Her eyes fluttered shut as Dylan slipped out and replaced his cock with two long fingers, crooked just so to make her lose her mind. There would be time to worry about why this worked for them later, Hazel decided. For now, she gave herself over to the sensation of Dylan’s hands on her, gently coaxing another slow, unearned orgasm from her aching body.
Chapter Seven
Barring the Enrique Iglesias playlist warbling from the car radio, the drive over had gone by in complete silence. Hazel killed the engine and waited for courage to find her. “You didn’t have to come with me,” she said, delaying.
“Are you kidding? It was this or sitting around while Mom frets and flits and asks me what happened to Frank for the umpteenth time.” Sadie liberated her phone from her handbag. “You said an hour, right?”
“Maybe less.” Maybe not at all, unless Hazel found the strength of conviction to slide out of her seat.
Sadie peered out the windshield. “Doesn’t look too shabby.”
Right across, beyond the narrow strip of sidewalk, lay a brick wall, recently repainted, dotted with square windows at various heights. Admission into the building it belonged to was granted through a pair of glass-and-wood doors that might have been new sometime in the late seventies.
It wasn’t Mizzou by any stretch of imagination, but it was the best Hazel could afford on her highly limited funds.
“You think it’s a waste of time, right?” she asked, unsure if she wanted to hear Sadie’s honest opinion.
No one at the diner knew of her plans and she hadn’t found the guts to bounce ideas off her brother and sister-in-law, let alone Ward or Dylan. Until she was sure there
was
something to tell, she figured it was best to keep the news to herself.
Sadie, as usual, was the exception that proved the rule.
“I don’t get it,” she admitted, “but I don’t get most of what you do these days and it seems to work out, sooo…” Sadie’s sequined top scraped the frayed upholstery of the seat as she shrugged. “Least you can do is give it a shot.”
“Right. Yeah.”
The registrar had asked to come by after work so they could talk about her three years of college and check if she could transfer her course credits. Hazel’s shift had been over for an hour. And while finding the college in the maze of streets in East LA hadn’t been easy, the more she waited, the greater the odds of missing her appointment altogether became.
Hazel sucked in a breath and pulled the keys from the ignition.
“Hey.”
Candy Crush
already running on her phone, Sadie leaned over the gearshift, angling her head so she could catch Hazel’s eye. “Leave the keys? Can’t work the radio otherwise.”
For a moment there, Hazel had thought Sadie was about to wish her luck.
It was futile to hope. Hostilities had not resumed since their last spat, if only because Hazel was careful to avoid the dense and tricky sore spots that might spark another argument. She had no desire to apologize, as she’d done so often in the past.
She told herself her newfound resilience had nothing to do with the men in her life.
Rallying to her purpose, she handed the car keys over and gently nudged the car door shut in her wake. She didn’t let herself look back.
* * * *
Night fell over the city like a compact, starless shroud. Very little light spilled through the windows of Ward’s bedroom. Hazel should have loved that. She slept best in perfect, pitch-black darkness. More than once, she had woken and drawn the blinds when she slept over in Dylan’s bed because thin filaments of moonbeam prickled against the backs of her eyelids.
It wasn’t the light that kept her up this time and it wasn’t Dylan’s arm gently draped around her waist, either.
Hazel rolled over on the mattress and fixed her gaze to the ceiling. Shadows swirled with red and blue mandalas, some twisting into the shape of the admissions documents she had signed.
Buyer’s remorse
. Hazel endeavored to dismiss her worries. Even if she
had
rushed headfirst into commitment, she could always give it up—albeit with a small penalty. And if she didn’t like the atmosphere or the professors, she had the option to stop everything at the end of the semester.
But what if I do like it?
She tossed around, turning her back to Ward and facing Dylan. Normally he looked so peaceful in sleep that it surprised her to find him with eyebrows furrowed and lips set in a thin line. On impulse, Hazel reached out and brushed his cheek with a knuckle.
“It’s okay.” His words in her mouth, whispered like a magical incantation. “You’re okay.”
Behind her, Ward stirred with a put-upon sigh but didn’t wake.
