by Amie Knight
“Oh, Winnie,” I sang out, walking through a maze of lockers and men and a lot of asses. Really freaking nice asses. I enjoyed the view while I passed by and even gave one really cute guy with a hell of an ass a small wave and wink. “Winnnieeeeeee,” I said again, louder this time, taking a play out of Pops’s book.
“Fuck.” I heard him mutter and part of me wanted to smile. I hoped I embarrassed the shit out of him like he’d embarrassed the shit out of me. I’d let him hear me come, for fuck’s sake. Turnabout was fair play.
A big black guy with muscles that looked to be the size of mountains stepped in front of me, nothing but a towel around his waist. “Who you looking for, baby?”
I mean, I was sure if I tried hard enough I could be looking for him. He looked me up and down so hard, so very good, that I wondered if he’d possibly impregnated me. I felt one corner of my lips tip up. He was definitely too young for me, but that didn’t stop me from looking.
“She’s looking for me, Phillips.” I heard Oliver’s deep voice from behind sexy muscle man.
Phillips turned around, looked at Ollie, and laughed before giving me a once-over again. “That’s a shame.” He turned back to Oliver. “You Winnie, brother?”
Oliver looked like he wanted to die and I reveled in it. He kind of deserved this moment. “Yep, that’s me.”
Phillips chuckled low and Lord have mercy it made him even better looking. “That’s even more a shame, man. You might want to tell your girl to keep that under wraps, Knox.”
“I’m not his—” I started, but Oliver reached around Phillips and pulled me toward a quiet corner of the locker room.
“You shouldn’t be in here, Hazel,” he whisper-yelled, all frazzled and mad. His state pleased me. The bastard deserved it.
I raised my eyebrows to the highest of the highs and pressed my right hand to my chest dramatically. “Well, look at us. Aren’t we quite a pair? Being places we shouldn’t be and doing things we shouldn’t be doing.”
Diverting his gaze, he let out a long breath. “You have to leave. We can talk about this later.”
Shaking my head, I said, “No, Oliver. We’re talking about this now.”
“Come on, Hazel. Now is not a good time. You aren’t even supposed to be in here. Coach will lose his mind if he finds out.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “You should be more concerned about me losing my mind,” I deadpanned.
“Look, I know I fucked up and I’m sorry. I’ll come by your house after I leave here and we’ll talk.”
I looked up at Oliver, feeling as vulnerable as I ever felt in my life. I couldn’t believe I let this boy get me like this. I was losing my touch. He was making me soft. It was scaring the hell out of me. I didn’t like the butterflies in my belly. And not the good ones. The scared ones. I didn’t like how insecure I was being. “You promise?”
I wanted to snatch those words right out of the air and shove them back into my mouth so quickly that no one would ever realize they were spoken. But it was too late, Oliver was already looking at me like a kicked puppy.
“I swear. I’ll head over as soon as I shower.”
“Don’t stand me up, Winnie.” And there I went again. Making it sound like I was begging him to show up for a date we weren’t even having. What was happening to me? This feeling terrified me. I couldn’t need him. That needed to stop this instant. I didn’t need him. Because what would happen when he was inevitably done with me?
With sweet more green than brown eyes, he said with emotion, “I’d never, Hazel. Not in a million years.”
I drove over to Hazel’s place, terrified out of my mind. I’d had a full day to try and figure out what the hell I was going to do, but it still hadn’t been enough time.
What a dumb ass I’d been last night. I’d been having so much fun in that game. For just a few minutes I’d forgotten I was Gray and it had proved to be disastrous. I was stupid. I’d just slipped up. And as soon as I sent the DM, I’d stared at the screen in shock, wishing I were smart enough to figure out how to get those words back. But I couldn’t. It was done and I’d had no idea what to do.
