Take Me Home

Chapter Thirteen

“I wanted you in that dressing room.” His words came breathless and broken in her ear.

Hazel pressed herself shamelessly against him, hooked her hands up over the backs of his broad shoulders and tugged, needing him closer.

“In that bird room the other night,” he went on. “Christ, in that dress that never stays on your shoulder.” He yanked the neck of her sweater over to mouth at the skin beside her bra strap. The soft, velvety warmth and scratch of stubble made her head swim.

A toilet flushed from behind one of the bathroom doors.

Ash buried his face into her shoulder and groaned. “So many better places we could have done this.” Drawing in a slow, deliberate breath, he straightened to search her eyes. His thumbs drew up either side of her neck, the touch melting her even as he gently moved her back a step from him. He was tense all over, fingertips pressing impatiently into the nape of her neck, then releasing.

Hazel wanted to kiss him again for it, for how he showed that he wanted her, for how he wanted it to be right. But she also couldn’t look at him, dread slowly ebbing in.

“You okay?”

She toed up and pressed her lips to his cheek, stalling.

He leaned back on his heels. “Talk to me.” His voice was stronger now, nearly back under control.

She still felt entirely out of control. “You surprised me.”

“A bad surprise?”

“No.” She felt her face flush. “Not bad at all.”

Two young women spilled out of the bathroom, and Ash gave Hazel another foot of space, nodding politely at the pair, who took one look at her, feral and breathless, and giggled. Hazel forced herself not to track their path into the bar, back to the figure that had sent her fleeing down this hall in the first place.

Why hadn’t she dragged him into this dingy, dark corridor to kiss him? She’d wanted to. She’d been so worked up all evening, turned on by his playful teasing, the private brushes of his hand at her back, on her hip, down her arm in the middle of the crowded bar. But it wasn’t her boldness that landed them here. She was a coward through and through, and in a few seconds, he would realize it.

She edged toward the heavy exterior door at the end of the hall. “Is there an alarm on this door?”

He scratched his forehead. “Not sure.”

She gave the bar a tentative push, and cold air licked inside the gap. No alarm.

“Your jacket,” Ash said.

“Don’t need it.”

He reached around her and pulled the door closed. “What’s going on?”

One second was all it took, one quick glance over his shoulder. He froze, didn’t turn back to her.

Hazel tried to be subtle, scooting strategically so his body blocked hers from everyone in the bar. And, more importantly, from Franny Bowman, who had just walked in.

He was silent for a long moment. Then, “Wait, is this why you—” He gestured at the wall they’d been pressed up against, then dragged his palm across his mouth, eyes wide. “And I—”

“Ash.”

“Christ, I was all over you.”

“I was all over you back.” She tugged at his shoulders, willing him to see in her eyes that she didn’t regret the kiss, even if it hadn’t been her intention.

He scrubbed his hands over his face, into his hair, making it stand up at odd angles that would have made her laugh if he weren’t so distressed. “I thought you were—”

“I was.”

“No,” he said. “You were hiding.”

“At first. But then I was into it. Couldn’t you tell?”

He leaned a shoulder into the wall, looking at her from the corner of his eye like it was the only way he could manage it. When Hazel shuffled two steps over to remain obscured behind him, his jaw tightened. She couldn’t hide anything from him. “What happened to ‘I’m a big girl?’?” he said, throwing her overconfident claim from earlier back at her.

She shrugged, defenseless.

“You were really going to bolt?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” She hugged her middle. “Yes.”

“You used to be friends. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“I don’t know, okay? I’m not like you. I don’t comb through the wreckage looking for something salvageable. I find somewhere that isn’t already wrecked.” Her voice was climbing, edged with anger. God, she sounded like she was attacking him rather than trying to defend herself.

“I’m not the one who wanted to come here,” he pointed out.

“I know. I know.” She petted at his shoulders, his chest, wanting to go back to when he was all over her.

“I feel like an asshole.”

“Don’t. Please. I’m the asshole.” Her fingertips grazed up his neck to his hair, coaxing his eyes back to her.

He breathed in deeply through his nose then gave a resigned shrug. “What now? I get your jacket, meet you in the alley?”

