Chapter Three
For all his insistence they hit the road immediately, Ash wasn’t anywhere to be found when Hazel returned to the café. Maybe he expected her to come up to his place? Annoyance flared. She didn’t even have his number, or she’d have texted him to come down. Grumbling that they hadn’t agreed on this white-glove, front door concierge service, she marched up the stairs to his door, through which loud, bassy music thrummed. When she knocked, it swung open from the force of her fist. God, why couldn’t he just be ready? Why did she have to debate whether to let herself in like some nosy creeper or stand awkwardly in the hall until he graced her with his presence?
She pressed her cheek to the doorjamb, peeking into his apartment. His place was small. The music was coming from a wireless speaker on the coffee table. He had a futon, a standing lamp, a tiny TV. A kitchenette occupied the far left corner of the room, and a bed took up the back right. A standing rack partially divided the sleeping area from the living area, all his dress shirts and slacks, as well as his collection of whimsical ties, hanging perfectly spaced. Over the music, she could hear water running behind the only door in the place. The bathroom, she guessed.
“I hope you’re decent because I’m coming in,” she announced, waiting a few seconds before she crossed the threshold.
All around the room, wooden models of buildings cluttered what little space was left. She crouched for a closer look at the one on the coffee table. Its front open like a dollhouse, the long, ranch-style home had wooden shingles on the roof and a pebble-fronted fireplace inside. In a pink-and-purple room with a bed and a toothpick crib, tiny childlike art hung on the walls. A cotton-ball beanbag chair sat in the corner. Every room was furnished, down to rugs made of patterned fabric and stamp-sized framed portraits.
The next model, between Ash’s futon and a bookcase, jolted her with recognition. Its lower level was full of fake plants and café tables, a newspaper-strewn farm table, her green wingback chair. Ash had re-created his own apartment in the loft with mind-boggling detail. He’d painted everything nearly the same colors of their real-life counterparts, stacked tiny books on the coffee table, hung a gray dish towel over the top of a kitchen cabinet, just as one hung there now in reality.
Hazel was squinting at the picture on the mini bedside table when the door opened right behind her. A yelp—“Jesus fuck!”—pierced through the music. She ducked and covered, emitting her own strangled sound of surprise, then twisted around to find Ash clutching a toiletries bag to his chest and gripping the knob of the bathroom door.
Hazel slapped her hand over her mouth to stop a laugh. It came out as a giggle and then a loud snort, which made her laugh harder. “That sound. I thought you were a little girl with a filthy mouth.”
He huffed. “I didn’t know you were here.”
“I knocked.” Another wave of mirth spilled over as he frowned deeply and leaned against the doorframe, his jaw tight. “I called out. Your door latch sucks, by the way. It swung right open.”
“And you came right in.”
She turned off the speaker. “Maybe if you had this at a normal volume, you would have heard me. Or if you were ready on time after demanding that I—”
“I was ready. I just wanted to brush my teeth.”
“Aw,” Hazel deadpanned. “For me?”
“Anyway,” he said with put-on weariness. He strode past her to stuff his toiletries into the duffel by the door. He was dressed but freshly showered, hair still damp. The scent of his soap wafted out with the humid air from the bathroom. Hazel hated that she wanted to rub like a cat into the source of that fresh, earthy lemongrass smell.
After carefully lowering the ranch house model into a large box, Ash held it under one arm, grabbed his sweatshirt and duffel, and nudged her ahead of him into the hall. Downstairs, he cut a wordless detour through the café to pour to-go cups of coffee and stick two blueberry muffins into a bag. Then, they were off.
Or they would have been. But before she could pull out, Ash objected to the route Hazel had chosen. He “didn’t trust” Google Maps and claimed perpetual freeway construction would add at least a half hour to her route on top of holiday traffic. Hazel had never made the drive back after moving here, so she had no clue if he was right.
“There won’t be that many holiday travelers,” she said. “Christmas isn’t for a week.”
