Take Me Home

Chapter One

When Hazel zipped into the parking lot of the Living Room Café, the old clunker with its faded indie-rock bumper stickers and duct-taped license plate frame wasn’t there. Which meant, more importantly, the owner of the car wasn’t there. A Christmas miracle. With only two hours to finish and submit the final paper of her first semester of graduate school, the last thing Hazel needed standing—or sitting—in her way was Ash Campbell.

She’d hustled to the café directly from proctoring her advisor’s Intro to Psychology final, her last chore as Dr. Sheffield’s favorite errand girl. Hustled even though she knew that more than likely Ash had already swooped in and taken her study spot. He had an infuriatingly reliable 5:05 arrival time. But she’d hoped anyway. She needed this.

And, damn it, by sheer willpower and a few questionable rolling stops (and apparently some favor from the cosmos because her clock now read 5:07), she’d beat him here. Finally, a small mercy. Hazel marched into the café, head held high, already pulling her laptop from her messenger bag and angling for the back corner.

Except—

She checked out the front window again. No, his car still wasn’t in the lot. And yet, there he sat across the café in her chair, monopolizing the only working outlet in the place. Ash’s eyes, dark as black coffee, lifted to hers just as a chilly December gust blew the door shut and knocked her forward. She dropped her laptop back into her bag.

“You’re here,” she accused.

“Rough day?” He gestured vaguely at her with his coffee mug before grinning into a sip.

Yeah, she was wearing an ugly plaid shirt from the back of her closet because she hadn’t done laundry in two weeks, her hair was falling from the hasty bun she’d jammed a pencil through when her hair tie broke, and she was practically vibrating from the three coffees she’d already downed this afternoon. So what?

“You missed a button,” he said.

She refused to give him the satisfaction of checking her shirt. “I have to finish a paper.”

Ash leaned back into the velvety green wingback chair, one ankle propped over the other leg in indulgent leisure. It was a comfortable chair, big enough to sit cross-legged while she worked. But fancy, too. A seat of power, as though every word Hazel wrote while sitting in it deserved to be leather-bound and embossed. If ever she needed that power, she needed it right now.

He looked pointedly at all the unoccupied seats between them, but she didn’t follow his gaze. None of the other tables had outlets. None of the other chairs had the green one’s magic. They’d had this argument a hundred times. With a huff, she crossed the threshold to the front counter.

“Isn’t the semester over?” Ash asked across the café.

“Not for two more hours.”

He tsked. “Cutting it pretty close.”

“Shut up.”

He laughed as she yanked out a stool.

“I put your Swiss Miss abomination on the menu.” He nodded at the sign above the counter. In his aggressive, spiky handwriting, the newest addition read, Baby’s First Coffee.

One time she’d mixed a hot chocolate packet into her coffee.

“It’s basically a mocha,” she snapped.

“The tiny marshmallows really elevate things, too.”

“I don’t have time for this.”

The kitchen door swung open, and Cami emerged, her natural curls swept back with her usual sunshine-yellow head wrap. She gave Hazel a bright, “Hey, hon,” over a shallow crate of mugs before she began restocking the open shelves with them, the tattoos on her sculpted brown arms flexing.

At the Living Room, the default was a for here cup. Mostly thrift-store finds, the mugs were mismatched in size and style. All the tables and chairs were, too, salvaged and given their second (or third or fourth) home. With all its eclectic art, warm lamps, plants, and cozy nooks, it was homey. Not like any home Hazel had ever lived in, but still. It would have been a perfect student coffeehouse, except it was too far from campus to cross most undergrads’ radar. Plus, the one espresso machine was in constant disrepair, limiting the menu to drip coffee, teas, sandwiches, chips, and, if you came early enough, the muffin of the day. Several other places offered triple-shot lattes and a dozen types of baked goods until two a.m., like the surrounding bars.

She’d found the café back around midterms on the heels of a breakdown in her tiny apartment, the first cracks beginning to show from the unrelenting demands of her psychology PhD program. When she’d walked into the Living Room, its ambience had soothed her low-grade panic with the comforting smells of coffee, soil, and the old paperbacks crammed into shelves. The smooth, tactile velvet of that big chair. Cami had selected a mug for her that said I Like Big Books and I Cannot Lie and remarked, “I’ve been needing someone for this one.” It buoyed her. Hazel had worked here, from that green chair, ever since.

Or tried to.

“Coffee?” Cami asked, pulling Hazel’s hard glare from the current occupant of the chair. Wordlessly, Cami connected the dots. “Yeah, sorry, hon. He got here ten minutes ago. Give me your cord.”