“You’d do that?”

He hooked one finger into a belt loop of her jeans and tugged, relenting. Sexy. Reassuring. Bless him.

Hazel peeked around his shoulder to track Franny’s movement through the bar, assess the situation. But Franny turned at the exact same time. A squint, another quarter-turn, and recognition flared across her features. Her hand lifted in a wave, then she was weaving through the crowded room, towing a very tall, well-groomed man along behind her.

“Too late,” Hazel said.

Franny’s face was unreadable as her heels clicked toward them on the tile, her oversize wool poncho swaying with every step. Glossy and manicured, she moved like she was on a catwalk, not in a grimy hallway that smelled of disinfectant. Hazel braced herself. Maybe Franny had been waiting for this moment to unleash everything she hadn’t said in the trickle of voicemails and texts that marked the death of their friendship, the ones Hazel simply hadn’t answered. For a wild moment, she wondered whether Franny might slap her.

About four feet away, Franny stopped, waited for her companion to catch up, and said, “Hazel.”

“Frances.”

Franny’s frown was slight, but it was enough for Hazel to correct herself. “Sorry. I don’t know why I called you that. Hi, Franny.”

Silence descended. Hazel fought the impulse to blurt another apology. Besides, how did you apologize for falling off the face of the earth? Certainly not like this, standing awkwardly post-kiss, next to a bathroom.

Ash extended a hand to the other guy, jump-starting a round of introductions. God, he was a savior. Franny referred to Hazel as her “first best friend” without a trace of bitterness. “And this is Cedric, my fiancé.” She wiggled her fingers, an enormous diamond refracting the dim light, then leaned in to hug Ash. “How are you? How’s your dad?”

“You two are friends?” Hazel asked.

They spoke at the same time, and Hazel gleaned that they’d crossed paths a few times since high school, kept up with each other on Instagram. Last she’d checked, Franny’s account was private, a closed door Hazel would rather die than knock on. A jolt of possessiveness consumed her, though she wasn’t sure which territory felt threatened—her relationship with Franny or with Ash.

Ash said his dad was recovering well from his surgery, which only seemed to confuse Franny. “Surgery? Was it related to the—”

He shook his head with a strange urgency, like the bobblehead armadillo that still sat on the dashboard of his old car. “Just a freak accident.”

Hazel felt like she was missing some insider information, but before she could figure out how to clear things up, Franny leaned in to hug Hazel. They embraced lightly, the equivalent of a dead-fish handshake.

How many of these halfway hugs could Hazel stand? First with her father, and now her oldest friend. Ex-friend. She remembered the easy physicality they’d had as girls. She’d had it with Sylvia, too, that cozy intimacy. Her stomach dropped.

They relocated to the bar, and the guys hovered behind them, already talking casually about sports. Hazel couldn’t remember a time when she’d ever had to think about what to say to this girl. She started and abandoned a dozen questions in her head, and when their drinks came, she sucked half of it down before Franny finally said, “This is so awkward, right?”

“Yes,” Hazel breathed.

“I thought I might hear from you after the invitation.” Franny waved a hand. “I mean, it’s okay. I know we haven’t talked in forever.”

“Invitation?”

“To my wedding.”

“You invited me to your wedding?”

There it was, the agitation. Franny’s nostrils flared, and she picked at her cocktail napkin. “Of course I did.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t get an invitation. But I moved last summer. I have a new apartment.”

Franny’s expression remained severe for another long moment. Then she reached for her handbag, her eyes guarded but something hopeful in them, too. “It’s in August. Do you want to see the venue?”

A pressure valve released inside of Hazel. “Yes.”

She swiped through the pictures on Franny’s phone. Each one led Franny into another story about the wedding planning, and the weirdness between them began to dissolve.

“This is all so you. Exactly what I would have pictured.”

“Well, some things are different than I planned.”

Hazel remembered then—they’d agreed once to be each other’s maids of honor. She swallowed thickly.

“I was supposed to marry Noah Centineo.”

“Oh God. Specifically, Noah Centineo playing Peter Kavinsky in To All the Boys,” Hazel clarified. She laughed harder than the moment warranted, the last of the tension finally breaking.

