Take Me Home

Chapter Eleven

“How about this one?” Hazel held up a T-shirt with a sequined cat eating a donut.

Ash doubled back from a rack of sunglasses, many of which had been jammed in haphazardly or dropped on the floor by the frenzy of Christmas shoppers. He made a thoughtful face over the throng of people between them but shook his head. “Seems a little young. Lucy’s fifteen, you said?”

Hazel refolded the shirt and tossed it onto the table, where another shopper immediately snatched it up. A mass of shopping bags clobbered her in the back, and as she attempted to extricate herself from the sea of people closing in around her, someone else stepped on her foot. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

Ash waved at her, then pointed at the front of the store. She met him outside.

“This is ridiculous.”

He made a sympathetic face. “It’s five days before Christmas.”

“Did you find anything?”

“No. You?”

An entire family pushed their way between Hazel and Ash, making them stumble apart. Ash jerked his chin toward a landscaped alcove nestled between two candy-colored Vintage Square shops. The place was overrun with holiday shoppers and kids in sweaters waiting to meet Santa in the gazebo. She plopped down on a bench. “I don’t know these people. How am I supposed to shop for them?”

That morning, Hazel had ventured from her bedroom late, hoping she’d missed breakfast and could fix herself something quick then retreat to her room, and instead, she found everyone gathered in the living room, assembling another artificial Christmas tree. A mountain of presents wrapped in brown paper with red ribbon covered the hearth and overflowed onto the floor beside it. Her name was written on several of the packages.

Five stockings had been added to the hooks over the fireplace as well, fancy embroidered ones similar to the Peruvian fiber art pieces she assumed were Val’s in the formal living room. The one with Hazel’s name on it had the same colors and motif of the others, though it looked newer, stiffer. It stopped her in her tracks. Someone had made hers to match. She assumed the elaborate stitching had been commissioned months ago.

Val perked up at the sight of her. “Oh, good. We were just going over today’s agenda. I’m picking up our suits and dresses from the dry cleaners later, and I realized I should have asked if you need your dress cleaned.”

“My dress?” Hazel said slowly.

“For the wedding.”

“I didn’t— I thought it was, like, a backyard thing.” Hazel looked to her father, who was snapping the top tier of the fake tree into place. “I’m supposed to have a dress?”

“Ah, I may not have been clear in my email.”

Email? Hazel pulled out her phone, scrolled through the mostly one-sided history of her and her father’s communications.

Hey, kiddo. In case you don’t get a spare minute to talk before finals, I’m passing along that the ladies’ dresses should be cranberry for the wedding. Wear any style you like. Hope you’re keeping your head above water. Dad.

“Oh,” she said, too embarrassed to look up from her phone. She remembered this message, remembered skimming it quickly between tutoring sessions, irritated at the oddness of him informing her what “the ladies” were wearing. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she was one of the ladies. “I’m sorry. I misunderstood.”

Val smiled far too brightly. “It’s okay. What do you have?”

Other than her gray sweaterdress, Hazel had brought a pencil skirt and a white blouse, staples of her teaching wardrobe. At some point she’d equated “small backyard wedding” with “courthouse wedding,” for which she’d figured she could fancy the skirt and blouse up with jewelry and her faux-fur-lined cardigan with the pearl buttons. As she relayed this, Val kept smiling and nodding, not a single crack of disappointment showing. “Sorry. Is that not nice enough?”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Val said. “It’ll be fine. The important thing is that we’re all together.”

Except if the dresses were being dry-cleaned, they were most likely fancy. Hazel would look like a photobomber, not a family member. She could tell Val didn’t want to make a big deal of it. She was truly going to let it go. But Hazel’s skin felt too tight with her mistake. If she hadn’t been so irrationally irritated when she got that email, she would have paid better attention. She would have bought a damn dress.

Hazel’s gaze fell once more to the packages with her name on them. There were at least seven, maybe more. She hadn’t exchanged physical gifts with her dad in years. They always sent electronic gift cards to each other first thing on Christmas morning. She hadn’t even thought to get him a real card this year, let alone anything for Val and her kids.

“I’ll look for a dress today,” Hazel said. “I need to do some shopping anyway.”

“Do you…want company?” her father asked, a hopeful lilt in his voice. “I’m free today.”