Ten minutes? She hadn’t stood a chance.

Hazel tossed the end of her laptop cord over the counter for Cami to plug in on her side. Her computer was so old, the battery wouldn’t last fifteen minutes without a power source, which was why, unlike some people, she didn’t have a million other seats to choose from.

“He lives upstairs. Why can’t he work up there?” Never mind that in a couple of hours Ash would also step behind the counter for the late shift.

“I need the noise,” he said, like there wasn’t an entire coffeehouse and old Frank with his crossword between them.

She twisted in her seat. “Play music.”

“I need voices. Talking.” He was fully engrossed in his laptop screen. It wasn’t even plugged in. A new spark of anger ignited in her chest.

“Turn on the TV then. Or a podcast.”

“Too distracting.”

“It’s not like anyone’s here right now.”

Ash cast a wounded expression toward Frank, who was either ignoring them or didn’t have his hearing aid turned up. “He’s here. You’re here.”

“Hey, I am not your ambient noise. I’m here to work. Which would be easier for me to do in that chair with that outlet.”

He smirked at his screen. “Keep talking. This is really working for me.”

With a growl, Hazel spun back around on her stool, fixing Cami with a wide-eyed expression that said, See what I have to put up with?

Cami raised an equally loaded eyebrow. “I’m not sure if this is a nerd thing, a white people thing, or a straight thing, but it’s the strangest flirting I’ve ever witnessed.”

“You,” Hazel said, flinging open her laptop, “are dead to me.”

But as soon as Cami turned away to pour her coffee, Hazel gave Ash an involuntary once-over. And fine, she could forgive Cami for hoping there was something more to their bickering. Ash was a passably attractive guy who, under different circumstances, might have held her interest. She didn’t need to look at him to know this. She didn’t need to sample the triple chocolate ice cream in the northside campus dining hall to know she liked it, either, but she did that pretty regularly, too.

Anyway, good looks only went so far. They certainly didn’t offset his total inflexibility on the issue of the chair and, thus, the threat he posed to her academic career. Nor how much pleasure he derived from being the constant wrench thrown into her gears. Nor their history, which was a whole other thing.

Any appeal really boiled down to the fact that he had nice hair and dressed well. Probably an old girlfriend deserved the credit for that because Ash hadn’t always worn understated floral ties and nerdy-chic gray cardigans that stretched across his shoulders. And his hair hadn’t always been so artfully mussed.

Nope, this new look was a big-time glow-up from the moody, apathetic teenager she’d met at Lockett Prairie High School, who’d shaved his head and wore nothing but obscure band T-shirts, jeans, and a faded pair of black high-top Chucks that were held together by duct tape. And a scowl, couldn’t forget that. He had been basically the human embodiment of the old, bumper-stickered-to-hell car he still drove.

Hazel didn’t trust his reinvention. It was too slick, too whimsical. He still had those dark, overly thick eyebrows and the scar cutting through the wing of one of them. The full, pouty mouth—the better to brood with. He still had the distracting habit of drumming his fingers, cracking his knuckles, incessantly clicking pens. He may have fooled everyone else with his new, charming, easygoing persona, his polished appearance, but Hazel still felt the same friction around him. She knew the real Ash under the costume, and she wasn’t interested. Nope. Not at all.

Cami thunked a mug of coffee down on the counter, snapping Hazel back around on the stool. The bold, black brushstroke lettering on the mug said Wifey.

“Cute.”

She laughed and fetched the little pitcher of creamer. “Honey, this is my café. My hot takes come with the coffee.”

Hazel clicked open her seminar paper. She couldn’t afford to even think of Ash right now. She was down to—shit—an hour and forty-nine minutes.

Pointedly, Hazel hefted the enormous stack of articles and notes out of her bag and dropped them with a loud clap onto the counter. Her dramatics immediately bit her in the ass, however, when an ivory invitation fell from the stack. It slid across the counter and over the edge. Hazel’s stomach fell right along with it. Casting a suspicious side-eye, Cami picked it up.

Hazel didn’t have time for this, either, for its hand-lettered calligraphy or monogrammed sticker. When she’d opened it in her apartment building’s mail room a month ago, Hazel had been distracted, hadn’t braced herself at all. And then there it was, an honest-to-God, formal invitation. She’d shoved it into her bag and, not as successfully, out of her mind.

“Whose wedding?” Cami asked, a note of pity confirming whatever dour thing Hazel’s face was doing.

