He grew a bit somber and shrugged. “I don’t find the need to hook up with random women anymore.”
“Oh, and why’s that?” I asked, somewhat terrified of the answer.
He narrowed his eyes in confusion, as if I were the slowest person alive. “Come on, Haze,” he whispered, running his hands through his hair. “You can’t really be asking that, right? I think you know why.”
I blinked. “Maybe, but—”
“Because of you,” he said, cutting me off, making it clear as day. “I don’t want any other girl to try to give me inspiration. Because I have you.”
No words left my mouth, because I wasn’t certain if I was dreaming or having delusions due to my throbbing lower half. Did Ian just confess to having some kind of feelings for me? Did he just open up in a way that I hadn’t expected him to do?
Did he like me in the same way I liked him?
He gave me a small smile and got to his feet. As he turned to walk away, I called after him. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“I think we’ve got some broccoli for your vagina. Maybe if I’m lucky, you’ll let me hold that against you.”
Oh, Ian.
You can broccoli my vagina anytime.
17
IAN
There were a lot of things that I didn’t like about small-town life, but one of the best parts of Eres was our summer bonfires. We held a big festival each summer with a shit ton of bonfires going on around the lakefront. Every youthful person in town came to the bonfire festival, where they’d dance, drink, and be merry. The night sky lit up with fairy lights that I was certain a bunch of girls twisted around the tree branches, and music was blasting through the speakers whenever the band and I weren’t performing. It was the best feeling in the world—summer nights and bonfires.
People seemed so free and lighthearted at the event. It was almost a guarantee that most people would end up in the lake, too, drunkenly splashing and celebrating summer. Even though our town had its issues, we didn’t miss a chance to celebrate in the lake with beers in our hands.
“Who in the hell is that with Leah?” Marcus exclaimed as Leah and a group of her friends pulled up in the parking lot for the bonfires. They all looked pretty standard to me, but there was one girl wearing short yellow shorts and a white crop top that stood out in the crowd. Her dark hair was pulled back into a high ponytail, and she was laughing and smiling with the other girls as if she belonged, and holy shit, it was Hazel.
Her face wasn’t plastered with makeup, and I swore her skin was glowing. She looked like she was floating on a cloud, and her confidence was out of this world.
“No way,” Eric said, staring in the same direction as the two of us. “That can’t be Hazel.”
“It is.” My jaw was pretty much on the ground, and the hard-on in my jeans was going to be a fucking problem, but holy shit, she looked breathtaking. I wanted to take her into my arms and slam my mouth against hers more than she’d ever know. I also wanted to press my body against her to showcase how hard she’d been making me lately.
I couldn’t count the number of times I’d awakened with a boner against her back. There were times I had to sneak out of bed to go stroke myself to my happy ending, with thoughts of Hazel on my mind.
She looked amazing that night, but she always looked amazing. Only that night, she was wearing color. Yellow shorts, to be exact. Short shorts. And her ass looked amazing in yellow. Yep. She should’ve definitely added more color to her wardrobe.
“What are we all looking at?” James asked, following our gaze. “Holy crap!” he remarked.
“I know, right?” Eric said.
“How the hell did my parents let Leah leave the house in those short-ass shorts! I’m going to kick her ass!” he hollered, obviously not noticing the same thing us other guys were taking in.
The girls began walking our way, and Marcus patted me on the back. “You might want to close your mouth before she sees you gawking at her like a damn predator.”
I shut my mouth, but not before telling him to piss off.
“Hey, you guys.” Leah beamed brightly. “What’s going on?”
“What’s going on is you’re going home to put on a sweater and sweatpants,” James ordered his little sister.
Leah rolled her eyes. “It’s like eighty degrees out, James. I’m not covering up. Besides, I’m over eighteen. I can wear what I want. Just like Hazel,” she said, shifting the conversation over to the quiet girl who I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off. “Doesn’t she look great tonight?” Leah smiled.
“She does,” I commented, eyeing Hazel up and down. I watched as her cheeks blushed from my stare dancing over her, but I couldn’t help it. She looked fucking amazing.
