She was so much more complex a human than I’d ever given her credit to be. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know.
“Now, come on. Get to work, or we’re going to be here all freaking night,” she ordered.
I wouldn’t have minded staying there for a few more hours getting a few more confessions out of her. I could’ve thought of a million things that would’ve been worse than spending an evening in the pigpens with Hazel.
“Wait, I have one more confession,” I told her.
“What’s that?”
“I think what you did to protect your mother was the bravest thing a person could ever do.”
Her eyes softened, and she stilled her movements. “You really think so?”
“I do.”
“Thanks, Ian,” she whispered with a timid voice.
“No problem, best friend,” I joked.
She smiled again, and I felt fucking privileged to witness the curve of her lips.
12
IAN
Hazel held up her part of the bargain. Every night after work, she’d sit up with me in the house, and we’d create music with one another. Some nights, we’d work for so long that the sun would start peeking through the sky.
She pushed me to open up, to dig deeper with my thoughts and my emotions, and it was working. Everything was pouring out of me in a way it never had before. The music felt realer with her help. It felt authentic. It felt as if Hazel Stone was the missing piece to my dream coming true. She was the muse I’d been praying for, and I hoped she’d keep helping me cowrite the songs that would change my life.
“What do you think of that, Hazel?” James asked her as she sat in on yet another one of our rehearsals. The same way she was growing on me, she was growing on the bandmates. Hell, I couldn’t count on my hands the amount of times I’d found them around the ranch, talking about our music instead of doing their work. Eric and Marcus were addicted to going to Hazel for advice on their sounds, and she was more than willing to help them out.
“I think it sounds great. Maybe a bit longer of a guitar solo.” She winked toward him, speaking directly to his soul.
“I can do that!” He beamed, picking up his guitar and strumming at the chords.
She did that for all of us—she made us feel excited about the music, and it seemed like a long time since we’d had that level of joy over our creations.
As the days went by, the guys and I worked harder than we ever had to create the next tracks. Eric was quick to post samples of the new sounds all over social media, and the response across the board was mind-blowingly better than anything we’d ever discovered in the past.
“Over three hundred thousand views in twenty-four hours!” he exclaimed late Friday afternoon. “Holy shit! And that was only a twenty-five-second clip! Just wait to see what happens when we release the full clip!” he breathed, sounding shocked as ever.
“This is it,” James said, cheesing like a damn fool. “This is going to be our breakthrough.”
“Remind me to kiss the hell out of Hazel Stone when I see her again,” Marcus joked, and it wasn’t fucking funny.
“Stay the hell away from her,” I warned, sounding more serious than I should’ve. But the idea of Marcus kissing Hazel made my blood boil.
Why, though?
Why did that thought piss me off so much?
Marcus tossed his hands up in surrender. “Just joking, man. You know I don’t kiss where my best friends are interested.”
“What? It’s not like that. I’m not interested in Hazel. I just don’t want to kill a good thing by having you break her heart or something. I need her to keep helping me with the tracks.”
“Right.” James smirked. “And it has nothing to do with you developing feelings for the girl.”
“Feelings?” I huffed. “For Hazel?” I huffed again.
No way. I didn’t do feelings—except for when it came to the newest lyrics of my songs. In those, I felt everything. But in real life? Still stone cold. Yup. My heart was still closed off from feeling things on a deeper level for anyone.
“Sure, Ian.” Marcus walked over and patted me on the back. “Keep telling yourself whatever it takes to help you sleep better at night, man.”
I would, because what I was telling myself was true. I didn’t have feelings for Hazel Stone.
She was just a girl who helped tap into the music in me.
“Confession time, I need your help,” Hazel said early one Saturday morning as we were taking care of some housework tasks. Her hair was pulled back into a high ponytail, and she wasn’t wearing makeup. She never wore her dark makeup on the weekends, only when she was working on the ranch and around other people, as if the heavy eyeliner and deep eye shadows were some kind of shield for her.
The dark, oversize clothing remained, though. Black on black with a splash of black.
I cocked an eyebrow and stopped folding the basket of laundry in front of me. “With what?”
“I need you to take me somewhere today.” She brushed her left hand up and down her right arm.
“Where do you need to go?”
Her eyes darted away from me, and her stare fell to the ground. “To visit my mom in prison. It’s a few hours away, and I have no other way of getting up there.”
I nodded once, tossed on a pair of shoes, and grabbed my keys. “Let’s go.”
We rode the whole way almost in complete silence. Hazel kept fidgeting with her hands and chewing on her thumbnail with her back slightly to me. I didn’t know what to say to her, because I wasn’t good at knowing what the conversation should be like when you were driving to see your mom who was locked up in prison due to a call you’d made. Kind of a buzzkill, if you asked me.
So I turned to the one and only thing I really knew: music.
“Any tunes you want to listen to?” I asked Hazel.
She shrugged her shoulders and kept looking out of the passenger window. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Wrong answer. All music matters. So there has to be something you like. Anything, Haze. You name it, and I’ll play it. As long as it’s not complete trash.”