It set Franny off, and soon they were clutching each other’s arms, mirthful tears in their eyes. Of all the ways Hazel had imagined such a reunion going, laughing so hard she cried had never been an option.

“So,” Franny said, pitching her voice low, “you and Ash Campbell? What’s going on there?”

Hazel tried to shrug it off, but her usual ability to rein in her feelings had apparently been compromised by the reunion with Franny, or by the alcohol, or by the sudden flash of Ash gently biting her lower lip, his unfiltered low groan as he pulled her closer in the hallway earlier. A wide smile broke free, and she dropped her face into her hands. “I don’t know,” she admitted, the words anguished.

“Holy shit,” Franny said. “You’re really into him.”

Hazel turned, resting her cheek on her arm across the bar. “Am I?”

“You’re bright pink right now.”

“He kissed me right before you came in. Don’t—” She hooked her arm through Franny’s. “Don’t look at him. I don’t know what to do.”

“Was it good? The kiss?”

Hazel had to bite the inside of her cheek to get her smile under control. “Yes. Doesn’t matter. I told him before that nothing could change between us.”

“That’s stupid.”

Hazel snorted. “Okay.”

“He’s a nice guy. You could do worse. You have done worse.” She didn’t say Justin’s name, but her meaning was clear.

Justin, Hazel sensed, was too fraught a topic for them to tackle at this point. She had forgotten that when they’d broken up, all Franny’s true feelings had come out. In retrospect, part of the reason Hazel had pulled away from Franny, ironically, was guilt about neglecting her best friend for a boy.

“I owe you a massive apology,” she said, forcing herself to meet Franny’s eyes. “I’m sorry I disappeared.”

Franny nodded, shrugged, then said, “Thanks.”

They coasted on safer waters until Cedric reminded Franny that they had to meet friends across town. This time, the hug Franny pulled her into was real.

Hazel and Ash entered his house to the aroma of baking cookies, the glow of a roaring fire, The Grinch on the TV, and several demands to come sit down for the movie. Ash’s older niece peeked inside the corner of one of Hazel’s bags, and June pulled her, giggling, back onto her lap. Mrs. Campbell rose from the couch to get them cookies.

Ash ruffled his niece’s hair, then June’s, laughing when she slapped his hand away. “We’ve got to wrap these presents because you’re all too nosy.” His smile grew even bigger at June’s melodramatic protest, and Hazel’s insides flipped at the pure sunlight that emanated from him when he was like this. Happy. How had she ever thought him broody and apathetic?

He dropped a loud, smacking kiss on his younger niece’s plump toddler cheek. As they passed through the kitchen, his mother tucked cookies in a paper towel into his jacket pocket.

Right at that moment, here with him, Hazel realized, she was happy, too.

She stopped short when he opened the door to the laundry room, which led to the garage and an upper-level addition. Names and dates were scrawled in pen up one side of the door, Ash’s at the very top. She pressed him back against the door and leveled her hand atop his head, comparing it to the mark there. “Someone fudged his last measurement. Either that or you’ve shrunk half an inch.”

Ash straightened, nudging her hand up.

She made a skeptical sound in her throat. The next thing she knew, he’d spun her around into his place. Her heart leapt at the thought of a replay of their kiss at the bar. But he pulled his pen from his pocket, nudged her heels flush with the door, and scratched a line above her head.

“What are you—”

“There.” He waited for her to move, then added her name and the date.

She was right between Maggie and June. A quick scan confirmed that this was not some communal record for just anyone who passed through the Campbell house. The only other names belonged to his siblings, his parents, his nieces. “You can’t just put me on here.”

“I can just,” he said and started for the stairs. “Come on.”

Inside his bedroom, Ash toed off his shoes by the door while Hazel surveyed his space, part of an add-on to the original house after the twins were born, he’d told her. Clearly, in his absence, it had also become a storage space. Two large plastic bins were stacked under the single window. File boxes lined the wall opposite his typical-guy, blue-and-green-plaid-covered bed. But Ash’s fingerprints were all over the elaborate Popsicle stick chandelier hanging above, as well as a pair of concert posters on the wall—Hippo Campus, Bad Bad Hats.