Fuck. And then she’d shown up at the field. And my already bad practice went straight to hell. Then, my luck went even further south when the football groupies cornered me coming off the field. Maybe I should have been happy that Hazel looked like she wanted to light them all on fire, but she also looked like she wanted to light me on fire, so there was no happiness. I’d run to the locker room trying to buy just a few more moments. I’d shower and come up with a way to say everything I needed to say. I wanted to figure out a way to tell her…the truth. It was time. I needed to come clean. I loved her. I had since I remembered. And that I was a virgin. It was a lot. I was pumping myself up in the locker room when the crazy woman had shown up, yelling my nickname. After I’d snatched her away from womanizing Phillips, I’d really had a chance to look at her. And what I saw scared me. It reminded me of that night all those years ago in my bedroom when I’d found the cuts on her arm. She’d looked raw and exposed and when she’d demanded that I not stand her up, it didn’t seem like a demand at all. More like a plea and it almost broke my damn heart.
I pulled into Hazel’s house and turned my lights off, sitting there in the driveway, still trying to figure out how this was all going to go down. I banged my head on the steering wheel a couple of times and stared at the window that I knew belonged to her. It had just gotten dark out, but her window was lit up. I wondered if she was in there on the game or if she was in there waiting to lay into me.
“You gonna sit there all night and stare at her window or are you gonna have some balls and go on in there?”
I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sound of Hazel’s pops so freaking close. And then I nearly died again when I saw him right at the driver’s side window, his face almost pressed there.
“Hey, Mr. Price,” I said, waving through the window and hoping he didn’t think I was a creeper for sitting in his driveway and staring at his granddaughter’s window.
He opened the car door for me. “Why don’t you get out and stay awhile, Ollie?”
I knew he was being a smartass, but I still nodded. “Yes, sir. I need to talk to Hazel anyway.”
“I figured as much, since you were staring at her window like some lovesick fool.”
I ran a hand through my hair nervously. I guess I had been doing that. But being caught was fucking embarrassing. And it made me feel even worse about what I’d done to Hazel. I felt sick to my stomach as I climbed out of my car.
“Come on in.” Pops waved me toward the front door and I followed him. “You don’t look too happy to be here today, Oliver. Something happen with you and Hazel?”
Hazel’s grandfather had always been perceptive. When Scarlett and I would try to sneak Hazel out in high school or bring her home after curfew, he’d always caught us. He’d be waiting up in the dark, just sitting there in the living room, and scare the shit out of us.
He walked me through the living room and straight to the kitchen at the back of the house where Ms. Caro was looking to be baking something.
“Hey, Ms. Caro, how you doing tonight?” I leaned over to give her a hug and she grabbed my face in both hands and kissed the cheeks on each side of my face. I was pretty sure she was leaving a red lipstick stain behind, but I didn’t dare rub it off.
“I’m good, Oliver. Are you here to see Hazel?” Her eyes widened. “Oh, maybe you can cheer her up. She’s in a terrible mood. That’s why I decided to bake her some brownies.”
Fuck. This was not good. It was the opposite of good and the more I stood in Hazel’s kitchen with her family, the more I thought of how I should have taken my ass home tonight instead of coming here. But I couldn’t do that. Not after seeing how fragile she’d been this evening in the locker room.
“Come with me.” Pops ushered me to the back door and onto his deck in the back. I noticed immediately the half-built greenhouse in the yard. “
Hazel and I are working on that.”
It looked like they were making good progress on it and I wasn’t the least bit surprised. Hazel and Pops always had a project going on. They weren’t the type of people who sat around on their days off. Hazel may have played video games into the wee hours of the morning, but when she and Pops spent time together, they always did something physical.
She once told me that she was keeping her pops young so she could have him for longer. When she said stuff like that it made me love her even more. And now I’d fucked up so badly, I didn’t even know if she was ever going to speak to me again after we talked tonight. I felt sick.
I nodded toward the greenhouse. “What are you going to grow in there when it’s done?”
Shrugging, he said, “I haven’t decided yet. I just thought this would be a fun project for me and my girl.”
I noticed a sparkle in his eye when he spoke about Hazel—his girl. She’d been so much happier since she’d been with him. I’d noticed it almost immediately and I knew that Hazel loved her pops more than anything in the world. She’d tell anyone who would listen about her love for him.