“Really, it doesn’t matter.”
“Again—all music matters. Who’s your favorite?”
She glanced over at me, and I swore I almost saw a little redness to her cheeks.
She had adorable cheeks . . . I didn’t know people could have adorable cheeks. But they were the kinds of cheeks that you wanted to lean in toward and repeatedly kiss.
I wanted to kiss Hazel Stone’s cheeks.
If that wasn’t the craziest realization I’d had in a while, I didn’t know what was.
“You can’t laugh,” she said warily.
“I promise.”
“What does a promise from a boy like you mean to a girl like me, Ian Parker?”
“Everything,” I confessed. “It means everything.” I didn’t know why, but I had the strange urge to do whatever it took to make that girl happy. She had so many sad moments in her life; I wanted to bring her some bright ones.
Her lips kind of curved up a little, but she turned back toward the window so I couldn’t see the bashfulness resting against her mouth. “Shawn Mendes.”
“Seriously?” I choked out.
She shot me a harsh look and pointed at me. “You promised!”
“No, it’s fine. I just . . . I didn’t expect a girl like you to like something so pop sounding like Shawn Mendes.”
“What did you think I’d be into? Slipknot or the Grateful Dead?” she asked. “Because of how I look and dress?”
“Honestly? Yes.”
She rolled her eyes. “You know what happens when you put people into boxes?”
“What?”
“They break out of them, proving you wrong time and time again. I’m more than my exterior.”
I almost told her how I wanted to know about her interior more than anything, but I didn’t want to sound like a complete needy moron.
I grabb
ed my phone and put on one of Shawn’s albums. Hazel couldn’t hide the smile that fell against her lips as she began mouthing the words to every song that played. Her fingers drummed against her thighs, and her head nodded to the beat. When the song “Perfectly Wrong” played, tears rolled down those cheeks of hers that I’d been thinking about kissing. I wanted to wipe them away. Shit—I wanted to kiss them away, but I knew it wasn’t my place to put my hands against her skin without her permission.
She sniffled a little and wiped them away on her own.
“I like them, too, you know,” she softly said. “Slipknot and the Grateful Dead. I’m a girl with many facets.”
I was learning that second by second. She was a complicated woman, and day by day, I wanted to know all about her complex sides.
When we arrived at the prison, I had to park in a designated area. Hazel was constantly rubbing her hands against her jeans as she took in deep breaths.
“Want me to go in with you?” I asked.
“No. I have to do this alone. I don’t know how long it will take, so if you want to head home, I can try to find another way back.”
I cocked an eyebrow at her, baffled at her words. “I just drove you over three hours to get here. Why the hell would I leave you now?”
She shrugged. “The kind of people I knew would’ve left.”
“I encourage you to meet better people.”
“I think I’m on the right path,” she murmured, almost so quiet that I missed it. Or maybe I made it up completely in my head and just wanted those to be the words that left her lips. Either way, I hoped I was on that path she was speaking of.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, giving her my word and a small grin. “I’ll be right here.”
She smiled back and didn’t even try to hide it from me. “Thanks, Ian.”
“Welcome. Good luck in there.”
She nodded once and walked away, with fidgety hands the whole way to the entrance.
As I waited, I played Shawn’s song “Perfectly Wrong” again, letting the lyrics sink into my system. Letting a part of Hazel fall into my soul. You could learn a lot about a person based on the songs that made them cry.
It played on repeat a dozen times, and by the thirteenth play, my chest ached a little too.
13
HAZEL
Walking into a prison always felt so terrifying to me. They searched the visitors as if we were the prisoners. We went through metal detectors, then were scanned with another device. A thorough pat down followed. The first time I’d experienced that kind of procedure was when I was eleven years old and Mama had taken me to visit Charlie with her. It had scared me pretty badly, and I remembered having heavy nightmares after the process.
When I showed up now, the nerves still rumbled in my stomach the same way they had at age eleven. Only this time, guilt struck me too.
Up next was all of the paperwork I had to fill out in order to see my mother. As I scribbled down my information, I tried my best to not overthink my emotions. I kept trying to convince myself I’d done the right thing too.
I stuck a name tag onto my shirt and headed to the meeting area. I went through a gate and sat down at a table where I’d wait for a security guard to bring my mother out from the back. As I sat there, I drummed my fingers repeatedly against my thighs, taking in sharp inhales. Around me, there were other tables where inmates were conversing with their family members. Some laughed, others cried, and some didn’t exchange words at all. They just sat in silence, staring at one another as if their stares said all the words for them.
When a guard brought Mama out from the back, I got to my feet, still fidgeting with my hands. I couldn’t stop moving my fingers against one another if I wanted to. My nerves were too intense.