“I’m getting you one of my ‘sad girl acoustic’ posters for Christmas,” she said, then lifted a pair of black, square-framed glasses from his nightstand and smiled. “So, you do still wear glasses.”

“Only at night.”

“I want to see.”

He shook his head but slid them on.

“Oh, my,” she said. Hazel didn’t even have a thing for glasses, but she did have a thing for Ash in glasses. He was easily ten percent hotter, all scholarly and serious-looking. He was also blushing under her open appreciation.

He pulled them back off and set them on his dresser. “That’s enough of that.”

“There will never be enough of that. Why is it that in movies with makeovers they always take the glasses off to make the lead sexier? They’ve got it totally backward.”

Ash leaned back against the closed door, popping his knuckles. She strolled through his room some more. Did her snooping bother him? She couldn’t tell. Still, she turned her attention from his walls to their gift bags. “We could wrap these later if you want to hang out with your family.”

At the reminder, he popped out into the hallway and returned with an armload of supplies.

“I’ve kept you all day,” Hazel continued. “Besides, I like them. They’re…”

“They’re a lot.” He lifted the paper towel pouch of cookies from his pocket as if it were evidence and tossed them to her.

A burst of laughter drifted up to them.

“I see why you need the noise at the café. It’s never quiet in this house. Impossible to feel lonely.”

“Impossible to be alone,” he corrected, but he said it with the same affection that accompanied all his empty gripes about his family.

Hazel placed her boots beside his shoes, then selected shiny red paper for her gifts and sat on the floor. He sat across from her, his outstretched foot nearly touching her own. For a few minutes, they wrapped in silence, the voices and TV from below coming to them in bursts. She imagined Ash in this room as a teenager, his boisterous family always present in this subtle, steady way, and felt a pang of longing to have spent time here back then, even just once. She pictured staying over for noisy family dinners instead of ordering takeout or making sandwiches for herself, his mother pressing a container of leftovers or cookies into her hands as she left. Maybe she and Ash would have come up here to listen to music.

Maybe, in a totally alternate reality, they would have come up here to make out on his plaid bed.

“About earlier,” he said, breaking the silence.

She smoothed a piece of tape more thoroughly than necessary. They hadn’t talked about the kiss yet. In her car after they left the bar, she’d filled the silence babbling about Franny’s wedding plans, mainly to keep from offering to find some secluded park to finish what they’d started like horny teenagers.

“It was—” she began just as he said, “Let me expl—”

“No, please. I was—” she started again.

“Just listen,” he said.

She set the tape dispenser down.

“It was…great.”

Hazel breathed out a sigh. “Agreed. No regrets.”

“Good. So, I wanted to assure you nothing has to change.” At her confused expression, he added, “We were drinking. We were having fun. It doesn’t have to be a whole thing.”

“A whole thing,” she echoed slowly. They hadn’t had that much to drink. And that kiss had been more desperate and, frankly, way hotter than some random, casual fun.

“Look, I think at this point I just have to say that I find you…” His eyes trailed from her face to her cropped green sweater and down her jeans to where her socked foot nearly touched his. When his gaze returned to hers, Hazel shivered. There was his studious, borderline serial killer look again. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I find you incredibly sexy, Hazel.”

He gave her name gravity. The effect on her was the opposite, floaty, heady.

“If I’m being totally honest, it’s not a new thing for me. At the café…” He gave a single-shouldered shrug, one corner of his mouth lifting. “But it never stopped me from pouring your coffee. We can have this…” He rolled his wrist, indicating a back and forth between them.

“Attraction?” she supplied.

“Yeah. Which I’m hoping is mutual?”

“It is.” Her voice came out thready. She cleared her throat, tugged her suddenly itchy sweater collar from her neck.

“Christ, between your little off-the-shoulder number and now that,” he said, pointing accusingly, “I’m going to develop an unhealthy fixation on your neck.”

After the last few days of dancing around it, she hadn’t expected him to come right out and state his attraction to her. It was almost businesslike, this clarifying of terms and conditions, and yet there was still a charm to the way he seemed to have abandoned being cool or coy. Her heart felt like a shaken-up Coke can.