“But all the schools just got out.”
“Well,” Hazel said, reselecting her original route and setting her phone into the cradle on the dash, “I’m not sleeping in my car in some cow pasture when we run off your little two-lane, farm-to-market road because of bad visibility.”
He shook his head but dropped it.
They made it approximately two miles before he pulled her phone back out of the cradle and asked her to unlock it.
“Why?”
“I want to see your playlist.”
“We agreed I pick the music.”
“Yeah, but seriously, is this all so depressing?”
“Sorry it’s not your beloved Now That’s What I Call Music: Deep Synth Volume 3.”
His unfiltered laugh, throaty and full, surprised them both. “Beloved,” he repeated.
“It was all you ever played.”
He laughed again, shaking his head.
“What?”
“First of all, get your subgenres straight. That was Now That’s What I Call Music: Psychedelic Space Trance.”
“Oh, okay.”
“And secondly, that mix CD was stuck in the player when I bought my car. The radio didn’t work. It was the only thing I could play until I replaced the stereo.” He swung his gaze out the front windshield, a wry smile creeping from one corner of his mouth to the other. “You really thought I drove around just vibing to that?”
“You played it every time. Loudly. Never talked to me, just scowled all broody in your rearview mirror and cranked it up.”
“Broody,” he mused. His smile faded. “Yeah, well, as I recall, there wasn’t much talking happening in the back seat.”
Hazel’s cheeks burned. She checked her side mirror just for the excuse to turn her face from him. When she looked back, he was scrolling again through her playlists. He read, “?‘We’ll Have to Muddle Through Somehow.’ What’s this? More sad girl acoustic?”
“That’s Christmas music.”
“Wow. Dark.”
She knew he was joking, but it stung. She wasn’t a dark person. “It’s from ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.’ That’s a line from the original version, the one Judy Garland sings in Meet Me in St. Louis. Fun fact: there was also supposed to be a line that said, ‘This Christmas will be our last,’ but she thought it was too depressing to sing to the kid in the scene, and she made them change it.”
“Thank God for that,” he said, back to scrolling.
Hazel itched to snatch back her phone and talk about anything else besides her apparently depressing taste in music. “So, you make dollhouses?”
“Models,” he corrected. He selected a ukulele version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” before returning the phone to its cradle then nodded at her back seat. “That one’s for my nieces. It’s just a hobby.”
“Just a hobby? It’s so detailed. They all were.”
He laughed uneasily. “How long were you in my apartment?”
“Long enough to know you made one of your own place. Who’s that one for?”
He rubbed his eyebrow with one finger. Was he embarrassed? Okay, she’d said it teasingly, but she was genuinely impressed. Each model must have taken dozens of hours. They had so many tiny pieces. She pictured him with a headlamp and tweezers, bent close over his work area, his tongue peeking from one corner of his mouth like it did when he was deep in concentration. When Hazel wasn’t working, she mostly just rewatched entire TV series and blocked out the world.
Ash said, “That one was just going to be the café, but I figured why stop once I finished the downstairs. I don’t know. I don’t have, like, a purpose for them. I get tired of doing everything in 2D. I draft all these plans, but I never see them built.”
“The floor plans you’re always drawing on your laptop?”
“Yeah. At my internship, I mostly submit plans to the city and run errands, and the pay is crap, so I take extra jobs whenever I can. I make a little money doing freelance drafting on the side.”
“I thought the floor plans were for school.” His fancy, business-casual wardrobe made more sense now that she could imagine him in a cubicle at some architecture firm. She knew what time he arrived at the café every day, but it had never occurred to her that he came from another job. She’d always assumed he made all his money working for Cami. “So, you have, like, three jobs on top of your program?”
