowed him to pack up his life and quit his job without her even knowing. If she kept clinging so tightly to caution, what else would she lose?
“I should have stayed. I would have been scared—I don’t know how not to be scared by all of this yet—but I should have been scared there, with you. I should have slowed down and talked it through like you wanted. I was going to. On the drive back here. But then you made other arrangements, so I assumed…”
“Wait, you thought— No, I just bought a car.”
“What?”
He jutted a thumb over his shoulder, gesturing outside. “I didn’t need a ride because I bought a car.” At her stunned expression, he quickly clarified, “Not because I didn’t want to ride home with you. There was a sale. It happened kind of fast. And when you said you needed space, I wanted to take you seriously. Unless needing space is just something you say when you don’t want to say it’s over.”
“Oh.” This was the problem with gauging someone else’s level of self-disclosure and making sure she didn’t go any deeper herself. It was a game of reverse chicken where instead of sailing headfirst into danger, both parties eased off the gas, slowed to a crawl, fiddled with the radio and their mirrors, and waved the other on. No, you go.
But safety was the danger. One of them had to put everything on the table. And this time, it had to be her.
She stood because she felt ridiculous having this conversation eight feet across the room from him and seated when he clearly had no intention of leaving his perch by the door.
“I’m a coward,” she said, letting her hands fall with a slap to her thighs. “But I’m working on it. I talked to my dad. Really talked, like you said. It’s still weird, but I think one day it won’t be. Turns out, weird and uncomfortable is still better than nothing.”
His eyes softened, and he looked like he was going to say something gentle and encouraging despite the limbo they were in with each other, like this was what she’d come here to tell him. It wasn’t.
“Which brings me to you.”
“Weird and uncomfortable brings you to me? Not loving that segue.”
She huffed a laugh, grateful for the small mercy of his humor. Rounding the coffee table toward him, she ripped off the Band-Aid. “I was afraid to do this. But I’m more afraid not to. Because I already know not talking to you, not seeing you every day is awful. I want to remember the Lovebird Suite or that crazy telephone diner or getting pulled over for having the world’s largest Christmas tree or hooking up in a barn or getting stuck in a dress, and I want to know it all mattered. When I made you promise to give me the café if things changed between us, I didn’t want to lose my one easy, comfortable place in town. But life is unpredictable and weird and messy, and last week, everything changed, and now…it’s not the place that I need. I need you.”
His eyes were steady on her, mouth a firm line.
“At the risk of stating the obvious—” She took a deep breath. “Ash, I lo—”
“I love you.”
She released a full chest of air. “You didn’t let me say it.”
He shuffled the last few steps forward so that their toes touched. He slipped one hand around to the small of her back, face finally released from its careful neutral mask. A smile played on his lips. “I knew where you were going with it. Didn’t want to leave you hanging.”
“I can’t believe you interrupted my big declaration. I drove all the way over here. I had a whole speech.”
“Sorry, was there more?”
“I mean…no, that was basically it. Unless you needed convincing.”
He feigned consideration then tugged her closer, his arms sliding all the way around her. His forehead dropped to hers. “Hazel,” he said, voice low and serious, “you had me at weird and uncomfortable.”
A laugh burst from her throat.
He kissed her right then, catching her mid-smile. The press of his lips was confident, certain, casting the last vestiges of her fear away. Relieved, she deepened the kiss. She wanted to make up for the entire week of kissing they’d lost.
But something still niggled at her. “Hold on. Did you quit the café or not? I didn’t mean for you to actually leave because of our agreement. I mean, at the time, I did. But when I showed up, and you weren’t there…”
Ash smoothed her hair back from her face. “I didn’t quit. I took some time off to take care of some stuff. Moving here, for one.”
“And?”
“Remember that night we talked at the Country Kitschin’, and I told you about the restoration I worked on last summer?”
She nodded.
“You made it seem so simple, that if I wanted to do restorations, I should go for it. And then my mom was on my case to make some changes—better apartment, reliable car, actual…happiness.”
“Smart woman.”
He smiled. “I agree. So, I reached out to a firm that works on historical sites in the area. They asked to see some of my work, said if I was serious about doing my professional hours with them after I graduate, I should consider a master’s with a specialization in preservation. I looked into the program here, and the application for next year is due in a few weeks. I’ve done most of it, just need to get recommendation letters. Then, wait and see.” He released a long, heavy sigh and raked his fingers through his hair.
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“So, you’ll be a grad student next year.”
“Hopefully.”
“And you’re not quitting the café?”
“Not yet. I can still pour your coffee.”
“I’m only thinking of Frank. Poor guy would be lost if you left for good.”
Ash bumped his shoulder into hers, sighing again. This time it sounded more relaxed, less like he’d been holding his breath. “I was only giving you space, not giving up. I thought if I came after you when you explicitly told me to back off, it would only hurt. I know I pushed you too hard with your dad.”
She started to interrupt, but he raised his palm to halt her.
“I thought knitting that scarf would be, like, a calming distraction, but it’s way fucking harder than Maggie made it look. I got a little impatient. But leaving that envelope was only halfway cheating. You still had to come to the café to see it. And you did.”
She reached for the pile of yarn on the coffee table. “So, this is a scarf?”
“That’s…generous.”
“It’s almost the same color as my old one.”
Ash scratched his eyebrow and gave her a sheepish smile. “Yeah, the colors all looked identical after about ten minutes in the yarn aisle. I panicked and hoped for the best.”
“Wait. Were you making this for me?”
“You loved that scarf,” he said simply.
Hazel fought to tamp down her smile and finally hid it by wrapping the scarf around her neck and over her mouth. “I love this one more,” she said into the yarn.
Ash tugged the material down and brushed his thumb across her lips. “It’s not finished.”
“Too bad. I’m never taking it off.”
“Kind of warm in here,” he pointed out.
She pushed up her sleeves. “You can take my sweater, but you’ll never take this scarf from my neck.”
His eyes lit up with mischief.
“What’s that look?” she asked, wary.
“I have a fantasy like that. You in your scarf. Just your scarf.”
She blushed. “Really…”
He nodded, trailing one exploring finger under the edge of the scarf, from one collarbone to the other.
She bit her lip, and a ragged breath ghosted out of him. “God, I missed you,” he said, voice low and eyes dark. Then, his perfect, hot mouth found her neck around all that material, and she yanked him down on top of her.