She slid her phone into her pocket, already edging out of the room. “I would, but I still have to get your gift, so I’d better go alone.”

Now, hours later and nearly empty-handed on both the dress front and the gifts front despite hitting three shops already, Hazel rolled her head against the wall behind the bench to look at Ash. She’d found a few small things she could go back for—hair clips for Lucy, a set of cloth napkins for Val that matched the navy-and-gold kitchen cabinets. Ash had a single bag with a book light for his mom and a Taylor Swift phone cover for Leanne. “Maybe I could get one of those covers for Lucy.”

“What kind of phone does she have?”

She groaned. She’d seen it several times but didn’t know for sure. “How about for Raf? All I know is he’s going to UT next year, likes dogs, and plays the tuba. How am I supposed to shop for that? What does a seventeen-year-old guy want for Christmas?”

“Honestly?” His lips twitched in a smile, and she rolled her eyes.

“Don’t say a PornHub subscription. I’m just going to give everyone gift cards.”

“Giving up already, huh?”

“I should have gone to Sylvia’s.”

He started to ask, but she shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about it. She wanted to check “presents” off her list and get out of here.

“You said you need a dress. Why don’t we focus on that?” He pushed up from the bench and held out his hand.

But she was getting too comfortable with him trying to ease the weight of things for her. If she kept letting him, one day, she’d be used to him being there, offering a hand, lifting the other side of a heavy tree, putting his coat around her shoulders. If she got used to it and then he disappeared, it’d be so much harder to reset than to continue on as she always had.

She rose without his help and pushed back into the crowd.

While Hazel browsed racks of dresses at a secondhand boutique that was less crowded than the other shops, Ash meandered nearby, lifting and dropping price tags on clothing, necklaces, hats. He never ventured too far to call questions back at her, like whether she and her mom were close.

She told him about her mother’s job, traveling all over the world to open new spas for a hotel chain. She’d started as a receptionist and worked her way up, earning her first big promotion right before the divorce, then relocating to Chicago. After that, she went to New York, London, countless other places, never staying long anywhere. The current stint was in Paris. Because of time differences and her mother’s long hours, their communication had shifted over the years from spotty phone calls to even less consistent volleys of emails. They usually caught up around the time her mother wanted to share her next destination.

“You ever visit her anywhere cool?” Ash asked.

“New York. Summer before college. My luggage got lost for a week. There was always some crisis in the spa, so I spent the whole visit in the hotel room—she lives in whatever hotel she’s working at. I think she thought I’d be impressed by all the TV channels and room service.”

“She didn’t take you to do touristy things?”

“I don’t think she ever did touristy things, in any of the places she’s worked. She stays busy. But the hotel gym had yoga and other classes. Those were fun.”

“Ah, the start of your yoga journey,” he said, grinning.

She laughed. “Shut up.”

“Does she ever visit you?”

“The first few years after she left, I’d visit my grandparents in Colorado for two weeks in the summer, and she’d come to see me there.”

Ash didn’t speak for a long time, and everything she’d said echoed back to her. Hazel’s mother probably sounded monstrous compared to his. She wanted to explain better, that her mom had never wanted to live in Lockett Prairie, that her parents had moved there for her father’s job, and Nora had hoped eventually they’d leave. Resentments had built up. She’d lost herself in the mundanity of housework and childcare. She’d been completely honest with Hazel about this over the years, especially that summer in New York, when Hazel had turned up heartbroken. Never depend too much on a guy, she’d said. Never sacrifice your dreams or your freedom. And keep moving forward.

They never directly talked about Hazel’s father—the implied culprit behind these lessons learned. Her mother’s only acknowledgment of the impact on Hazel was to urge her to make the right choices before she had kids—if she had kids—because afterward it was much harder to choose your own health and happiness.

Hazel looked at it that way—that leaving had been the best thing for her mother—and most of the time, she left it at that. She didn’t dwell on what might have been better for herself, didn’t wonder if there could have been some acceptable middle ground that could have met everyone’s needs. Hazel had turned out all right. Really, she’d made it out of childhood better than lots of people. So.

Eager for a happier subject, she offered, “The last few years, I’ve spent the holidays with Sylvia’s family in Houston.”

“Hmm,” Ash said, wrapping a yellow-and-black striped scarf around his neck. It was a perfectly neutral syllable, which seemed intentional. “Does your dad ever visit you at school?”