He leaned against the deck railing, looking out over his dark yard, the porch light on his face. “Hazel doesn’t like to sit still. She looks to do things to keep her busy so she doesn’t think too much. She’s an overthinker, ya know?”
The seriousness of his tone was reflected in his gray, blue eyes and I understood that he was trying to teach me something here and I damn sure knew I better paid attention.
“That’s how I kept her sane when I first got custody of her. I decided we’d build a shed for me to put my yard tools in.” He pointed to the dark back corner of the yard where a small little white storage room stood. “That one right there. We worked for two weeks on it nonstop when she wasn’t at school. It kept her from worrying about her parents. It kept her mind on something. So whenever I see that Hazel is thinking too much, I make sure to get a project for us to do. It keeps her healthy up here.” He pushed an index finger into the side of his head.
I nodded, understanding. Completely getting it. I knew Hazel almost as well as her pops did.
“You’re a good boy, Ollie. I see how you care for my Hazey. She’s special, you know? And special girls have to be taken care of. Their hearts are bigger, which make them all the more delicate. Hazel’s a lot like that greenhouse there. It’s going to be sturdy and strong. It’s going to withstand the wind and the rain and all the storms that come through here all the time. But the plants on the inside, they’re fragile, Oliver. One small gust of wind could send them toppling over. I know how strong my girl seems. She’s as tough as nails on the outside, boy, but one small blow and it could send her into a tailspin. And I don’t want that. You understand me?”
“I know, Mr. Price. Hazel’s always been special to me.”
Pops nodded. “I can tell, Ollie. I’ve always liked you because of that. Don’t let me down.” He patted my back and walked back into the house and because I didn’t know what else to do, I followed him.
“Hazelllllllll!” he yelled like a madman and once again he about scared the shit out of me.
Ms. Caro handed me a plate of brownies as Hazel entered the room.
“Pops, what have I told you about screaming for me like that? If you need me, come and get—” Her voice cut off as she saw me standing there with a plate of brownies in my hand. “Hey, Ollie.” Her face made the transformation from mad to sad and I thought of Pops’s words out on the deck and felt even more like shit.
“Can we talk?” I asked.
“Yeah, let’s go to my room.”
I turned around to set the brownies on the counter when Ms. Caro pushed them back into my hands. “Take the brownies. She needs them.”
So I followed Hazel to her room with a plate of brownies in my hand and a shit ton of trepidation in my heart.
Once we arrived she went on in, but I felt different about her room now. Anytime I’d been here before, I’d been Winnie, one of her best friends and someone she could trust. I didn’t feel like I even deserved to step inside. I felt ashamed.
“Come on in, Oliver.”
I walked in slowly, looking at her computer on her desk in the corner, feeling nauseous. I’d really fucked up everything.
Hazel eyed the plate of brownies in my hand. “Amor send you up with those?”
“Mmmhmm,” I said, holding the plate out.
She took the plate and set it on her dresser before grabbing the biggest brownie and sitting on her bed. “This is why I love her. Come on. Sit down.” She motioned to the bed beside her and took a huge bite of brownie.
I sucked in a big breath, wishing it were courage instead of oxygen, and sat down. “Listen, Hazel.”
“I didn’t think you were going to come. You took so long,” she interrupted, her eyes almost dead looking.
“Well, I came right over from practice, but Pops took me out back to show me the greenhouse y’all are working on.”
“Oh.” She picked at some lint on her sweatshirt. “He didn’t put you to work, did he?”
I gave a low chuckle. “Nah. Not today, anyway.” There had been a few times, however, that I’d shown up to hang with Hazel that the man had put me to work. Jack Price loved a damn project and he loved young, healthy people to help him carry them out. Ya know, while he stood there and bossed everyone around.
I tried to start up the conversation that I knew we needed to have again. “Hazel, I—”
She threw her hand up in front of my face. “Just stop, Oliver. Let’s just pretend this didn’t happen.”