“Come on, guys. Let’s go get some drinks. While we’re doing that, how about Ian and Hazel go grab us one of the bonfires to sit around,” Leah said, sounding exactly like the matchmaker I needed in my life.
I wanted alone time with Hazel, but not the kind that was spent sitting next to a fire. I wanted to take her back to our place and introduce her to the hardness in my pants.
I gave Hazel a half grin and tried my best to stop thinking about how I wanted to own her body. As everyone began walking away, I nodded toward her. “You look beautiful.”
She bit her bottom lip, and fuck me sideways, I wanted to bite it too. “Are you doing that compliment thing to make me feel uncomfortable?”
“Not this time. Just speaking the truth.”
She smiled, and I loved it. “Let’s go get some seats.”
The rest of the night was spent with me gazing over at Hazel every chance I got. I didn’t know why, but for some reason I felt like a damn fool around her. I tripped over my words and came off corny as ever without even trying. That woman drove me crazy, and I didn’t think she even knew it.
Luckily, the band didn’t give me too much alone time with Hazel to keep embarrassing myself. We sat around the bonfire taking in the smell of summer nights in Eres.
The boys had grown pretty attached to Hazel over the past few weeks, looking at her as if she were the mother hen of the band. They’d begun calling her “momanager” not too long ago. The Kris Jenner of the Wreckage.
Every now and again, Hazel would shout out, “You’re doing great, sweeties,” and the guys would blush like damn fools at getting her approval.
Hazel had that characteristic to her: she took care of people. She always went out of her way to help Grams whenever she needed it and to go above and beyond at the ranch for Big Paw. She worked harder than most of Big Paw’s employees. Once I asked her why she pushed herself so hard, and she replied, “I want to work hard for all your grandparents have given me.”
We spent the night around the bonfire, trading embarrassing stories about each other to see who could make Hazel laugh the most.
“I shit you not,” Marcus exclaimed, taking a swig straight from the bottle of vodka, “Ian set Big Paw’s hand-carved mailbox on fire while stoned, and when he realized Big Paw’s prized possession was going to go up in smoke, he pulled out his junk and tried to pee out the flames.”
Hazel was cracking up in laughter at the story.
“Luckily he’d downed a ton of soda, because I swear it seemed like he peed for ten minutes straight before realizing it wasn’t gonna be enough to stomp out the fire. I swear, he waved his little Peter Pan back and forth like he was in search of Tinker Bell.” Marcus chuckled.
“And Big Paw still doesn’t know it was Ian?” Hazel asked.
“Nope. We made a pact to never tell. The Wreckage has a handful of secrets we aren’t allowed to tell people,” Eric stated, holding his camera in his hands. He looked down at it and turned it off. “I mean, I’ll edit those secrets out.”
Hazel laughed. “You always have a camera in your hand, don’t you?”
Eric nodded. “If I didn’t play the keys, I’d probably be a videographer or in the computer world in some way, shape, or form. I’m lucky I get to do all this stuff a
nd play the keys, though. Just think, with all the footage I have, I’ll be able to make a badass documentary for us down the line someday that Netflix will pick up. You see, with the way I do my recordings—”
“Stop talking nerdy to her, Eric! You’re going to bore her to death,” Marcus commented, taking a swig of vodka.
“Oh, no way! It’s not boring. I think it’s interesting,” Hazel said, staring at Eric with the biggest smile. I wished she were looking at me with that smile. With those lips, with that tongue that sometimes grazed against her bottom lip.
Fuck, those lips. I wondered what they tasted like.
I shook my head and tried to control the hard-on that was determined to grow with the thought of Hazel’s lips. I focused more on how happy and relaxed she seemed that night at the bonfire. Most of the time, Hazel was overthinking life. She wrote letters to her mother every week and never received a reply. She overthought how Jean was doing in prison and counted down the days until the baby would be born.
“She’s probably around six months by now,” she told me the other day. “In a few months, I’ll no longer be an only child. Isn’t that crazy?”