She pulled a wine-colored dress with a drop waist and fringe from the rack and draped it over her arm even though she was likely too curvy for it. Even if the crowds weren’t bad, dress shopping would have been enough to sour her mood. Hazel could buy tops and bottoms off the rack, but finding one dress to accommodate her whole figure—curvy with wide hips and thick thighs, a long torso, and narrow shoulders—was an uphill battle from the start. Her annoyance bled through when she replied, “I’m a stop on his way to other people.”

“What do you mean?”

“He comes through when he has a conference or a friend to visit and I’m on the way. Buys me dinner, and gets back on the road. I think he was in town for five whole hours at graduation, and most of that was the ceremony.”

“He never comes just to visit?”

Hazel stopped sliding hangers. Ash was at the next rack over, idly lifting the skirt of a cute black dress she might have worn to a New Year’s Eve party. He was an expert at this, asking seemingly offhand questions that struck right at the profoundly personal. Underneath his question, she heard judgment, though it was likely all her own reflected back—First her mother, and now her father, too? Why didn’t he come just to see her?

Because…that was just how they were. She hadn’t ever asked her father to come. And she hadn’t returned here to see him, either. Her already prickly mood had sharpened further talking about her mother, and now she was agitated, tension knotting in her shoulders and neck, a headache pulsing in her temples. She had opened this door by grumbling about her father’s tacked-on visits, but the suggestion that there was more to it—that his priorities weren’t normal and therefore said something about her—put Hazel on the defensive.

“We’re looking for cranberry,” she said, lifting the three total dresses in the entire store that matched her color and size needs.

He dropped the black dress and pulled out a burgundy one she’d missed. “I don’t know what size you are.”

She glanced at the tag—size four—and laughed. “Bigger than that. Shouldn’t you be looking for your own gifts?”

Ash shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Eh.”

“Eh?”

“I’m not exactly flush right now.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“I’m not actually broke. I have savings. I just try really hard not to touch it.” He blew out a breath. “I mean, I know you’ve seen my shitty car and my tiny apartment—”

“Trust me, the people at Apartment Therapy aren’t dying to do a spread of my place anytime soon.”

He gave her a small, joyless smile.

Hazel gestured to the dressing room down a long hall at the back of the store. Ash followed, dropping into an upholstered chair right outside the two stalls. The area was vacant apart from the two of them, and rather than ending the conversation, the quiet allowed her to hear him clearly when he said, “After my dad’s accident, my parents missed a tuition payment for the twins’ dance class. They didn’t want to bring it up and stress out our parents, so I covered it. Between that and my car dying…I get nervous when I have to use my savings. I can’t come back here after every accident or hug June after a bad audition or babysit for Maggie, but at least I can send money. Unless some other shoe drops and wipes me out.”

“You’re a good brother.”

“If my parents find out, they’ll be pissed.”

“Why?”

She heard him shift in the chair, aware that he could probably also hear her shimmying out of her jeans and pulling off her sweater.

“Same reason I’m not allowed to fix things around the house. They’re the parents. I’m the kid. Never mind that I’m twenty-three.”

It didn’t sound so bad to Hazel, to have parents who still wanted to parent. She’d been used to her father’s unpredictable schedule since childhood, but after the divorce, he’d become absent in a less obvious but more confusing way than her mother—there but disengaged. By fourteen, Hazel made or ordered her own meals, managed her own bedtime, checked her own homework. When Justin tried to get her to break curfew, she never told him it was self-imposed.

“They wouldn’t even let me get a job in high school. Wanted me to focus on school and baseball, even when—” He cleared his throat. “Even when I got benched.”

Hazel tugged the flapper dress on, meeting resistance at her hips. She pulled it right back off.

“I keep hoping they won’t notice the dance payment, but I don’t know. Maybe that would mean things are really…” There was a soft shushing sound like he was rubbing his hands on something. She peeked through the crack in the door but could see only half of him, the hunch of his right shoulder, his hand in his hair.

“How’s it going in there?” he asked, his face lifting.

Hazel ducked back from the door. “Fine.”

