Twice Upon a Blue Moon (16 page)

He’s human. Stop the presses.

“I want you to come get me,” Hazel got out, ridiculously pleased when her voice didn’t quake. “I’m just down the street, at the…“ She glanced around at the corseted mannequins and pink, padded handcuffs. “I’m in the sex shop.”

“Interesting choice. I’ll be right there.”

“Wait.” Hazel bit her lip. “Could you stay on the phone with me?”

“Afraid the dildos will attack?” Ward scoffed, but he didn’t hang up.

The clerk shot Hazel a puzzled look and held up her own phone—
911
had been keyed onto the screen.

Hazel held her cell away from her face. “Please, I won’t be here long. My friend is coming—”

“Did someone hurt you?”

“No… I think they were about to. Maybe.” Hazel shrugged. “Police can’t help with that.” They needed at least a few bruises. A dead body was even better.

A car drove past the shop at that very moment. Hazel flinched back from the door, her stomach sinking. She was dimly aware of Ward saying her name, but her throat was suddenly tight with panic. She focused on breathing. It would be pretty dumb of her to panic when nothing was wrong.
Just us, baby…

“Sit down,” the clerk instructed, wheeling an office chair from behind the till and moving to flip the ‘Open/Closed’ sign on the door.

Hazel did as instructed.

“You still there?” Ward breathed into the phone. “Hay-zel… I’m five minutes away. Three if I break the speed limit. What’s your view on speed limits? Necessary evil or government-sanctioned extortion? If you don’t say anything, I’ll just keep talking until you get sick of me. Did you ever wonder why we call yellow lights yellow? They’re more orange than anything—”

“They’re called amber across the pond,” Hazel breathed.

“Are they?
Fascinating
. I wonder if it’s amber back home, too… Perils of growing up in the wrong country, you see. I don’t know anything that truly matters. Nothing about traffic lights, anyway. Ah, there we are—
Venus’ Playground
.” He sounded like he was reading a sign.

“Guys that bothered you,” the clerk said, peering out into the street, “were they driving a BMW?”

Hazel breathed a sigh of relief. “No. That would be my friend.” The shiny black car came into view a moment later as Ward double-parked in front of the sex shop. He must have broken a few speed restrictions to get there so fast.

“What was that you were saying earlier about my winning personality?” He shoved the driver side door open wide and stepped out in time for Hazel to make her way out of the shop.

She glanced up and down the street. No sign of the Mustang. It was probably long gone.

Hazel thanked the clerk, who nodded, slid one glance to Ward and his Ritchie Rich blond hair, and went back into the shop. The ‘Closed’ cardboard sign banged against the door as it fell shut.

“You’ll get ticketed,” Hazel pointed out. “Double-parking’s against the law.”

“So is burning red lights, I think, but I don’t hear you complaining about that.” Ward circled the shiny coupé and opened the passenger door.

Hazel slid in silently. She couldn’t think of a quip that wouldn’t also imply gratitude.

* * * *

It was hard to say how they wound up at the loft. Maybe it was Ward’s doing. He made a few attempts to draw Hazel into conversation, but when she didn’t respond he, too, fell silent. Or maybe it was Hazel consciously steering them away from her small, pathetic apartment, protecting the last part of herself that hadn’t yet been laid bare for Ward’s adjudication.

Whatever the reason, she stepped over the threshold of four-seven-one Aulden Way with a sigh of relief.

“Do you want a drink?” Ward asked, charting a course for the sideboard.

Hazel shook her head. She made her way to the couch and sat, folding her arms over her knees and resting her brow on that makeshift pillow. She was aware of Ward moving about the room—his car keys hitting the artsy glass bowl on the square coffee table, his shiny shoes squeaking as he drew a circuit around the couch. The clinking sounds of a tumbler being filled reached her from very far away.

“Aren’t you going to ask what happened?” Hazel asked after a beat. She was used to Sadie grilling her. She was also used to lying to herself and others, because it was the only way to keep anxiety from taking over.

“Figure you’ll tell me if you want.”

“Reverse psychology,” Hazel drawled, “I see.” She sat up, spine cracking like logs snapping in a fire. She took the glass Ward pressed into her hands.

