by Helena Maeve
“Even—you know?” Sadie canted her head speculatively, the kind of expression that said more than words ever could.
Hazel felt her cheeks grow hot but nodded anyway. “Even that.” Especially that.
Sadie was not so easily convinced. “I’m worried about you. I went by your place last night and you didn’t answer.”
“Oh. I wasn’t there.”
It wasn’t the first night she’d taken the car out and driven around aimlessly. It probably wouldn’t be the last. She understood, now, why Sadie relied on the open road to make sense of the hubbub inside her skull. There was something about the streets at night—sodium lights streaking the Volvo as she drove, potholes and puddles lending a bass line to whatever soundtrack happened to be playing on the radio—that soothed.
She had driven up Mulholland last night and parked on that stretch of dirt where teenagers went to make out. Soda cans and broken beer bottles crunched under the tires. The city glimmered, sprawling in the valley at her feet.
She’d been tempted to ask Ward to join her. She hadn’t.
“No kidding.” Sadie scraped her Converse back and forth across the bare cement floor. “I know you’re all grown-up and supposed to know what you’re doing with your life—”
“I do,” Hazel interjected, frowning. She wasn’t in the mood for that conversation. She didn’t have the time, either, even if Dylan was running late.
Undaunted, Sadie steamrolled her objection. “Think about the chances you’re taking. These guys… They’re in a different league. Tesla and BMW league. You and I barely share a twenty-year-old junk heap.” There was something poignant and earnest in her voice—the same kind of something that Hazel usually injected into her pleas. Don’t drive so fast. Don’t take so many chances. That alone kept Hazel from shutting her down. Sadie scowled at the floor. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“Trust me,” Hazel implored. “I won’t.”
“Do you ever believe me, when I say that?”
It was a good point, but it rankled all the same. “If I wanted to be a bitch, I’d say your track record and mine are a little different…”
“If?” Sadie sneered. “Just say it. You think I should trust you because you’re a goody-goody.”
“Okay. Yes.”
They stared at each other for a long beat. Eventually, Sadie nodded. The neon overhead flickered too much to guess whether she was conceding defeat or simply retiring the topic.
“Did you see the invites for the reunion?”
Hazel hummed a note of acquiescence. “Rhonda sent one.”
“Nice of her.” Sadie’s tone suggested the opposite.
“Are you thinking of going?” Unlike Hazel, Sadie had pushed through her English degree and come out swinging.
It wasn’t her fault that the economy had gone to shit by the time she graduated.
Sadie hitched her shoulders. “It’s ten years… I’m a little curious to see how everyone made out.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“We could go together,” Sadie started to say, her face falling before she made it halfway through the suggestion. “Oh. Do you think he’ll—?”
Hazel pinched her lips. “Probably.”
“All the more reason to go. We could key his car. Spill punch on his date…” Sadie smiled ruefully. “Or not. I still think you’re making a mistake with Dylan. My two cents.” She held up her hands when Hazel blew out a long, frustrated breath. “I’m going, I’m going.” She left the same way she’d come—silently, without a word of apology or goodbye.
We don’t all land on our feet, Sadie. Thanks for reminding me I have shit luck.
Hazel yanked the elastic scrunchie free of her ponytail and shook out her curls with a hand. Her hair crinkled around her shoulders in unruly ringlets and fluttered in the faint breeze as soon as she set foot into the grease-scented heat of the diner.
She found Ward at the counter, poring over his cell.
“Hey.” She approached cautiously, like a snake charmer with an unknown specimen. It wasn’t just Ward she felt she didn’t know here. After their last tête-à-tête, they hadn’t really had a chance to go over the rules of engagement in a public place. Worse, she could feel Sadie watching them out of the corner of her eye. “Ready?”
Ward slid off the bar stool. “You look lovely. Dylan is a lucky man.”