“My dad’s.”

Cami leaned in. “Are y’all not close or something?”

“No,” she said too quickly. She tried to soften it, adding, “No, nothing like that,” because Cami was already mustering protective cool aunt energy on her behalf, imagining some parental hurt Hazel truly hadn’t suffered. Her parents were fine. But the wedding was a tomorrow problem, not a today problem. She plucked the envelope from Cami’s hand and tucked it back into her bag.

Then came Ash’s perfectly ill-timed, chiding voice across the café. “Thought you had to finish a paper.”

“Shut up. You don’t exist.”

She was already scanning through her notes, mentally sweeping everything else off the counter to focus only on what mattered, so she heard his echo of her words—“Ah, right. I don’t exist”—but didn’t fully register until a minute later that it had been oddly mirthless, almost…

Nope, no more distractions. She was at the finish line. After this, everything she’d put off could come for her, but not before she shut the door on this long, grueling semester.

A half hour later, tinny ringing pulled Hazel from her essay, followed by a voice. “This is Ash.”

She un-Quasimodoed herself, straightening her spine and rolling her neck. Her eyes were slow to refocus past the short distance of her screen. Her coffee had gone cold, but Cami was by the door, flirting with a UPS delivery woman, so she reached over the counter to refill her mug herself.

“Ah, shit. Really? Five hundred?” Ash rose from the green chair, squeezing the back of his neck. He met Hazel’s gaze then turned away and drummed his fingers on the table. “Four days? I was supposed to go home tomorrow.” Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. “No, I get it. Just crappy timing. Go ahead and do the repairs.”

Hazel supposed this explained why his car wasn’t out front.

He ended his call and hastily packed up his belongings. The evening crowd had filled in around them while Hazel was lost in her paper, and he had to weave his way to the front. As he stalked past her to the door, he grunted, “All yours,” as if she’d orchestrated his personal crisis just to lure him out of the chair. Through the big front windows, she tracked his path to the door that led up to his loft.

Hazel surveyed her sprawl—laptop, a stack of articles, highlighters, pens, paper clips, two separate legal pads of notes, a worn APA manual, coffee. She’d practically moved in here, and she was so close to being done. Maybe she’d just finish her paper and then relocate to the chair.

While she debated this, the UPS woman left, and Cami sidled casually back behind the counter, some thought brewing behind her narrowed eyes.

“What?” Hazel asked, wary.

Cami’s gaze darted pointedly to Hazel’s bag, and she knew instantly what she was referencing: the invitation. “Lockett Prairie,” Cami mused. “Small world.”

Unease pricked Hazel’s skin. She sensed where Cami was going with this. Best to get ahead of it. “I’m not leaving for a few more days.”

Guilt flared. She’d put her father off for weeks about her travel plans.

She switched tacks. “If you’re thinking I should give Ash Campbell a ride across Texas, you haven’t been paying attention. We’d kill each other before we reached the hill country.”

Cami’s look suggested killing each other wasn’t the only way it might go, but she raised her palms. “Okay.”

They didn’t even know if he needed a ride.

Plus, it was an eight-hour drive. He’d probably eat corn nuts or beef jerky or something that would make her gag the whole way.

“We have a bad history specifically with being in cars together,” she said.

Cami, who was already turning to welcome a customer, laughed. “I said okay.”

But Hazel’s mind supplied one final defense, just in case: That party freshman year. The first and last time they’d acknowledged each other in undergrad. She knew he’d let the last four years harden around that night, preserving it like amber, just like she had, because when she’d found her new favorite study spot two months ago and returned the next day to discover Ash already seated in the wingback, claiming it was his regular spot, he’d set his jaw and said entirely too smugly, “There are, like, twenty thousand other places to study.” Throwing back her own words from that night.

Hazel’s laptop screen dimmed, reminding her of her paper. Even when he wasn’t here, Ash was still a distraction. She rubbed her tired eyes, retraced her mental steps, and got back to work.

Hazel was uploading her essay to the online submission portal when Ash returned at five minutes to seven. He’d changed into black jeans and a gray Henley for his evening shift behind the counter—his barista uniform, though there wasn’t officially an employee uniform. He refilled her mug, complete with her usual shot of creamer and two sugars, without asking and said, “So, I was right.”

“Shush. I’m almost done.” She hesitated over the submit button, though there was little she could do at this point to improve her paper. Clicking it, she let out a long sigh, and brought her mug to her lips.

He was waiting.