Mama’s hands and ankles were shackled, and that broke my heart. She looked skinnier than she had before she’d gone in, which was very concerning, seeing as how Mama was already skinny to begin with. She was skin and bones minus the baby bump. I wondered what they were feeding her. If they were looking after her, seeing as how she was probably going through withdrawal from her drug usage too. She looked bizarre in the face. Dark circles sat under her eyes, and her skin was paler than normal, as if she’d been sick for days. Her hair was wild, tangled and knotted as if she hadn’t cared enough to run her fingers through it, and her lips were chapped and split open.
Did they not have lip balm for the inmates? Not even petroleum jelly or something?
Oh my gosh. What had I done?
I’d thought turning Charlie in was the safest option for her, and after she’d gotten busted, too, I’d tried to convince myself that her being locked up was good for her, because she couldn’t get into any more trouble. I’d thought she’d look a little better than when I’d last saw her, battered and bruised from Charlie’s hand. But truthfully, Mama looked even worse than before. She looked broken in a way I hadn’t known humans could crack. She was shattered to her core.
And it was all my fault.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
She sat down across from me, and when her eyes locked with mine, tears flooded my stare. She looked so dead in the eyes—as if any light that was left inside her had been drained away.
“Hey, Mama,” I whispered, my voice pained as I watched her skinny fingers fidget together, same way mine had. I wiggled around in my seat and tried my best to push out a broken smile. “How are you doing?”
What a stupid question, though I wasn’t sure what else I could’ve said to her. What did you say to the woman you loved more than life, yet who you were also responsible for locking away?
She huffed at my question and looked away, picking a corner of the table to focus her stare on.
“Craziest shit,” she murmured, shaking her head. “I’ve been trying and trying to figure out how we got caught, you know? Nobody knew about the drop location except Charlie, me, Garrett, and . . .” She turned her stare back to me and tilted her head in a knowing way. “Garrett stopped by and told me that you had something to do with this.”
Tears burst out of my eyes, and I covered my mouth as her eyes pierced into me. “I’m sorry, Mama,” I cried, feeling every rush of emotion shooting through me. “I didn’t think you would be there. I thought it would only be Charlie.”
“Why would you do that to him?”
“Because he’s a monster. He was going to kill you. He was going to kill you, Mama.”
“He would never hurt me,” she sneered, shooting me looks of hatred.
Hatred. My mother, the only woman I’d ever loved, stared at me with so much hatred that I instantly began to hate myself.
“But he did, Mama. He hurt you time and time again, and I couldn’t keep watching it happen. I couldn’t let him do it to you.” I sniffled and brushed my hand beneath my nose. “I know this isn’t perfect, but after this, when you’re done with your time, we can start over. You’ll be clean, and I’ve been saving up some money for us to get our own place. We can go anywhere in the States. We can start over, Mama. We can build a new beginning and—”
“I took the fall,” she whispered, making me raise an eyebrow.
“What?”
“For all of it. I took the fall for Charlie. He’ll be out soon, and I’ll be in here for much longer.”
My heart began shattering into a million pieces. “What? No. Mama, you can’t do that! You can’t take the blame for—”
“He’s my soul!” she barked my way. “Everything I am is because of him, and I’d do anything to protect him.”
That made my heart shatter completely. She was so warped in her mind about what love was and how it looked, how it worked, that she truly would go out of her way, give away her own life, for a man who didn’t give a damn about her at all. She was right about one thing, though. Everything she was was due to that man. Her messed-up mind, her jaded lifestyle, it all existed because Charlie had poisoned her soul with his toxicity.
“But Mama—”
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“I hate you,” she sneered, the words hitting me like bullets to the chest. “I hate everything you are, and I never want to see you again. I wish I would’ve had the abortion when I had the chance. Being your mother has made me miserable. You’re no daughter to me.”
“No.” I shook my head. “You don’t mean that. I know you’re upset and hurting, but Mama, I love you. I did this for you, to protect you.”
“You ruined my life. You ruined me, and I hope your life from here on out is a living hell. I hate you.”
Tears streamed down my cheeks at an impossible speed, and I didn’t even bother wiping them away. I reached across to her to grab her hands in hope of her feeling my warmth, feeling my love, feeling me.
She pulled away before I had the chance.
“Guard, I’m ready to go back.” She got to her feet and gave me a harsh glare as her hands fell to her stomach. “At least this time, the baby will take after her father,” she stated, making my mind flip sideways. “And Charlie will be able to take care of the kid once it’s born, no thanks to you. Maybe this one won’t be such a disappointment.”
“Mama . . . let me help you somehow. Let me—”
“It’s a girl,” she cut in as she rested her hands against her stomach. “I always wanted a real daughter.”
That cut me deeper than anything ever had before.
“I can help with the baby,” I offered.
“Don’t you think you’ve already done enough?” she asked as the guard walked over to lead her away. “I never want to see you again, and when karma catches up to you for what you’ve done, I hope it burns.”
She was guided away, leaving me standing there with a hole in my heart and an ache in my soul. And the burning of said karma? It happened instantly. My entire being was set to flames.
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