He turned for the door before Hazel could puzzle out the acerbic edge in his voice. He didn’t quite storm out, but his strides were long and fast. Coming up on the far side of an eight hour shift, Hazel could barely keep up.
“I thought you told Sadie we had time?” she called after him.
“There may be traffic.”
“Or there may not. Ward, what the hell?” She caught him by the sleeve of his linen suit, her grip tight, leaving him a choice between hundreds of dollars’ worth of sartorial damage or turning to face her.
He picked the latter, twisting around. By the end of that quarter turn, he was once again polished and remote. His expression was set, mask firmly in place—not unlike that night at the club, before regret had gotten the better of him. Before he’d come to Hazel’s rescue when she’d called him.
She ignored his scowl. “What’s up?”
“Why should anything be up?” he shot back archly.
“Really? We’re going to do this now?” Hazel told herself to bite her tongue, to think before she spoke. It was useless, in the end. “You’re still sore about what happened? I thought we settled things…”
Ward scoffed.
Fine, if that’s the game you want to play.
“Is it the dress?” Hazel wheedled. It was borderline see-through and white, and Hazel had been self-conscious since she’d bought it. The thought of all those ‘how to dress right for your body type’ magazine articles being right filled her with anxiety. But that wasn’t what drove her to this line of questioning. “If you’re ashamed to be seen with me…”
“Where did you get that dumb idea?”
“You took one look at me in there and said Dylan was a lucky guy. Sounds like you’re passing me off to him like a collection plate.” Like you did at the loft, with that bullshit about plying me with liquor so I’d sleep with you. “Is that it?”
She didn’t think so, but if the seclusion of the past few days had confirmed anything at all, it was that Ward operated best in the narrow wedges between guilt and insecurity.
The only way to get anything real out of him was to press where it hurt.
Ward rolled his shoulders as though brushing her off. “We’re going to be late.”
Hazel weighed the possibility of digging her heels in and telling Ward they weren’t going anywhere until they settled this. She thought better of it. There was a good chance that Ward would just head to the airport on his own. He didn’t need Hazel to tag along.
“Fine,” she sighed. “Lead the way.” So much for trying to make it work.
* * * *
LAX spread out before them in a tangle of concrete. Alphabetized lanes that Hazel vaguely recalled from her last jaunt to Missouri assumed they knew where they were going.
Ward seemed nonplussed by the labyrinthine layout. He checked his phone periodically, flight tracker refreshing for news of Dylan’s impending arrival, but mostly he seemed to rely on gut instinct and prior experience.
Perhaps he’d driven Dylan to and from the airport before. Perhaps he often flew out of California himself. Either was possible, but Hazel didn’t ask and Ward showed no inclination to make conversation with her.
They found a parking spot in silence and marched, also in silence, into the terminal. Hazel thought she’d just about hit the limit of what she was willing to put up with when Ward jerked a finger toward the escalators. “Would you like some coffee?” He was still brooding, but good manners compelled him to ask.
Hazel had never thought she’d be grateful to the one percent for anything, but drilling civility into their offspring came in handy
.
“Yeah, sure.”
They found a coffee shop on the arrivals level. Ward huffed and puffed a little because it wasn’t a Starbucks.
“I don’t mind,” Hazel told him, meaning every word. She didn’t tell him that Starbucks was her rainy day treat, her break-up cure. He’d probably think it was pathetic. “Does Dylan know?” she asked as they stood in line to get their coffees.
“That you came, too? No, I thought you wanted it to be a surprise…”
“I did. I do.” Hazel spared a glance to the press of bodies, men and women checking monitors and scoring furrows into the buffed, utilitarian floors with their pacing. “I’m not talking about the welcome committee.”
Ward was too sharp-witted not to catch her drift. “Ah.” A wrinkle deepened the crease between his eyebrows. He glanced away. “No. He still doesn’t. I wasn’t sure that you wanted him to hear it from me.”
“I thought you two were best friends.” I thought you were planning on throwing yourself on that sword, like a righteous asshole.