She humored him. “You were right about what?”

He nodded behind her at the chair. “You only want it when you can’t have it.”

“I was just already settled in over here.”

“Sure,” he said before rounding the counter with a turkey and Swiss sandwich and a carafe of decaf. And then he morphed into the kind, gentle café barista he was with everyone else, squeezing Frank’s shoulder. The old man blinked up at him, coming out of his crossword daze, and took his dinner with a grateful smile.

Frank tucked his napkin into his collar so it hung like a bib and bowed his head in private prayer. He looked like a father at the head of the empty table. Though he rarely seemed approachable, engrossed in his word puzzles, he came here to do them. He chose that big farm table for a reason. She’d never wondered about it before, but now, her heart squeezed for him. Did he have no family or friends? Didn’t he ever want a hot meal, especially on a chilly night like this?

More often than not, Hazel also ate a sandwich for lunch or dinner, but that was merely a convenience because she was already here studying. It wasn’t really eating alone when eating wasn’t the main thing you were doing.

“You want one, too?” Ash returned, distractedly thumbing his phone.

“No,” she said. Swear to God, if her stomach growled…

“Got a date tonight or something?”

“What?”

“Do you have a date later?” He enunciated every word slowly, eyes still glued to his phone. “You usually eat around now.”

This was the weirdest part of their dynamic. When he was on the clock, it was like the whole chair feud and that party freshman year and their tense orbiting of each other the last semester of high school didn’t exist. He served her attentively, knew her usual orders like he did everyone else’s. Sometimes, he even stripped back a few layers of snark and attempted to make normal conversation. If she was feeling particularly starved for human interaction, she let it play out.

Though maybe this wasn’t one of those times. He didn’t look up from his phone.

Hazel chewed her lip and contemplated heading back to her apartment. After her scramble to finish her paper, a restless, buzzy exhaustion had set in. Just last year, she’d have thrown on a short dress and boots and gone to sweat it out at the Fox with her roommate and all the other students drinking and grinding away their stress. But she’d already learned her lesson about going to undergrad bars.

Anyway, dancing wasn’t in the cards. Stress had cinched her shoulders up to her ears, and her back and butt protested all the sitting she’d done in the last week to knock out her final projects. She arched to stretch out some of the tension and mused, through a pitiful groan, every vertebra popping, “I think Frank needs a pet.”

Ash’s gaze lifted to hers then dipped. He stopped scrolling.

Her cheeks heated. Casually tugging her shirt hem back down, she pushed on. “I’m serious. A cat maybe. Or an older dog.”

“Because…”

“He’s obviously lonely. Why else would he come here every day? For your company?”

He flashed her a quick, winning smile and dropped it just as quickly. “Why do you come here every day?”

“This is the only place I can get any work done.”

“I’ve been here for three years. You had other places before now.”

“That was in undergrad.”

He waited for her to explain, but when she tried to put into words how working with Dr. Sheffield had overtaken her life, she felt pathetic.

His phone dinged. He muttered, tapped out a message, sighed, and stuck it back in his pocket. Then, placing both forearms on the counter, he leaned in, giving her his full attention.

And Ash’s full attention was…a lot. Somewhere between studious and serial killer-y. She couldn’t look right at him, opting instead to wonder at the marvel of his hair, which she suspected would hold a curl if she twirled it around her finger. She could smell his fresh, citrusy laundry detergent under all the plants and coffee beans.

“Can’t work at home?” he asked.

“You’re one to talk.”

“I’ve already said I don’t like the quiet. What’s your excuse?”

Between her wannabe rockstar neighbor and the train that rattled her windows several times a day, her apartment could serve as an enhanced interrogation site for all the noise she had to put up with. It was all she could afford on her graduate stipend now that her old roommate, Sylvia, had moved to Houston. Ash would probably understand the constraints of thrifty living, considering his own place, his old car, but he at least looked put together. He projected a self-possessed ease that was foreign to her, seemed to genuinely enjoy his job here at the café. And if the floor plans she sometimes glimpsed on his laptop were any indication, despite his slacker ways in high school, he’d apparently managed to stick with architecture, which was a challenging five-year program. Whereas for Hazel, school, once straightforward and simple, felt more like a fun house maze lately. In her rawest moments, she questioned whether she was cut out for a PhD at all.

Not that she would admit any of that to Ash. She decided to treat his question—why did she come here every day—like it was just another of the small, inconsequential ways they needled each other and dismissed it with an eye roll. Her indifference was helped by his phone dinging yet again. He frowned at the screen.

