Chapter 4 #2
She told me then, haltingly, the rest of it — the parts she'd only sketched before.
The way her mother's absence had been slower and stranger than her father's, a woman present at the table every night and gone everywhere else, until one day she wasn't even present at the table, and twelve-year-old Hazel had learned to run forty hives and keep a household solvent because there wasn't anybody else standing in line for the job.
The way she'd chosen bees, deliberately, at some point in her teenage years, because bees showed up.
Bees didn't get tired of you. Bees didn't decide, one gray morning, that being present was more effort than it was worth.
"Bees don't leave," she said, and there was something fierce and old and grieving in the way she said it, a sentence she'd clearly built her entire adult life around.
"Bees don't leave," I agreed. "Neither does this club. Neither do I."
She looked at me, and I watched her want to believe it and not quite manage it, the way you'd expect from somebody who'd spent two decades gathering evidence for the opposite conclusion.
"I know you've got no reason to believe that yet," I said.
"That's okay. I'm patient. Ask anybody. I once spent a full year getting a feral clubhouse cat to trust me.
Wouldn't let anybody near him. Scratched Diesel bad enough he needed four stitches.
Took me twelve months of just — showing up, same time every day, not pushing, not grabbing, just being a reliable, boring, harmless presence until he decided on his own I wasn't a threat.
You're basically that cat, Hazel. Except grumpier. And I love the cat."
She stared at me. "Did you just compare me to a feral cat."
"A very dignified feral cat."
"That's not better."
"It's a compliment, I promise. Rosco's the most respected member of this club, cat or human. He's got his own chair. Nobody sits in Rosco's chair."
"I don't have my own chair."
"You will. I'm working on it. Might take longer than a year, honestly, you're a tougher case than Rosco, no offense."
She threw a honey lid at me — grabbed one off the crate beside her and lobbed it, not hard, more startled reflex than genuine aim, but I caught it clean out of the air, grinning, and she made a sound that was almost, almost a laugh before she caught herself and turned it into something closer to a huff.
"You're ridiculous," she said.
"I'm delightful. There's a difference. Same one you tried to explain to me about needing help versus wanting it, actually — ridiculous is what you look like from the outside if you don't get it. Delightful is what it is once you do."
She was smiling. I want to be very specific about this, because it mattered, because it was the first real one — not the almost-smile from the farmers' market, not the twitch she tried to suppress, an actual, full, helpless smile that reached her eyes and softened every hard line in her face into something I'd have crossed considerably more than a farmers' market parking lot to see.
She couldn't help it. I watched her try, watched the old instinct rise up to smother it, and watched it lose, just this once, to something warmer that had apparently decided it was done waiting for permission.
"There it is," I said, echoing myself from weeks before, and she rolled her eyes, but the smile stayed, and I sat there on an overturned crate at the edge of forty-one hives, coffee gone fully cold in my hand, and thought, with a clarity that startled me a little: I am not walking away from this. Not now. Not ever, if she'll let me.
I didn't say that part out loud, not yet. Some things you let sit a while before you say them, especially to a woman who'd need to believe it slow, believe it in accumulated proof rather than declarations, one Tuesday delivery and one dumb cat comparison at a time.
I got back to the clubhouse late that morning, later than usual, and walked into the kind of ambush I should've seen coming from a mile off — Diesel, Hawk, and Silas all clustered around the coffee machine like they'd been waiting on me specifically, which, it turned out, they had.
"You're late," Diesel said.
"Deliveries ran long."
"Deliveries don't run three hours long, Finn. What happened."
"We talked."
"About what."
"Things," I said, which was as much as I intended to give away, mostly because some of what Hazel had told me that morning wasn't mine to hand around a clubhouse coffee station like gossip, even to my own brothers, even out of love.
Silas, who doesn't push on things he can read without being told, just studied my face a second and said, quiet, "She let you in some."
"Yeah."
"That's fast, for a wall like hers."
"I didn't rush it. She offered."
"I believe you," Silas said, and there was something in his voice — old recognition, the particular weight of a man who'd once been exactly where Hazel was, walled up tight and certain it was the only safe way to live — that made the rest of the room go quiet for a second, the easy joking dropping away into something more serious.