She winced at the surprise her tone betrayed, but she couldn’t help it. In high school—at least, during the one semester she was aware enough of him to notice—Ash had been flaky, apathetic. He arrived late to their homeroom, fell asleep during class, even lost his starting catcher position on the school baseball team for missing too many practices. His own best friend blamed Ash’s lack of focus and drive for their disappointing senior season. Not to mention the very first time she met Ash, when he bailed early on the volunteer field day she’d organized for at-risk kids. She couldn’t help but wonder, where was this work ethic back then?
“The internship will pay better once I graduate,” he said. “They’ll let me do more, and the hours will count toward my license requirements. The models just…help me unwind.”
“Lot of unwinding,” Hazel said.
“I assume you have a more exciting life away from the café.”
“Sure. Grad school is a riot.”
“You’re a TA, right? Actually teaching, not just doing grunt work for a professor?” He laughed at her suspicious side-eye. “What? You’ve stalked my schedule, but I can’t notice that you make your lecture PowerPoints on Thursdays?”
“Technically, I’m a research assistant for Dr. Sheffield, but he doesn’t like to teach on Fridays, so I usually fill in for him in Intro to Psych. It’s one of those mass lectures with two hundred students. Plus tutoring. Plus whatever else Dr. Sheffield dumps on me. So, it’s more like lab work, teaching, and grunt work for a professor.”
“I bet you’re a good teacher. You’ve got a knows-her-shit, takes-no-shit vibe.”
“Well, the whole job is a shit show, but…” She’d lost any sense of healthy boundaries with the students ages ago.
“You work hard.” At her dismissive shrug—frankly, she wasn’t sure how to take him being so openly nice to her—he doubled down. “You do. I’ve watched you sit in that chair for five hours straight without taking a break.”
“Maybe I’m just keeping you from stealing it.”
“At least you did your undergrad here, so you don’t have to navigate a new campus, make new friends.”
She covered the scoffing sound that escaped her throat with a cough, but just barely. Though she’d been there for four years already, the shift from undergrad to grad school had unmoored her. She’d tried to make friends with the other students in her program, but at the first department mixer, she’d overheard some of them speculating about which first-year student had been awarded the coveted Benning Scholarship and answered too brightly, “Oh, that’s me. I’m Hazel.” They murmured strained hellos and immediately abandoned the dessert table to re-congregate in a far corner as though she’d announced she had Ebola. Dr. Sheffield didn’t help matters, tacking “our illustrious Benning Scholar” onto every utterance of her name all semester, cementing her outsider status.
Even her lab team was more contentious than expected. Co-led by Zach, a fourth-year student, their meetings frequently involved the most competitive “brainstorming” sessions she’d ever seen.
Not that she had time for socializing anyway. She’d had to extend her tutoring hours to accommodate Sheffield’s freshmen, pushing her own work behind all the other tasks he’d dropped on her desk.
The real breaking point was when she’d wasted a week transcribing the wrong set of audio files—a mistake that had invited a full dressing-down from Zach in front of the whole lab team—and, simultaneously, Sheffield’s students started finding her outside her office hours. She realized she needed a hideout. And thus—not to be too dramatic about it—her self-imposed exile from school grounds.
“Maybe,” Hazel hedged. “It’s different, though. I didn’t live alone before.”
“Ah. Me, too.”
“You haven’t always been squatting alone above the café like some attic troll?”
“Cami let me crash there. It was supposed to be temporary. That was…” He scratched his eyebrow again. “Almost two years ago. To be clear, I do pay rent.”
“What happened two years ago?”
Ash watched her for a beat before finally giving an easy shrug. “Breakup. Couldn’t afford our place on my own.”
“You lived with a girl?”
“I have four sisters. I’ve lived with girls pretty much my whole life.”
“Yeah, but a girl you were…”
“In love with?”
Hazel was going to say sleeping with. “So, it was serious? You lo—” She tripped over the word, had to clear her throat. “You loved her?”
Ash laughed at her clear discomfort. “I don’t know.” He turned and drew a spiral in the foggy side window with his finger. “Doesn’t everything feel serious when you’re in the middle of it?”
