Twice Upon a Blue Moon (20 page)

“He’s got a sweet ride,” said another boy. He glanced up at Hazel, sizing her up in whatever faint illumination slithered under the busted hallway light.

The jeans and tank top weren’t exactly streetwalker attire. She hadn’t even bothered putting her face on before she had hightailed it out of the house.

Hazel blew a stray curl off her cheek. “Do me a favor… Stay away from that guy. He’s trouble. Mob connections or some shit.” One truth for every lie had worked for her before.

She let the shadows of the entryway swallow her up, Ward’s gaze hot on the back of her neck.

Chapter Fourteen

Sadie cornered her in the staff rooms as Hazel was changing out of her uniform. Despite being about a head shorter and thirty pounds lighter, she cut a dangerous portrait standing in the doorframe and blocking Hazel’s passage.

“I think I saw this in a porno once,” Hazel recalled. Trying to make Sadie blush was a lost battle. Also lost were her attempts to pin her hair up when it was freshly washed or apply makeup in the tiny square mirror glued to the inside of her locker. “What’s up?”

“There’s an uppity blond asking for you. He said to tell you that Dylan’s flight has a half hour delay.” Sadie folded her arms across her chest. “Explain.”

“He’s here?” Hazel’s stomach hitched up to her lungs, then promptly dropped into her knees. She’d been hoping to meet Ward outside, partly so she could avoid this kind of grilling, but mostly so he wouldn’t see how ill-suited she was for Dylan. Judging by Sadie’s quirked eyebrow, she had more immediate obstacles to face. “Oh. That’ll be Dylan’s roommate.”

“The one he’s sleeping with.”

“Yes.”

“The one you don’t like.”

Hazel resisted the urge to squirm under Sadie’s knowing gaze. “It’s not that simple.” It had been a week ago, when she had resolved never to see him again. Ward was difficult and he was presumptuous, but her body didn’t seem to mind that.

As soon as he’d texted her Dylan’s flight details, Hazel’s pulse had spiked accordingly in anticipation. She found herself chewing her nails, fretful like a schoolgirl.

Then her cell had shrilled with another message—did Hazel want to come with him to the airport?

A question like that deserved only one kind of answer.

“You’re starting to sound like him.”

Sadie might have meant it as an accusation, but Hazel couldn’t resist grinning. She sucked her cheeks in, though, attempting it all the same. “Really? Huh… Well, there are worse things.” Dylan had poise and charm. He was a self-made man, a whole rags-to-riches story that would have endeared him to her even if he wasn’t also handsome and kind.
And really good in bed
.

“I don’t get it,” Sadie confessed. “I thought it was over?”

Hazel bit her lip.
I did let you think that.
She’d been wary of telling Sadie the truth—both about prostrating herself on her knees before Dylan and sleeping with his roommate. The snotty one. “It was, but then… I don’t know. I think… I think I’d like to try to make it work. I feel good when I’m with him.”

“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.