Hazel waited, curious to see if he would turn and pull her against him, but she had already discovered that he didn’t like to cling. Or at least, that he didn’t like to cling
to her
. That was another element worth considering—whatever Ward felt for her, it was nothing to what he felt for Dylan, and if Dylan changed his mind…
She banished the thought. A week ago, she would have greeted it with panic and a sinking heart, and sharpened the dormant, envious shard of anger she felt toward Sadie.
It took Penelope salting a still-open wound to shift her perspective.
Careful not to wake them, Hazel shuffled down to the foot of the bed. She had slept in a simple white nightshirt, hoping the boys might let her tempt them. But Ward had been so beat he’d fallen asleep the minute his head met the pillow. Dylan started yawning before Hazel could get her hand under the waistband of his boxers. She caught a glimpse of herself in the full length mirror in Ward’s walk-in closet. The soft, silky fabric greedily snatched what little light there was in the room, shimmering as if wet.
Hazel walked on before she was tempted to lower her gaze to her generous thighs and spoil her mood with another game of ‘who looks better’ between Sadie and her, between Penelope and the naïve girl Hazel had been. Barefoot, she negotiated the steps of the spiral staircase in the dark. Somehow, she didn’t break anything along the way. She thought of brewing herself a cup of coffee or tea, but both the espresso machine and the electric kettle made enough noise to raise the dead. She opted instead to rummage through the fridge. Ward kept a variety of fruit juices on hand for cocktail mixing. Dylan enjoyed the occasional beer.
And there was always a hefty supply of liquor in the sideboard by the window.
Hazel closed the fridge door, empty-handed.
“I thought I heard you down here,” Ward said, from the stairs.
She jumped at the sound of his voice. “That’s it. I’m making you wear a bell from now on.”
“Kinky.”
Hazel tried to glower, but it was late and her eyes had grown ill-accustomed to the shadows in the short time they had the fridge light to see by.
“Midnight snack?” Ward suggested, on the cusp of a yawn. “Sign me up.”
“Actually, I was thinking of a nightcap.” She could all but hear him smirk at that.
“Ooh… Well, I won’t tell if you won’t.”
Instead of saying something clever and incisive about the last time they tried keeping secrets from Dylan, in short order, Hazel found herself on the couch with a bottle of Jack Daniels. Ward was there, too, his thigh touching her knee, but she was mostly interested in Jack D and all the reasons why she shouldn’t indulge.
“For God’s sake,” Ward grumbled, snatching the bottle out of her hands and twisting off the cap. “It’s alcohol, not rocket science.”
“No glasses? What will the neighbors think?”
“Fuck the neighbors.” Profanity was not at all rare in Ward’s language, but he seldom seemed so emphatic about its use.
Hazel took a small sip, grimacing as the whiskey burned her throat. “This brings back memories…”
Namely, of the first time they had slept together. Dylan was out of the country and Ward had come to her aid after an unhappy run-in at a nightclub. Their tryst hadn’t been planned or deliberate, but nor had it been a drunken accident. By the time they’d acted on the sizzling attraction building up between them, the whiskey had long left their bloodstreams.
That little detail hadn’t stopped Ward from believing he’d taken advantage of Hazel. His pigheadedness ran deep.
“We’re missing the bedtime story,” Ward said. “It’s not the same without it.”
“Ah, right…” Hazel looked down at the bottle in her hands and thought of the past few days—sleeping with Ward because she was afraid they were losing Dylan, sleeping with Dylan because she feared losing herself. Deciding to take a leap of faith and revisit her murky past after the past had decided to walk through the diner doors at Marco’s.
It was Ward who spoke first. “Dylan wants you to meet his folks.”
Hazel snapped her head up with Pavlovian swiftness. Her jaw loosened. “That’s sudden.” And scary. And possibly a mistake.
No, definitely. Definitely a mistake.
“Why?”
“Because it’s Dylan and he’s weird… He asked me not to tell you.”
“Well, job well done.”
Ward shot her a sidelong glare. “I thought you’d appreciate the heads up. No offense, but our last parental meet and greet ended with you popping Xanax—”
“It was one pill,” Hazel scoffed. “But point taken.”
In her defense, the encounter hadn’t been planned. She’d hoped to introduce Ward and Dylan to her brother and his wife, maybe let them coo over her newborn niece for a while before they left Dunby. It was a confluence of things going utterly wrong and people showing up where they weren’t supposed to that had delivered her into the arms of a panic attack. The Xanax had pulled her out of it. She didn’t make a habit of popping pills.