“Just soda water and lime.”

“You’d tell me if it wasn’t?”

Ward rolled his eyes. “And here I thought we were starting to get along…”

“How do you have my phone number?” She’d been foolish enough to put all kinds of information about herself, under her real name, online—never her phone number. In the months and years since she’d dropped out of school, that last shred of anonymity had been her only protection.

Sitting down was a whole operation for Ward. He perched on the edge of the square Barcelona chair, at first, then slid back until the backs of his knees hit the leather upholstery. He folded his long legs, all while balancing a glass of amber liquid in his hands. Probably whiskey, Hazel mused.

“Dylan gave it to me. For emergencies. He’s rather paranoid, you may have noticed…”

Hazel had not. “And asking me out counts as an emergency?”

“I wasn’t asking you out,” Ward scoffed. Where Dylan was all effortless good manners and sophisticated charm, Ward seemed like he was constantly struggling to keep a straight face. Little people either amused or annoyed him. There was no in between.

Right now Hazel was fairly certain that she found herself in the latter category.

“You wanted to talk,” she recalled and took a tentative sip of her soda and lime. “What’s there to talk about?”

“I’m not sure now is the best time to—”

“You think this hasn’t happened before?”

Ward’s astonishment flashed starkly across his milky-white features. So Hazel went on.

“It’s a rare day when I leave the house without some creep making a pass at me.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Ward replied, “but you
are
a beautiful woman—”

“Right now? Maybe. Not so sure that’s true when I’m doing a coffee run in my PJs or wiping spilled ketchup off the tables at Marco’s. Or waiting for the bus….”

“Men are pigs?” Ward offered hesitantly.

Hazel took another sip of her soda water. If Ward had slipped her something, then it was subtle enough that she couldn’t discern the taste. “Tell me more about you and Dylan in college.” She didn’t want to talk about herself anymore.

“Wouldn’t you rather ask him?”

Hazel toed off her ankle boots. “I’m asking you.”
Distract me.

She expected Ward to refuse. He was as closed off as he’d been at the club, shoulders stiff beneath his tailored black shirt. Yet when he spoke, a wistful smile crept onto his lips, eventually gaining his whole face. He looked different when he smiled in earnest—less Machiavellian, somehow. Certainly less put-together.

“We met in junior year,” Ward recalled. “I transferred out of Columbia, failed most of my finals.
Again
. Dylan was on his first go at Ledwich—proud and defiant, huge chip on his shoulder… You have to understand, Ledwich doesn’t offer many scholarships. There are anywhere between five and ten students who couldn’t otherwise afford tuition, never any more than that. Dylan had been living on campus for three years when I showed up, so most of the abuse from the other students had dwindled by then.”

“So you picked up the slack?” Hazel ventured.

She had an easy time imagining Ward as a reckless, arrogant twenty-year-old hell bent on plucking the wings off butterflies just because he could. He wore that mantle even now, albeit not so flagrantly.

He waved a hand. “Every school has its Skull and Crossbones equivalent. Usually it’s a fraternity everyone’s trying to get into or a football squad that makes grown men wet themselves… We had two rowing teams. Where you fell in the pecking order affected which crew you joined. Scholarship students got the Copperheads.” He grimaced. “The rest of us got Even Odds.”

“Fitting name,” Hazel mumbled under her breath.

“Dylan was desperate to join the Odds. They got the better equipment, the better coach. They had money, essentially, and the Copperheads didn’t. He’d been trying to make the crew since freshman year. He showed up for trials every semester… And he was good. Very good. But there was some resistance from the existing members.”

“Until you showed up.”

Ward narrowed his eyes at the interruption, but he was smiling. “Has Dylan already told you this story?”

“No,” said Hazel. “I just have a feeling I know how it goes. You decided to up the stakes, make it harder and harder for him to prove he could make the cut. Dylan dug his heels in. Eventually you came to blows… Ta-da, the start of a wonderful friendship.”

The curve of Ward’s small smile grew even fainter, smoothing out until his lips were perfectly horizontal. “I told him he’d make the team if he gave me a blow job,” he confessed, speaking mostly to his untouched whiskey.

Hazel arched her eyebrows. “He turned you down? Punched you in the face?”