I blinked slowly. “What?” I’d had a whole thing prepared to say. Like I didn’t exactly know how it was going to come out. But I was going to tell her I’d loved her my whole life and that was the only reason why I’d done what I’d done. I was ready to ask her to finally give us a chance. And she was telling me to just forget it happened. How could she just forget what Gray and Hazeyeyes had? How could she forget what we had? And she did all of this without one ounce of emotion. Whatever I’d seen at the stadium was long gone now. There was no insecurity, but there was also no warmth. She was ice.
She chewed a bit of brownie and then said, “Look. I don’t know why you did it. Maybe it was to have a little fun at my expense, but whatever it was, I don’t want things to change between us.” She reached her hand out and grabbed mine, holding it. “I forgive you. I don’t want us to change, Winnie. You mean so much to me.”
Did I really? Because it felt like in that moment I was speaking to some kind of weird robot of my Hazel.
She didn’t want to talk about it all? To know why I’d done it? She didn’t want to yell at me? What the fuck was going on?
I studied her face, her eyes, the parts of her I knew like the back of my hand and I saw it there, in the depth of her brown orbs. I had to look hard, but I could see it. She was scared. And then I remembered how she’d looked when she’d practically begged me to not stand her up. How she’d reminded me of Hazel from years ago. And then I thought of what Pops had said to me out on the back porch. About protecting Hazel. About being there for her.
And even though it was past time to tell Hazel how I felt, and even though I’d been ready to confess the whys of everything to her, I decided to do what she needed and not what I wanted. Because when you loved someone that’s what you fucking did. You put them before you at all costs. And this time it felt like it cost me everything.
Squeezing her hand back, I said, “Okay, brat. Anything you want.”
The fear just below the surface of her eyes eased and I knew I’d made the right decision.
“Really?”
Nodding, I demanded, “Now give me one of those brownies.”
She leaned over and grabbed the plate and passed it over to me. “I just want things to go back to normal. I don’t want you to ignore me. I want us to always be friends, Winnie.”
I took the plate of brownies, but my appetite was sudden
ly nonexistent. She wasn’t ready. She may never be. Maybe this whole thing where I imagined us together was in my mind. She wanted to be just friends.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said what I thought she wanted to hear. “Yeah, Hazel. Let’s just go back to normal.”
Normal was fucking bullshit and I hated it.
Things were definitely not back to normal between Winnie and me. Oliver was a damn lying face liar. It had been a couple of weeks since our talk on my bed that night and it seemed like ever since then Oliver was avoiding me. I couldn’t be entirely sure since he was in the middle of a busy football season. And Scarlett had been busy, too, since school had started back, so I hadn’t seen them tons. But it seemed like whenever I did manage to go over to their apartment for dinner, he wasn’t there.
And then one night I’d met Scarlett for pizza after she and Oliver had taken a ballroom dance class and the boy had hightailed it out of there as soon as I’d arrived with the claim that he’d had to help a friend move a TV. Maybe I’d teased him a little too much when I’d seen him that night. I had alluded to playing video games with him and flirted a bit. But that was what we did. Teased each other mercilessly. But maybe too much had changed for that now. It was sad. He had to move a freaking TV. Yeah, right. I found that incredibly hard to believe since I knew that Oliver didn’t have a ton of friends. Scarlett and I were pretty much the center of his universe. Until now, that is. Seemed like now, he was trying to drop me like a bad habit.
I couldn’t believe it. Oliver had never let me down, really. I’d even let him off the hook with the whole Gray thing. I mean, really, I’d let myself off of the hook. I hadn’t wanted to deal with the fallout of it all. Besides, I’d known what Oliver was going to say that night on my bed and I just wasn’t ready for it. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready for it.
I’d just finished my shift at Level Up and was feeling bad for myself when I got a text.
Scarlett: SOS at The Mills.
I had no idea what she was talking about. We’d never sent an SOS before in our lives. And while I was a little confused, I did know what The Mills was. It was a coffee shop/bar in downtown Summerville only a couple of blocks from where I worked.