The second dress gaped through the waist. She reached back to pull the material tighter, listening hard for Ash, but he’d fallen silent. If she were him, she’d know the perfect probing question to get him talking again, to draw from him the kinds of personal confessions he pulled from her. Ironic, she thought, that she was the psychology student here.

Because that would mean things are really—bad? That was what he’d been about to say, right? Were the medical bills from his father’s surgery not covered by insurance? Was Ash worried his father might be out of work for too long? Or was the problem even bigger than that?

“I’m sorry things are stressful,” she said, assessing her reflection in the mirror. With no time for tailoring, this dress wouldn’t work.

Ash gave a soft grunt, and she sensed that he wouldn’t say more.

Did he not trust her with whatever was bothering him? Or did he just not need another friend to confide in? Unlike Hazel, Ash was surrounded by nosy sisters and loving parents. He maintained relationships—with family, with his cheating ex, probably with all his old friends. She didn’t know how things had shaken out with Justin since that summer before college, but if either of them still held a grudge, she’d put her money on Justin being to blame. There were probably twenty people Ash could turn to before he would need her.

They were friends now, though. They’d shaken on it. But she had to admit it felt mostly one-sided, their conversations so often coming back to her. With barriers up between herself and just about everyone else—Sheffield’s students, her classmates and lab team, even Sylvia more and more—she had been so starved for conversation, she couldn’t seem to shut her mouth around Ash, to balance their give-and-take. She’d been aware of the shift when Sylvia left, how every little thought she would have texted, every anecdote she would have passed along suddenly felt too trivial, too needy to send across so many miles. It had hit her clear as day: Sylvia had sailed on, and Hazel did not want to be a barnacle, clinging until someone eventually noticed and had to scrape her off.

It was hot in the tight stall. The air wasn’t circulating at all. Hazel didn’t want to try on the last dress. She fanned her face and chest, wiped the dots of sweat from her upper lip. Her hair was beginning to frizz at her temples, and she gathered it up off her neck into a quick, messy bun.

Of course, if she went back to her dad’s house without a dress, he’d think she hadn’t really tried. Grudgingly, she tugged the third dress from the hanger and stepped into it, prepared for another bad fit.

But this one slipped over her hips without a hitch. The zipper in the back went up easily. She twisted in the mirror, and the slightly flared skirt draped over her knees in an objectively pleasing way. Her bra straps showed, so she elbowed out of it under the dress. Better. The lacy overlay and wide straps had seemed a little stuffy on the hanger, but she liked the texture, the pretty contrast against her skin. The real selling point? It had pockets.

“I guess we can cross ‘find a dress’ off the list.”

“Yeah?” Ash said. “You gonna show me?”

She blew at a hair tickling her nose and clocked her reddening cheeks in the mirror. As well as the dress fit her—and the low, sweetheart neckline was flattering—the rest of her looked wild, skin shiny, hair already slipping from the hasty bun. “Nope. I’m just going to ch—”

No. Hazel twisted, trying to see her back. She tugged the zipper again. It was stuck. “Shit.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She twisted the other direction, switched hands, bounced as she tugged. The zipper wouldn’t budge. It wouldn’t even go back up. It was stuck exactly where it was, two inches from the top of the dress.

Her fingers kept slipping on the pull. She pressed her palms to the cool metal of the wall, then her forehead. Do not panic. Just because there’s no air in here, and the dress is stuck, and the heat is suffocating—

“Haze?”

God, she couldn’t even relish the nickname. She blew out a defeated sigh. “I’m stuck.”

“The door?” The handle jiggled, and she slapped her palm against the door even though it was locked.

“The dress. The zipper is stuck. I can’t get it off.”

“Oh,” he said.

“I’m stuck,” she repeated, her voice embarrassingly shrill. She could see it. Someone was going to have to cut her out of this dress, and it was the only one in the entire store that was the right size and color. Maybe it wasn’t the right size, though, because now it was getting hard to breathe.

“Do you want me to find a salesperson?”

“I want you to come in here and get me out of this thing.”

Did she? Too late. She’d said it. And now her insecurity about her wild hair and perspiration seemed trivial. Now, she was full-on panicking, and if she didn’t get a real, complete breath of air, she was going to have to bolt from this stall and throw herself into the last sparse remains of snow outside.

There was a long silence on the other side of the door.

“Asher, for the love of God—”

“Open the door.”