Not if you don’t let it, she thought. If she didn’t crave touch like oxygen, she’d have entirely given up on dating a long time ago. Which explained why, lately, she jumped at the tiniest innocuous touches, the surprise brush of skin when a grocery clerk handed over her change, an accidental jostle on a crowded bus. She was starved for contact. But at least she was safe.
Ash seemed uninterested in talking about his ex and instead told her about his four sisters—Maggie, the oldest, three years his senior, who taught high school French in Kansas; June, an adventurous middle sister trying to make it as an actress out in California who had been two years behind him and Hazel in school; and Laurel and Leanne, seventeen-year-old twins.
“Wait, the cute blonde who was in all the theater productions and came to your baseball games?” Hazel asked. “I thought she was your girlfriend for a while.”
Ash shuddered. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”
He told her the ranch house model in Hazel’s back seat was a Christmas gift for the oldest sister’s two daughters and grumbled lightly about his family being overrun with girls, but the way his eyes lit up at the mention of his nieces totally undercut the complaint. He hadn’t seen them all since summer, the last time he went home, and she could feel how long that stretch had been for him. He was in the middle of showing Hazel a picture on his phone of a little dark-haired girl in a pink, feathered dance costume when the line of cars ahead slowed into an ever-compressing string of red brake lights.
“Is this the construction you mentioned?” she asked.
“It’s usually further along, but yeah.” He had the grace not to say they should have taken his route, but his fond, heart-eyed affection for his nieces was now shuttered.
For forty-five minutes, they crept through the bottlenecked stretch of highway. The traffic finally sped up again, but not for long. Rain dotted the windshield. Hazel calculated their slow progress against the weather models she’d checked before leaving. Not to give her father too much credit, but he’d taught her a bit about forecasting. The type of storm they were driving into was notoriously difficult to predict, but rain wasn’t a good sign, and they were still five hours from Lockett Prairie on a good day.
“It’s just rain,” Ash muttered, shaking his head at the line of cautious drivers.
“We might want to consider a plan.”
“A plan for what?”
“If we have to wait it out.” Just then, they passed a sign with the distance to the next town. Seventeen miles.
“It’s getting cold. If it freezes, it won’t thaw until tomorrow. We’d have to stop overnight.”
“Preferably in a hotel.”
“No.” He shook his head adamantly. “We should keep driving. If all these people would speed up a little—it’s just rain.”
The car ahead of them slowed. Hazel tapped the brakes, and her tires skidded before they caught. She squeezed the steering wheel, cutting a glare at Ash.
“We’ll go slow. I’ll drive if you want.”
“I know you really want to get home—”
“Yeah, and for whatever reason, you don’t.”
“I’m not causing the weather!” She flung a hand at the windshield. He was squaring his shoulders, ready to fight, but her heart had skipped a beat with that skid, and her arm hair stood on end, and she didn’t let him interrupt. “You think it’s fine because it’s not snowing yet, but that’s only because there’s a warm wedge of air beneath the upper atmosphere temporarily thawing the snow into rain. The ground temperature is already freezing. This is only going to get worse.”
“And that’s your weather, folks,” Ash said, his voice dropping into a low, rich register. “Take care out there.”
Hazel’s lips parted, and her eyes widened in surprise. “What are you— Stop it.”
He leaned forward, forcing his way into her periphery. “I’m Dan Elliot, and you’re watching Channel 2,” he said, smooth and lilting like her father’s on-air voice, “the Permian Basin’s most trusted news source.”
She slugged his shoulder, and he slunk back against his door, laughing, rubbing his arm. “Don’t ever do that again,” she said.
“Oh, come on. You sounded just like him with all that ‘warm wedge’ and ‘upper atmosphere’ stuff.”