“I don’t know… Have you met them?”
He nodded. “They’re nice.”
“
Nice
nice,” Hazel clarified, resting the broad base of the bottle against Ward’s thigh, “or really, actually nice?”
“Let’s see… They used to send me alpaca wool scarves when Dylan and I were in college because he mentioned me in a letter? That was before he invited me over for Thanksgiving.”
Hazel grinned. “No more scarves since, huh?”
“Yeah, they figured what a truly terrible influence I am.”
Despite the forced levity in Ward’s voice, Hazel recognized that shred of self-flagellation. He employed it often. “Can’t be worse than a college dropout turned diner waitress,” she mused, holding back the
neurotic, overweight, compulsive liar
labels that itched to be tacked on.
Ward inclined his head onto the leather backrest. “That’s where you’re wrong. College dropout diner waitresses can only change for the better…turn out to be amazing cooks, or wonderful mothers. Or—I don’t know—humanity’s last hope in the inevitable zombie apocalypse.”
“Oh, and you can’t?” Hazel scoffed. The whiskey was already making her feel sleepy and Ward was a warm, welcome furnace tucked against her flank. She leaned into his body. “I don’t even want to think about how much money you’ve got in the bank, it’ll just depress me—”
“Money I didn’t earn,” he recalled pithily, “and money I can easily lose.”
“Somehow I doubt you’ll drain even your sizable accounts buying expensive cars.”
But Ward was already shaking his head. “We owe a lot more than you think. Company hasn’t been doing well since Dad died.” He snatched up the bottle and pressed it to his bottom lip, like a baby seeking out the comfort of a pacifier. “I could try selling it for parts at this point and I wouldn’t make back what I’ve borrowed,” he added, staring blankly into the shadows of the loft.
“I thought you got federal funds,” Hazel murmured, going out on a limb, based on what she’d heard on the news.
“We did. But sucking on Uncle Sam’s teat is no longer a viable option, even if I could swing it past the board. Should’ve listened to Dylan when he told me to sell. He saw it coming…” Ward shook himself, shamming a grin. “Sorry. I’m being boring. What’s got you restless, anyway?”
It didn’t take much in the way of intuition to guess that Ward didn’t want to tell her more about his problems at work.
You’ll figure it out.
Hazel was sure of it.
Given the magnitude of the problems he was grappling with—buying and selling businesses, considering the effect that would have on thousands of jobs and how it might dismantle his father’s legacy—her own seemed puny by comparison. “Oh, nothing,” Hazel said. “Penelope came by the diner a couple of days ago.”
“Who’s…?” Ward’s frown deepened as he put together name and the limited cast of Hazel’s college tales. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” Hazel snatched the bottle from him and twisted the cap back on. “I think she just wanted to rattle my cage.”
“And did she?”
Hazel met his eyes and, slowly, shook her head.
Ward smirked. “That’s my girl.”
Pride fluttered in her chest, offset only by the molten heat that seeped through her bloodstream when Ward slid his fingers into her hair and kissed her sweet and long. Hazel went with it, always greedy for his touch, for the affection her boys dispensed so readily. She didn’t doubt that they cared for her—even Ward, in his own, weird way—when they were together. Her insecurities only crept in when she faced the real world.
She tasted whiskey and the faint hint of toothpaste on his tongue. It made for a surprisingly heady mix.
Ward moaned into the kiss, then once again as Hazel slid a leg over his hips and straddled his lap. “This brings back memories, too,” he confessed, pulling back with a breathy laugh.
“Mm, your BMW
is
huge,” Hazel agreed, “but not the size of this couch.”
“We’re not using the whole couch.”
Hazel tugged a hand through his blond hair, grinning. “Maybe we should be.”
It might have been an hour or ten minutes later that a light flicked on by the stairs, silhouetting a form Hazel recognized as she arched her spine and tilted her head back. Before she could muster anything by way of greeting—or apology, for waking him—Ward sucked her clit, sacrificing her breath on the altar of unfettered pleasure. Hazel moaned, digging her heel into the backrest of the sofa.