“We are.”
“And you won’t tell him there’s a good chance the woman he’s dating is a slut?” Hazel had been called worse things long before she started working at Marco’s. Drunks and entitled clientele came with the territory in her profession.
Providentially, Marco didn’t put up with that kind of talk and he was pretty good about evicting troublemakers. Along the way, both Hazel and Sadie had developed thick skins. They came in handy sometimes—like now, as Ward sneered at her over the bridge of his nose.
“Still trying to make me into the villain?”
“I don’t know what fairy tales your mom read to you, but the princess doesn’t usually screw the villain while the prince is away…” Meeting his birth parents.
Somehow Dylan’s situation didn’t lend itself to flippancy. Hazel still wasn’t sure she was meant to know the details. She boxed the thought, made a ribbon of her reservations and tied them around it.
“Tell me that what happened between us didn’t mean anything and I’ll drop it for good,” she contended. “You can tell Dylan whatever trumped-up version of the truth you like. I won’t get in the way of your self-flagellation.”
Ward met her gaze, cool and composed, as though the blood in his veins was so blue it had turned to ice.
“It didn’t mean a thing,” he said, perfectly level and controlled. Nothing at all like he’d sounded when he lay curled around Hazel, both of them sticky with sweat, his arm flung carelessly around her waist and his lips tracing patterns from her nape to the jut of her shoulder.
Hazel smiled, too, just as measured, and let her Midwestern brogue stretch two syllables out into a drawling third. “Bullshit.”
* * * *
When Dylan emerged through the arrivals gate with the other passengers, Hazel’s heart briefly forgot how to operate. The noise level in the hall went from quiet buzzing to nervous hum as friends and families and booked-in-advance chauffeurs waiting to pick up their quarry were suddenly flung into a flurry of activity. Hazel had no trouble hearing each thump of her pulse as it whooshed in her ears.
It got even louder when Dylan glanced their way.
His gaze found Ward, first, and his features relaxed into a smile at once relieved and exhausted. Then he saw Hazel. He stopped smiling.
Not knowing what to do, Hazel raised her hand in a nominal wave. She had the horrible feeling that if he could, Dylan would have sooner turned back than advance the rest of the way to meet them.
The last time they spoke, Dylan had asked her to take his absence to consider what she wanted—if anything—from a relationship with him. But that was two weeks ago. Men like Dylan could live entire lifetimes in two weeks.
“I almost thought they’d keep you,” Ward taunted in lieu of greeting. “Well, I hoped.”
“So you could steal my girl?” Dylan’s eyes darted from Ward to Hazel and back, corners crinkling in amusement.
Hazel winced. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves…”
She hesitated for only an instant before rising on tiptoe and pressing a chaste kiss to Dylan’s cheek. The thirteen hour flight had done nothing to coarsen the baby-smooth texture of his skin. He even smelled good. Hazel suppressed another flood of insecurity for the white peasant dress and the unbound hair. She probably looked like she’d just emerged from Woodstock—and that was fine. That was okay. She wasn’t going to change herself for any guy, let alone two.
“I didn’t expect to see you,” Dylan said. “Here, I mean. I was planning on calling you tonight, of course—”
“Well, now you don’t have to.” Ward stuck his hands in his pockets. “Shall we? I know I have money to throw around, but it irks me to pay extra for parking.” He set out without waiting for confirmation. Seeing as he had the car keys, Hazel judged it wise to follow.
She didn’t expect to feel Dylan slot his hand into hers as they navigated the crowded hall, much less have him lean in to ask, “What’s gotten into him?”
Ward’s shoulders were a perfect horizontal line. His gray suit jacket fluttered unbuttoned against his sides. He was trying very hard to be nonchalant about Dylan’s return. A week ago, Hazel might have believed it. She was starting to get wise to the many faces of Ward Parrish, so she felt confident when she turned to Dylan with the answer.