“More bad news?” she asked.

“Eavesdrop much?”

“You took a call in a public place.”

He slid his phone onto the counter in front of her. It was open to a popular forum for alumni and current students. He’d asked for a ride to or near Lockett Prairie for the holidays. The responses ranged from Where? to the observation that he should have asked before most students left town. The comment he pointed at said, Who the hell wants to go to Lockett Prairie for anything?

Hazel could relate to that one.

“I posted on Craigslist, too.”

She snorted. “Hoping to get murdered for Christmas?”

He gave her a tight smile and pulled his phone back. “Don’t really have any other options.”

If Cami were still here, she’d be telepathically nudging Hazel from the kitchen.

“You could rent a car. Or take a bus?”

“Nah, I’m strapped. I still have to buy most of my Christmas gifts, and with my dad—” He stopped himself, cleared his throat. “Not your problem. I’ll figure something out.” He didn’t meet her eyes when he said this. Then he disappeared without another word into the kitchen.

Not her problem. He’d said it himself.

But watching Ash experience frustration didn’t bring her the pleasure she might have thought. He’d looked so downcast. Also, there was a compulsive little part of her that desperately wanted to solve problems for people, to make things perfect, to please. Even apparently, confusingly, to please Ash Campbell. And that part was already weighing what it would take to give him a ride.

No matter how she turned it over, it would surely be a shit show for them both. And the timing didn’t work. He’d said on the phone he’d planned to leave tomorrow, whereas Hazel could conceivably delay her departure for six more days, just soon enough to arrive the night before her father’s Christmas Eve wedding. She needed those days to figuratively sage her life and plan for a smoother spring semester.

And anyway, contorting herself to accommodate everyone else this fall had only earned her extra stress. She needed to strengthen her backbone, not bend it again, even if that made her feel selfish.

Besides, this wasn’t her problem.

When Ash returned from the kitchen, he busied himself wiping tables and tidying the café. The late evening crowd filtered in, and other than drumming his fingers over his phone in his pocket, clearly itching to check his leads, he didn’t rush anyone through their usual small talk. She negotiated with the pushy voice inside of her—if he asked about her plans at all, she’d be honest, see if he was desperate enough to angle for a ride.

But he didn’t bring it up again, and finally, despite a gnawing, unresolved feeling, she left.

Later that night, Netflix asked in its judgy way if she was still watching, alone, in her sad apartment. She’d intended to eat a well-balanced meal, wash her hair after way too many days of dry shampoo, and tackle the mountain of dirty clothes overfilling the hamper, but here she was again with a microwave burrito, rewatching Schitt’s Creek. She didn’t need Netflix’s sass about it.

As she clicked Yes, Hazel received two text messages.

The first was a picture of a massive ice cream sundae. Sylvia’s accompanying message said, Congrats on finishing your first semester, smarty! Dave thinks it’s a stretch for me to eat a sundae for your accomplishment, but I say teamwork makes the dream work! Hope you already had yours.

The second text came so soon after, Hazel didn’t flip her phone over right away, assuming it was some other shot of Sylvia’s boyfriend eating one of his weird, organic yogurts in protest, like all the other times they’d indulged in their post-finals ritual the last few years. But curiosity won out.

And her regret was instant. The text was from her father. If you’re coming tomorrow, you’ll want to leave in the AM. Expecting a big PM storm. Otherwise, best to wait a day.

Tomorrow? Hazel groaned. She’d put off giving him her arrival date because she knew it would seem like she wanted to spend the least possible amount of time there. And yeah, that was true, but she hadn’t wanted to voice it, to endure his long, disappointed silence or, worse, lie about some obligation keeping her at school. But now, because she’d put off that uncomfortable conversation, he had apparently decided for her, expected her to wake up early the very next morning, without one day to decompress after finals, and drive across the state. She’d for sure be using the excuse of that storm to push it back, but still.

She tossed her phone into the blankets with another long groan.

But soon enough, her frustration faded. It was almost a relief to have it decided, to not have to tiptoe her way through the minefield of proposing a last-minute arrival. A relief, too, that her father was so unaware of her reluctance to come. If she was going to spend a week with his new family and watch him get married and experience the whole ordeal of Christmas, the last thing she wanted to add to the mix was unnecessary baggage. It was going to be awkward enough as it was.

Nope, his utter obliviousness meant at least she could smile and get through it, then get back to planning her fresh start next semester, when she would learn to assert herself, to solve her own problems, to say no. After this one last yes.