She barely registered his touch through the fabric of her wrap dress until his fingertips were on her bare leg, skating upwards.
“Is it still there?” Malcolm wondered, a heartbreaking catch in his throat. “My name on your skin.
Forever
.”
His voice lured her into the distant past, but the stroke of his fingers at her hip conjured a more recent memory, of pain like hot oil on skin and lasers burning away the remnants of a mistake while Hazel tried to hold back her tears.
She tore away from his hold, the spell broken. “Things change, Mal.
I’ve
changed.”
Surprise flashed briefly onto his handsome face before succumbing to a sneer. “We’ll see about that.”
Hazel expected him to lunge for her, maybe put her in her place with force, as he’d once done in the name of educating her. But Malcolm was an adept at eschewing her calculations.
“Talk soon,” he threw over his shoulder as he turned back for the BMW.
“I mean it, Malcolm!” Hazel shouted, her voice quaking pitifully. “Stay away from me!”
The wave of a hand in the bright glare of the headlights was more suggestion than farewell. The BMW rumbled to life with a low, disturbingly familiar purr. Hazel didn’t breathe any easier until he’d pulled away from the curb, his glowing tail lights rapidly diminishing down the street.
Then he rounded the next corner and was gone.
Shaken, Hazel bent to grab her car keys off the sidewalk and nearly face-planted into the jagged cement. It took three tries to unlock the Volvo, but only one to lock herself inside and put her head in her hands.
Deep breaths
, she imagined Dylan whispering in her ear.
You’re okay
.
Her knuckles smarted from hitting Travis at the diner, but that was an insignificant ache to the guilty tug in her chest. Malcolm was right.
She had sworn herself to him—not for the sake of marriage, but for something equally precious—and she had reneged on her commitment.
Stupid, stupid.
The shock of seeing him in LA was a wake-up call. She had no excuse for failing to anticipate this moment.
He was always going to search for her. He would always worm his way back into her life.
Hazel’s plan, before she’d left Marco’s that evening, had been to spend the night at her own place, the better to hide her books and get some reading done before she passed out. Her aspirations were a foregone conclusion.
After a brief fumble, Hazel managed to slot the key into the ignition and put the Volvo in gear. She took off with a squeal of tires, in the same direction as Malcolm’s BMW.
Chapter Nine
The front door opened with a metallic clang, revealing hardwood boards and soft, filtered light beaming down from ingeniously calibrated wall fixtures. The low droning of the TV trickled out into the hall.
Ward furrowed his brow at the sight of Hazel on the doorstep.
“I thought you were meeting Sadie tonight…”
“I—no. I couldn’t find my keys,” Hazel said, the right answer to the wrong question.
“Hazel?” Dylan’s voice rang out from deep inside the apartment.
It wasn’t until Ward backed out of the way that Hazel saw him at the dining table, laptop and papers strewn before him. He still wore slacks and a white shirt, but the sleeves were rucked up to mid-elbow and his feet were bare under the sleek oval of his improvised desk.
He plucked his reading glasses off his nose, mirroring Ward’s frown. “What happened?”
Ward drummed his fingers against the door. “Are you coming in?” he asked, doing a fair impersonation of indifference.
“We need to talk,” said Hazel. She stepped over the threshold, though, on legs that didn’t particularly feel like her own.
She tried not to flinch when Ward slid the door shut behind her and pulled on the latch. It was harder by far to rid herself of the impression that she was somehow intruding.
“What’s up?” Ward pressed, draping himself into the Eames chair.
“Sadie okay?” Dylan put in.
“Malcolm came to see me.”
It was no use beating around the bush anymore. Hazel flopped to the couch and let her textbooks fan out beside her. Predictably, both Dylan and Ward glanced to the squat little pile.
Principles of Business Management
had the dubious quality of being particularly glossy, lettering as big as her thumb spanning the whole front cover.
“And I’m taking night classes at the community college… Oh, and I hit someone today,” Hazel added, resting her elbows on her knees.
Dylan opened his mouth but no sound came out. He looked like a particularly studious fish, standing there in his pristinely ironed slacks and starched white shirt.
“I’ll get Jack,” Ward said, darting back to his feet. He returned a few moments later to find Dylan leaning forward in his seat. The bottle exchanged hands wordlessly. “So. Your ex is in town. Best news I heard all day.”