The heaviness of her words saddened me, because guilt dripped in her tones. So whenever she found a way to laugh, like she was doing that night, I took it in. She was so beautiful when she smiled, and I didn’t think she had a clue how hard it was for me to not want to be around her every single second.
“Holy shit!” Marcus exclaimed, hopping up from the folding chair he was sitting in. His cell phone was glued to his hand as he stared wide eyed with shock. “Holy shit!” he repeated, making everyone turn his way.
“What is it?” James asked.
“Max. Fucking. Rider. Just. Emailed. Us,” Marcus said, making James, Eric, and me sit straight up.
“Holy shit!” we shouted in unison, leaping to our feet.
Hazel sat still with a confused look. “Who is Max Rider?”
“It’s not Max Rider,” Marcus remarked. “It’s Max Fucking Rider. The manager known for taking everyday, average artists and making them megasuperstars. He’s like the godfather of music. He makes masterpieces.”
“What did he say?” I barked as my chest tightened.
Marcus cleared his throat and began reading the email. “‘Max here. The Wreckage, huh? Neat name. Came across and listened to some of your tracks on YouTube and Instagram. I think you got something. I know it’s short notice, but I got some free time in my schedule next Friday in Los Angeles to meet up. Can you bring some new stuff to listen to? I cc’d my assistant on the email. She’ll pass on more information on location, date, and time. Chat soon. MR.’”
“Oh my God, I just creamed my fucking pants,” Marcus sighed, holding his hand over his heart as if he were going to have a heart attack.
“Holy crap,” James coughed out, pacing back and forth. “We have to go! This is it. This is the kind of shit that makes and breaks people. We’re going to LA next week come hell or high water.”
Hazel celebrated just as wildly as us guys, because she could tell how much it meant to us.
“This is it,” I said to her, pulling her into a hug. Pulling everyone into a hug. “This is the moment that changes our lives.”
We proceeded to get shit faced and danced the night away as we slammed on the drums and howled at the moon like the freaking animals we were that night. After the guys headed home, Hazel and I stumbled into the house, and she kept singing the lyrics to my song, swaying side to side. Hazel Stone made the cutest drunk girl in the world, and when my lyrics fell from her tongue?
Instant fucking man boner.
As she stepped into her bedroom, I followed, not even walking to my own room to change.
She quickly turned toward the door. “Hey, Ian,” she hollered, not knowing I was steps behind her. She crashed into my body and giggled, covering her mouth. “Sorry. Didn’t know you were so close.”
I moved closer.
She didn’t step away.
“Sorry,” I murmured.
“Sorry,” she replied.
We didn’t even know what we were apologizing for. Maybe for our proximity? Maybe for our drunkenness?
Maybe for our hearts?
Shit, I wanted to kiss her so bad my chest physically hurt. I was drunk and high on life, and Hazel Stone was the most beautiful human in the whole goddamn world, and I wanted her lips against mine.
She placed her hands on my chest and looked up to meet my stare.
Did she feel it?
Did she feel my heart beat and how it was beating for her?
“I’m so proud of you, Ian. You deserve this. You deserve all of this.”
“I want to take our songs,” I confessed. “I want to play for him the songs you helped me write.” Over the past couple of months, Hazel had helped me create dozens of songs. Being around her, working with her, came so naturally. To the outside world, the two of us probably seemed like polar opposites, but to me?
To me, we made perfect sense.
She inspired me in ways I’d never been inspired. She pushed me to create songs in a way I’d never considered. She challenged me; she coached me. She was my muse. She was the music.
She was . . . closer.
She was so much closer than she had been mere seconds ago. Had I pulled her toward me? Had she moved in on her own? How did my hands land against her lower back? Why didn’t she try to pull them away?
“Confession: I want you,” I breathed out, knowing that rejection was a possibility, but I felt drunk and brave enough to not care.
“Confession”—she swallowed hard—“I want you too.”
“You’re drunk,” I whispered.
“I am,” she replied. “You’re drunk too.”