She did, and he was right there on the other side, ready. Only, he didn’t step in right away. His gaze swung straight to the ceiling.

“You’re going to have to look at me to help.”

Slowly, his eyes tracked down to her face. They flitted lower, as if to close but his lashes didn’t quite meet. Then, he was taking her in thoroughly, abandoning any attempt to avert his dark, dark gaze. He licked his lips. “It fits,” he said, his voice oddly gruff.

“Please, get it off me.”

Ash swallowed then motioned for her to make space. The backs of her knees hit the bench seat as she accommodated him in the tight stall.

“Turn around.”

When she did, he squeezed in against her backside, jostling her against the mirrored wall to clear enough space to close the door. Already short of breath, Hazel held her sharp inhale until he stepped back and broke the contact.

Behind her, in the mirror, his shoulders and chest rose with a deep breath. Then, she felt his fingers at the upper edge of the dress, just below her shoulder blades. Goosebumps broke out on her skin despite the heat.

She felt him tug at the zipper to no avail. He cursed softly, and the hairs on her neck stood on end, her shoulders flexing back against the warm brush of his knuckles. His attention was laser-focused, eyebrows determinedly drawn together. His tongue licked out over his lips once more. Hers did the same, and she caught the movement in the mirror, her focus shifting to her flushed cheeks, her shallowly heaving chest. Despite the bright fluorescent lights above the mirror, her eyes were dark, pupils overtaking the irises almost entirely. She looked deranged. She itched to hide her discarded bra, which lay open in all its pink lacy glory atop the pile of her clothes, but he would find out as soon as he unzipped her just how naked she was under the dress.

“This zipper is tiny,” Ash said.

“Can you get it or not?”

His mouth twitched up in the corner. “Patience, Hazel.”

“I’m not good with small spaces.”

“Small spaces,” he repeated, like he was noting it in an official record.

“Or suffocating dresses.”

He stopped working at the zipper to place one big hand over her bare shoulder and meet her eyes in the mirror. She expected him to make light of her outsize reaction, but there was no trace of mockery when he said, “I’ve got you.”

Maneuvering her back a step closer to him, he gathered the fallen strands of her hair and tucked them over one shoulder. “The light,” he said by way of explanation. This didn’t explain, however, the slow stroke of his thumb down the side of her neck, down the ridges of her spine, his other fingertips trailing featherlight after, the scrape of a callous lighting a fuse under her skin. Her eyes snapped to his reflection, and that was when she realized he wasn’t looking at the zipper but at her—her eyes, her mouth, lower. His throat bobbed with his swallow, and she felt it behind her.

He noticed her noticing him and cleared his throat. His next firm tug pulled her onto her heels, and she tipped back, her backside flush against his front, his hands dropping immediately to her hips. They both issued breathy apologies. Hazel was ready to just pay for the dress and wear it out of the store to escape.

Ash dropped a knee onto the bench, bringing his face closer to the problem. “I think it’s just caught on the lining. Can I…”

She had no idea what he wanted to do, but she nodded anyway. His hand slipped inside the dress, knuckles brushing a spot she had no idea was ticklish until now. She let out a little laugh as he made adjustments.

Finally, the zipper gave. He slid it down all the way to the curve of her butt, his hand stilling there. A desire to sway back seized her. Just enough to press against his fingers, just enough to let him know she wanted…What did she want? For him to touch her, here in a public dressing room? She wanted his body pressed against hers like it had been when he first squeezed into the stall behind her. She reached up for the lace straps of the dress, now loose, and held them, wondering, her heart hammering, breath halting, what he would do if she let them fall.

He met her gaze in the mirror, his eyes as dark as hers, jaw clenched. “There.” The syllable scraped out of his throat.

She moved to let him pass at the same time he tried to get by. They continued the dance in the opposite direction, Hazel turning around to face him as they shuffled. She laughed, but the sound was cut short by his hand at her hip, first stilling her, then grasping her through the dress like he couldn’t help himself. She backed up against the mirror and gasped at the cold against her shoulder blades. His body closed in the space between them, trapping her there.

“Don’t move,” he said, barely audible.

She could inhale, and their chests would touch. She could reach up and pull his face down to hers. His fingers were still gripping her hip.

Then, somehow, he let go, squeezing around the door and out of the stall without even a whisper of contact.