Hazel gaped at him.
“Dylan’s been itching to get his hands dirty since we left Missouri,” Ward explained, “and he’s not the only one who—”
“That’s not funny.”
“Wasn’t trying to be, sweetheart.” Ward filled a heavy base tumbler and held it out to Hazel by the rim. “I’m serious.”
In a voice not unlike the one he used in the playroom, Dylan interjected, “What did he want?”
Hazel met his eyes warily. “I’m not entirely sure… The short version is, I guess, me.”
“Well, that’s not happening,” Ward decided, tucking a leg under his hips as he sat down on the couch. “Problem solved.”
“It’s not that easy.”
Malcolm’s hold on her had weakened over the years, trust shattered by the video that he had published—or at least not fought very hard to keep private. Whatever fertile ground it might have sprouted roots in years ago had been salted by many miles of distance and utter radio silence.
Hazel peered into the amber depths of the whiskey glass. “He sent Penelope to the diner to rile me up. Then he followed me.”
“To your college,” Dylan specified, inflectionless.
“Yeah…”
“Then he knows more than we do. Any other secrets, Hazel?”
A phantom grip seized Hazel’s throat. “It wasn’t a secret,” she forced out, knowing her protest would only make things worse. Her pulse thudded in her eardrums, echoing the frenzied drumming in her chest. “Today was my first day. I just—I wanted to try it out before I told you. In case I dropped out.”
“But you didn’t apply today. You didn’t decide you wanted to do this
today
.” Dylan punctuated the retort with the thrust of a fingertip into the coffee table.
Whether or not he intended the gesture to be menacing, Hazel found herself stiffening. She had never been hit in anger as an adult. Malcolm’s methods were more sophisticated than that. He’d turned the pain he dished out with the flat of a hand or the back of a hairbrush into a reward, a condition of his love. He’d been too careful to hit her where it would show.
The end result was the same. Hazel had quailed when he claimed to be displeased. She’d offered herself up as a punching bag to win back his affection. It took ten years for her to see it clearly and one minute of Dylan staring at her as though he barely knew her to work up the strength to fight back.
“And you didn’t decide you wanted me to meet your parents today, either,” her voice shook, but it was nothing a little bourbon wouldn’t cure. “Ward told me.”
Dylan shot his friend a sidelong glare. “Thanks a lot.”
In response, Ward did his best to disappear behind his tumbler.
“I don’t care if you changed your mind—”
“Don’t change the subject,” Dylan warned her.
“I’m not. Point is we all play our cards close to the vest. If you can’t see that, if you think that I’m the one with the problem, then say so. I know my way out.”
“You’d leave?” he asked, bemused.
“Yeah.”
I’ve done it before
.
Until now, it had always been a show of weakness, of cowardice. Hazel couldn’t take what Malcolm dished out, so she fled. She’d abandoned him—and Penelope, to a lesser extent. The fear of being forced to do it again—for her flashbacks, for her irrational terror of being cooped up without escape—had kept her from dating seriously, let alone looking for another relationship like the one she’d discovered in college.
She hadn’t realized that there was power inherent in being the one to turn the page. But Malcolm had followed her to LA
because she’d left.
He wouldn’t have done it otherwise. She had forced his hand and gotten what she wanted, albeit six years too late.
“I should’ve told you about the night classes,” Hazel agreed, sipping at her fast-depleting nightcap. “And I’m sorry I didn’t. I was worried I’d get your hopes up—or the reverse, make you think I’m trying to… I don’t know, change who I am.”
Ward reached across the scattered textbooks and laid a gentle hand on her wrist. “We like who you are.”
“But I don’t,” Hazel confessed.
Surprise widened his eyes. Dylan said nothing.
“I don’t want to be a waitress for the rest of my life. I don’t want to…to be the girl who gave up on her dreams because of a guy.” Especially when that guy seemed happy to go years without so much as a tweet. Hazel extricated her hand. “I’m happy here. I love being with you…”
Love you
echoed in her ears, a heart-stopping confession that Dylan had probably regretted as soon as it had slipped out. “But I don’t want to be someone you save.”
“We—
I
,” Dylan corrected, “never felt that way.”