“He’s being his usual sunny self. What else?”
Dylan rewarded her with a smile, but it was soft and uncertain. The dynamic between him and Ward was completely unlike anything that Hazel had witnessed before. Ward was meant to be the master of ceremonies and Dylan his loyal but long-suffering aide. Not the other way around.
Gloom hung over them until it finally crystallized as they crowded around the BMW.
Ward popped the trunk as Dylan collapsed his trolley suitcase and prepared to slot it in.
“So Ward and I had sex,” Hazel blurted out. She could have couched it in euphemism—spent the night, got to know each other a little better, explored the second story of the loft, tripped and landed with Tab A in Slot B—but none suited her purpose so well.
Ward’s glare could have melted the polar ice caps. He froze with one hand on the hood of the car, his jangling keychain in the other. He suddenly seemed a little pallid too, nostrils flaring as he blew out a long breath.
In the face of his palpable aggravation, Hazel was glad that Dylan stood between them, albeit grunting with effort. He scraped his palms together once he’d successfully levered the suitcase into place. “I thought something was up… How was it?”
“What?” Hazel asked, Ward not far behind.
But Dylan was insouciant. “Did you enjoy it?” He turned slowly to give Hazel his undivided attention. For some ungodly reason, that was more unsettling than if he’d turned red with ill-suppressed rage. “Did he show you a good time?”
Hazel thought back to Ward’s hands digging bruises into her hips, his lips tracing runes into her shoulder. “Yes,” she breathed. She could scent Dylan’s cologne as a sticky, warm current blew through the parking lot. She swayed a little toward him, snared.
“Good.” Dylan reached up and brushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “He can be a little rough.”
“Standing right here,” Ward said and emphatically cleared his throat.
“Yes… And this explains that giant stick up your ass.”
Ward shifted his weight, but his rambling irritation was fast becoming an afterthought. “Don’t get snippy with me, Mr. Five Hundred Dollar Shoes.”
“They’re knock-offs,” Dylan shot back. He was still watching Hazel, the shallow curve of a smile painted on his lips. “Are you okay?”
She knew what he was asking—not about the sex, but their incipient relationship, the odds of venturing into something more complicated than the friends-with-benefits routine he seemed to favor. Hazel had been wondering as much herself ever since he told her about his ‘roommate’. Now she knew firsthand that Ward wasn’t the easiest person to live
with. Neither was she.
“We’ll need ground rules,” Hazel said. “But yeah… I want to give it a shot.”
Dylan’s grin was blinding and warm, and liable to make her say and do many stupid things if she didn’t inoculate somehow against its power.
“Then let’s go home. Ward, you’re driving.”
“Yes, sir,” Ward drawled, rolling his eyes. Hazel didn’t know him very well and it might have been a trick of the light, but she had the unshakeable suspicion that he was relieved as they all piled together into the BMW.
She sat in the back, the pleats in her white dress billowing in the artificial breeze from the AC. Once in a while, her gaze drifted to the clutch, where Dylan had folded his hand over Ward’s.
Chapter Fifteen
Dylan begged off for a shower as soon as they stepped through the loft door. Hazel watched his suitcase, a solitary rectangle forgotten by the door, and wondered what he’d found in Shanghai, if his trip had been fruitful. She thought about asking Ward, but he was back to brooding as he mixed a cocktail that seemed to involve more gin than tonic.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Hazel asked, resting one arm on the backrest of the couch.
Ward pivoted to face her, a slice of lime in hand. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
A week ago, Hazel would’ve taken that for an unsubtle threat. It was becoming harder and harder to believe him capable. Terrible thing, letting your lust play judge of character…
“Share and I won’t be tempted,” Hazel challenged.
“After your performance at the airport, I have trouble believing you know the meaning of discretion.” The rebuke was earned, but it did nothing to stop Hazel from bristling.
“Next time I promise to let you hang yourself like a good little martyr.”
“Good.”
“Fine.”