“Anyway.” He closed his eyes as if trying to refocus. “What I’m trying to say is: it can be a physical thing without changing anything else, whether it’s just the one time, or only while we’re here, or whatever.”

He placed a set of bracelets onto a square of paper and folded the edges around it, so casual, like he’d just offered her the muffin of the day at the café rather than…what, exactly?

“Friends with benefits?”

Ash didn’t look up from his wrapping. “I wouldn’t even call it that.”

“What would you call it?”

“Just…Okay, so, we can kiss if we both want to. We can stop whenever. You don’t have to worry that I’ll get attached. I won’t ‘get weird’ and make you avoid the café.” She heard the air quotes he put around get weird, his mildly sarcastic recall of what she’d said when they’d agreed to carpool home.

Her stomach went oddly leaden at how easily he brushed off the prospect of an emotional attachment. “We already agreed that if things get weird, I’m not avoiding anything. I get the café.”

He smiled, an amused, genuine smile that broke a little bit of the tension. “Sure. And since I live and work there, you can trust that the very last thing I want is for anything between us to get complicated.”

Hazel narrowed her eyes. “Just physical. And you can do that, Mr. Still Goes Out with His Ex and Her Fiancé?” Why did she want him to admit that it would be a struggle, that he didn’t really feel so cavalier about her? When he’d kissed her at the bar, pressed his entire frame against hers, she’d felt like she was bursting at every edge of herself. A supernova. This is what I wanted, he’d said, and it had felt like a door opening.

“You want me to put it in writing or something?” He raised his palm. “I, Ash Campbell, swear not to catch feelings from making out a few times with Hazel Elliot.”

“A few times, huh?” She settled back against the bed, smiling despite her nagging unease. It would be easier to know they could act on their attraction without complications. If they were straightforward with each other, if they established clear boundaries, wasn’t that better than this wild attraction driving them to do something reckless and messy?

Yet she couldn’t help but think of seeing Franny after all this time, how avoidance had made her lock their friendship in a box and throw away the key. All this time they might have had, all this loneliness Hazel had been drowning in since…well, before Sylvia even moved away. If she hadn’t run into Franny tonight, she never would have realized that maybe burying the past and avoidance weren’t her only options.

Ash drew up onto his knees and prowled across their wrapping area, crinkling the paper under one hand and then the other as he leaned in, a cute, playful smile on his lips. “A few make-outs. A thousand. Whatever you want.” He waited for her to tilt her chin up to him, then brushed his lips softly across hers.

Threading her fingers into his soft curls, she tugged and deepened the kiss. He fell on top of her, right into the open V of her legs, the paper underneath him surely getting destroyed beyond use. She didn’t care. When he dropped his lips to her neck, all thoughts beyond their bodies and how good his mouth felt flew right out of her head.

His warm, broad palm slid around to the middle of her back, pressing so she arched into him. They were at awkward angles, his other hand propped on the bed behind her shoulder, his body still too far above her, up on his knees. She had nowhere to go, boxed in by the bed, and as far as she arched, she couldn’t get the contact she wanted. They expelled frustrated sighs at the same time, and he sat back on his heels, ran a palm down his face. “Haze,” he said, half agonized and half laughing. The nickname zinged through her.

Bed. Bed, now, she thought, the rest of her vocabulary beyond grasp. She wanted to unbuckle his belt and shove his jeans down, wanted to wrap her legs around his waist and koala-hug him, let him palm her ass and lift her up. To fall onto the bed, finally bearing the full, satisfying weight of him on top of her.

His eyes danced back and forth between hers, reading her, debating. Just when he seemed to have settled on a decision and his hand ran down to the curve of her butt, a muted thud came from the hall, followed by a hissed, “Shh.”

Ash’s hand paused. “Someone there?” he called hoarsely. More shushing came, then a louder, indignant little girl’s voice, accusing, “You walk too loud, Aunt June.”

He groaned. “I’m taking their gifts back for interrupting this.” He tucked Hazel’s hair behind her ear, then rocked back on his heels and went to the door.

When he flung it open, June and Cosette thudded loudly down the stairs, shrieking. Then came Maggie’s voice, laughingly admonishing June for setting a bad example.