“I am.”
Her stare shifted away from my eyes to my lips and then back up again. “Play those songs. They’re yours, after all.”
“They’re ours,” I disagreed. “They are ours.”
“But it’s your future. I’d give you every lyric that lives inside of me to make your dreams come true, Ian.”
My stare shifted away from her eyes to her lips. My stare stayed there. “The only dreams I have right now involve kissing you, Haze. I want to lie with you in that bed and kiss you until the sun comes up in the morning.”
“Sometimes I wake up and you’re still sleeping, and I think about leaning in. I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything, Ian, and that scares me. I never wanted to kiss someone as bad as I want to kiss you.”
“Me too,” I confessed. “And well, now we’re drunk and saying shit we probably wouldn’t normally say, so there’s that.”
She smiled and I loved it. Fuck, did I love it. If the only thing I could ever stare at again was Hazel Stone’s smile, I’d be the luckiest bastard alive.
“Maybe we should sleep,” she said, nodding toward her bed. “Sober up a little and see how we feel about things in the morning.”
“Yeah, okay.”
I slipped off my shirt and pants, staying only in my boxers. I turned my back to her as she slipped into her pajamas.
We climbed into bed, and our bodies melted together as if we were meant to be fused as one. I kissed her forehead without much thought. I let my lips linger there too. My lips against her skin, swallowing in the small taste I was being allowed.
Her eyes closed as she moved in closer, twisting our legs together. Our foreheads rested against one another, and her small breaths brushed against my skin.
“You’re my best friend,” she said softly, her words piercing me. “I know your bandmates are yours, and I know I can’t take their spots, but to me, you’re it, Ian. You’re my best friend. I’ve never had a best friend before, but I want you to know that it’s you, and I’m so proud of you for your dreams coming true. This is just the beginning. You’re going to be huge someday. You’re going to be a star.”
“You are the stars,” I whispered, our mouths so close that if I moved an inch in, we’d be p
ressed against one another’s lips. Fuck, that was corny, and fuck, I didn’t even care. Hazel made me want to be the corniest asshole alive. “You’ve been my light, my muse, my inspiration. Haze . . . you are every star in the goddamn sky. You are my galaxy.”
Her lips fell into a smile, and her eyes closed as she moved a bit closer to me and rested her head against my chest. As I inhaled and exhaled, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I felt so alive with her in my arms. My heart, which I’d thought had died the day my parents had walked out on me, was fully functioning once more, all because of a girl who wasn’t afraid to push me enough times to wake me back up.
We fell asleep that night, drunkenly entangled in a sea of wishes and hopes and dreams.
What if Hazel and I were meant to be together? What if our puzzle pieces fit seamlessly together? What if everything we’d ever wanted was right there on the other side of our fear?
“Ian. Ian, wake up,” Hazel whispered, nudging me a little.
I squinted my eyes a bit and noticed a small pool of light coming in from her window. My head ached thanks to the large amount of drinking that had taken place. “What’s up?” I grumbled, still tired. I looked toward the window, and the sun wasn’t completely up.
Then I turned to Hazel, who was looking at me.
“Are you still drunk?” she asked, biting her bottom lip.
“No. Just a bit of a hammering headache.”
“Yeah, me too.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Did you wake me to tell me you had a headache? Want me to get you ibuprofen?” I started to stand up, and she placed a hand on my arm.
“No. I woke you because, even though I’m now sober, I still want to kiss you.”
That got me to sit up a bit more. A sleepy, goofy smile probably appeared on my lips. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. What about you?”
“Haze . . . I’ve been wanting to kiss you for weeks now. With alcohol, without alcohol, shit . . . I just want to—”
She cut me off by leaning in toward me and placing her mouth against mine. Sure, she began the kiss, but I took the lead from there. My hands wrapped around her body, and I pulled her closer to me as I kissed her hard with lust, with want, with need. I parted her lips with my tongue and slid inside of her mouth, tasting every part of her and hoping I wasn’t in some fucked-up dream, because I needed this to be my reality.
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