Hazel offered him a half-smile. “But I do. Sometimes. And seeing Malcolm reminded me of the last time I needed saving.”
Ward blew a long, mirthless snicker into his already empty glass. “
Ouch
. Don’t hold back, now. Tell us how you
really
feel…”
“I’m not saying you’re like him.”
“Sounds like it.”
Hazel stood abruptly. “For fuck’s sake, pay attention—I’m scared of him. If that’s how I felt about you two, I wouldn’t be here!” She hadn’t meant to raise her voice, but the dread she’d carried with her since running into Malcolm spilled out in a torrent of fury and frustration. “
This
is what he’s good at. He always could get inside my head, make me doubt my choices… I changed majors three times because of him. To say nothing of the friends I made, then dropped, then made again ’cause he kept changing his mind. He—he had us sleeping together! Me and Penelope—did I tell you that?”
Their silence was answer enough.
She deflated a little without Dylan’s goading to fan the flames of her temper. “He…he picked me first,” Hazel recalled, slowing her pace but still striding up and down the dividing gap between kitchen island and the nearest uncomfortable, artsy armchair. Like trying to walk off a contraction, she needed to be mobile to get the words out. “It was just the two of us for maybe four or five months. Penelope was something of a free electron in the group, fleeting around from man to man. A submissive for rent—and she wasn’t the only one.”
Ward raked a hand through his hair. “Jesus…”
He fell silent at a glance from Dylan.
“Malcolm didn’t tell me he was bringing her in. He’d had sex with us a few times, made us kiss and…do other things. But it was all about him. And it was temporary, so I didn’t mind. Then he decided he would make her his.” Heat raced up Hazel’s cleavage and cheeks at the memory.
Isn’t she beautiful?
Penelope, with her dark brown hair and big eyes, was a Disney princess in the flesh. She even had the requisite wasp-thin waist.
“I tried to make it work, to be nice to her. But it’s hard to be friends with someone when your boyfriend will punish you by screwing them in front of you, you know? And vice versa. Malcolm’s idea of play went from pushing my limits to making us compete for his attention.” His skill as a master of ceremonies was unparalleled. Hazel’s stomach still twisted in knots when Dylan or Ward played at delaying her orgasms. Knowing that they wouldn’t deny her for long wasn’t the same as believing it.
“What I did back then was ugly. And—and for the wrong reasons. But tonight when he showed up?” Hazel licked her lips, because this part was equally ugly yet needed saying. “For a second there, I nearly went with him. Would’ve been easier. I mean, I know he’d make me pay for these last ten years and I’d never really get back into his good graces. I still thought about it.”
“And somehow you wound up here,” Dylan pointed out.
Hazel nodded. She hadn’t gone back to her apartment, to lock herself behind the bathroom door and weep until she couldn’t breathe anymore. She hadn’t gone by Sadie’s to score a couple of Xanax and sleep away the hard calls.
Dylan pressed his palms together, becoming as still as a statue. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not good enough.”
“Dylan—”
He held up a hand, cutting off Ward’s protest. “Why are you here, Hazel?”
“I don’t want to be that person anymore. I think with you two, maybe… I’m not.”
“Maybe,” Dylan agreed. He wasn’t mollified by her wishy-washy reply. “I’ll hazard a guess that you didn’t tell us all that for a let’s-hug-it-out Hallmark moment, did you?”
Hazel bit down on thin air. She had met this Dylan once before, when she’d thought Ward might have been taking advantage of their friendship. Dylan had shot her down with the same single-minded swiftness with which he was now dissecting her intentions. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he saw right through her—and, more importantly, that he didn’t think much of what he found at her core.
“I need your help,” Hazel confessed, digging her toes into the hardwood boards.
Dylan sunk back into his armchair. “That I’ll believe.”
But not the rest,
was implied.
Hazel wanted nothing more than to drop to her knees and kiss his feet until he forgave her—or at least worked himself up enough to take a belt to her backside. She made herself remain upright and clung to what little confidence she was ever likely to feel.
Their staring match was only interrupted when Ward sighed and reached for the bottle. Whiskey splashed half onto the table and half into his glass. He didn’t seem to notice. “I’ll bite. You need our help with
what
?”