“I’m keeping you from your family,” Hazel said as Ash tried to smooth the mangled wrapping paper. “We should go down there.”

“Yeah, just—” He licked his lips, his eyes still heavy-lidded with want. “Give me a few minutes.” His eyes dropped, and hers followed, landing squarely on the bulge in his jeans.

That he was still very turned on made her want to go again. She swallowed. “Good idea.”

She checked her phone for a distraction and sobered at a text from her father reminding her that they were all going as a family to the winter festival tomorrow for Lucy’s choir performance.

“I suppose they still do Winter Fest at the high school?”

Ash nodded. “Are you going?”

She tossed her phone onto his bed. “Looks like. Lucy has some choir thing.”

“Yeah, the twins have a dance recital, too.”

Hazel perked up. “You’ll be there? What time?”

He shook his head, smiling. “I’d be flattered if I didn’t know you just need a buffer from your family. What time do you want me there?”

She opened her mouth to protest, but he threw her a look that said he wouldn’t buy it. “Eleven.”

He talked about the twins’ small but constant competitions with each other over dancing, school, friends, June’s disappointing go at breaking into acting in L.A. When he moved on to Maggie and his nieces, she saw genuine concern there. Everyone was trying to make this Christmas a little more magical for them with the little girls’ father away for work.

“And your dad,” Hazel said.

He stilled.

She’d only intended to empathize, but she sensed she’d said something wrong. She recalled his response to Franny at the bar, the same sudden straightening of his posture, the darting eyes, the weird feeling that she was missing information. “His…surgery?”

“Right, yeah.”

Hazel couldn’t pinpoint why the energy between them had changed, but soon they ran out of gifts to wrap, and he was back to normal. Ash descended the stairs behind her, carrying presents, and as she opened the laundry room door, her name and height marked there in his assertive handwriting, he hooked his free hand around her waist and whispered in her ear, “I won’t be able to do this in front of them.” Then he dipped his chin over her shoulder to kiss her. It was firm but quick. Before she could respond, he squeezed past her and out into the kitchen.

They watched While You Were Sleeping with Ash’s family, and the coziness of so many bodies all squished together on the sectional and sprawled across the floor in the dark, all their laughter, all their mild complaints about someone hogging the blanket, someone’s cold toes, everyone talking too loudly, enveloped Hazel. She was hyperaware of the warmth here, already aching at her inevitable departure even as she tried to stay in the moment, wring every last drop from it.

Only the two of them and June managed to stay awake to the credits, the rest of the family all lightly snoring, heads tipped back or resting on someone else’s shoulder. Unlike Ash, all four Campbell sisters so strongly favored Annie, with matching strawberry blonde hair, freckles, and blue eyes, that the actual identical twins among them barely stood out. But like Ash, they’d also all inherited their dad’s height. With their willowy limbs sprawled across each other on the couch, their close bonds, both genetic and emotional, were impossible not to notice.

It was after eleven, the fire nothing but embers. Hazel considered feigning sleep. Maybe Ash would let her stay. But when June extracted herself from the little kids and slipped out back to smoke, Hazel resigned herself, stretched, and said, “I guess I should go,” embarrassed by the last-second upward inflection that turned it into a question. Even more embarrassed when he said, “Yeah, sure.”

Just as she climbed into her car, he said, “Wait, I forgot,” and ran back inside the house. He returned with a box under one arm and a small tower of soup cans in his other hand. “For the gate, so you don’t have to give them another sweater.”

She tried and failed to suppress her smile. The gate stopped charging admission so late at night, but she decided not to tell him that. “What’s in the box?”

“Ornaments. You said you didn’t have any for your tree, and as I’m sure you saw, the grandkids’ have taken priority around here.”

“Asher…” She stared up at him in awe, unable to speak for a long moment. “Your mom won’t miss them?”

“It’s just a few of the literal hundreds I made as a kid. Cinnamon dough stars. Popsicle reindeer. Very amateur. And I was pretty generous with the glitter on a few of them, so it’s honestly more a burden than a gift.”

Hazel got out of the car, reached up on her toes, and kissed him hard.