“Understanding basic weather terminology does not make me my father.” Her chest clenched with irritation, but the sound of her own petulant tone short-circuited her bad humor. She huffed a reluctant laugh and muttered, without any heat, “Shut up, Asher.”
“Ash,” he corrected, probably a mindless habit by this point. Then, quieter, “And I know this isn’t your fault. I’m sorry.”
She did feel weirdly responsible, though, like her resistance had somehow conjured the bad conditions. In other circumstances, she might have rejoiced at the unforeseen delay. But after hearing how excited Ash was to see his nieces, the proof in the elaborate model in her back seat, part of her wished she could snap her fingers and clear their path for him, even if it brought her home sooner herself. His quiet apology despite his frustration spoke to a goodness in Ash that she doubted she possessed.
It was an hour before they spotted the first signs of a small town—an old Texaco station, McDonald’s arches. Their side of the highway was deadlocked with brake lights as far as Hazel could see except when, periodically, someone peeled off from the line, bounced over the grassy median, and came back their way. Eventually, the traffic started moving again as a steady stream of people bailed, taking an exit ramp into the town. The sky darkened. The rain became a wintry mix, lightly tapping on the roof and windshield.
Ash was scrolling on his phone. “There’s ice on an overpass at the next town. They’re only letting one car cross at a time. That’s why we’re stuck here. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but—” He rubbed his jaw. “We should stop.”
“Are you sure?”
“I agreed to give you the café if this trip makes me intolerable to you, and if we end up stranded in a cow pasture tonight, you’ll never get over it, so.” It was clearly an attempt at humor, but he sounded dejected.
By the time they inched into the tiny town, Ash had found two places to stay, a Motel 6 and some bed-and-breakfast called the Roadrunner Inn. Hazel pulled into the packed parking lot of the Motel 6 just as the NO lit up on the VACANCY sign.
The Roadrunner Inn it was. The old, pale blue two-story Victorian house sat at the end of a pothole-riddled road. Its much smaller parking lot was also full, and Hazel was already calculating their next move as she parked on the street. Drive on to the next town, where surely everyone who hadn’t stopped here would be looking for lodging? Or head back the thirty or so miles to the previous one? She indulged, briefly, the voice that said, This is a sign. You shouldn’t have come at all.
In the lobby, an enormous fire crackled. With a teeth-rattling shiver, Hazel looked longingly at the couches angled in front of it and the cart with cookies and coffee, her hands shoved into a thin fleece jacket that would have made her father shake his head. Nat King Cole played softly over speakers. The wood floor creaked with every last step to the counter, where three college-aged guys blew into their hands and shifted impatiently.
“Do you have a cot or something?” one of them asked.
Hazel eyed Ash in a wordless panic. If there weren’t any rooms left, she was prepared to wage a sit-in on one of those couches.
Ash reached for her arm, and she lurched away on instinct. He caught her gaze for a long moment as if reading a wild animal before reaching again, slowly, and squeezing her upper arm.
The contact was surprisingly…steadying. Her gaze dropped to his hand, but she quickly refocused on the taxidermied mallard duck in mid-flight on the wall. Uncertain what else to do with her body when Ash was touching her, she hugged her middle, then regretted it when the motion made him let go and push both his hands into his hoodie pocket.
The three guys were given an old-school metal key. At least for them, there was still room at the inn. Hazel and Ash shuffled forward.
The man holding their fate in his hands was tall and spindly with a disarrayed, feathery tuft of hair atop his head. In less dire circumstances, Hazel would have found his likeness to a roadrunner amusing, but nothing about this could be funny until she knew she had a warm place to sleep for tonight. He spoke abruptly in a decidedly unbirdlike baritone. “Got one room left. It has a queen bed. And no, we don’t have any cots.”
Before they could respond, the door opened behind them, and a middle-aged couple tromped in, shivering from the cold, tension all over their grim faces.
One room left? Too bad for them, but over Hazel’s dead body would those two get it. She slapped her credit card on the counter. “We’ll take it.”