“No.”

It wasn’t the feel-good homoerotic coming of age movie she’d built up in her head. It also wasn’t something Ward seemed to treat as hilariously funny. His shoulders stooped when he shifted forward to set his tumbler on the coffee table. He didn’t seem proud or commanding anymore.

He didn’t seem like he wanted to relive the past.

So this is what guilt looks like when it’s packaged in Hugo Boss
. Her stomach roiled as she ran through scathing remarks in her head, discarding them one right after the other. In the end, she only wanted to know one more thing. “Why?”

Ward glanced up from his joined palms with a sullen expression. His prayers to the god of hard liquor and bad decisions must have gone unheeded.

“I wanted him. He didn’t want me… I never said it was a cheerful story.”

Something about his posture told Hazel that he was perfectly aware the addendum did nothing to exculpate him. She didn’t heed it.

“And now?”

“Now?”

Hazel couldn’t tell if he was stalling her or not, but she furrowed her brow all the same. “What do you want from him now? You haven’t told him about my—indiscretions. You wanted to set the record straight tonight…” If this was Ward’s way of working his way toward absolution, Hazel wanted no part in it. “Dylan mentioned that he’s been with other women since you and he left school,” she pointed out, disregarding the part where he was also adamant that his relationship with Ward was off limits.

He’d made clear that a relationship with him would imply putting up with his tetchy roommate. There was no way around it. Before she’d found out that Ward was an abusive fuck, Hazel might have considered it. Now, her skin crawled. She’d been the Dylan in that equation. She knew it was messed up.

“I want him to be happy,” Ward confessed miserably.

“Even if that means being with other people?”

Ward held out for a long beat before nodding, once and solemnly, and glancing away.

“Is it because they’re women or…” Hazel pursed her lips. “Is it a fetish thing?” Dylan had a fully fitted playroom. Clearly his taste for dominating women wasn’t a passing fetish.

“Partly. Dylan will submit to me if I ask. But since I don’t reciprocate, I can’t help feeling like I’m forcing him into something he doesn’t truly care for.”

Like the first time, you mean?
Hazel scoffed, which had the same effect as that jagged barb.

Ward flinched. He had no right to look so downtrodden, so hurt. He’d gotten everything he wanted out of that stupid dare all those years back—and Dylan was still around, still caught in his orbit. Some men were lucky like that.

“He wouldn’t be sleeping with you in the first place if he didn’t enjoy it on some level.”

She didn’t want to admit it, but sex with Dylan was at once intimate and personal. Even at their most clinical, their sessions in his playroom had never felt like they could involve any other two people. Dylan made her the center of his world in exchange for her trust. Whether or not that was a fair trade, Hazel couldn’t say. She trusted herself less than she did him.

Body language at odds with his tone, Ward asked, “What makes you think we’re sleeping together?”

Hazel narrowed her eyes.
Really?

Ward scowled but ducked his head. “It’s complicated.”

“That’s what he said.” Like most things, the snappy comeback was funnier in her head.

“You must think I’m a terrible person.”

“You’re not stellar. That’s for sure.” The retort seemed to diminish Ward even further, as if her words were millstones piled onto his shoulders. Were she in a more vindictive mood, Hazel could see herself deriving great pleasure from giving Ward the verbal lashing he deserved. It didn’t seem necessary. He wasn’t sitting there, hunch shouldered, and telling her all this because he was
proud
.

On impulse, Hazel exchanged her glass for his and downed the whiskey in one burning swig. “I’ll need to be a lot drunker before I start confessing my sins,” she offered by way of explanation. Then she held out the glass. “Another.”

Surprise flitting off his features, Ward complied.

Chapter Twelve

“Your bag’s moving.”

“What?” Hazel tried to sit up, but she was lying on her hair and the unexpected tug stabbed through her skull. “Ow!”

Ward laughed. He’d been laughing a lot, when he wasn’t angrily swiping at his eyes. “Your bag,” he repeated. He hooked a toe in the offending accessory and nudged it against her calves.

It was, indeed, vibrating.

Hazel plucked out her cell. “Oh… It’s my sister-in-law.”

“Answer,” Ward urged. “You can tell her about the dent you’ve put in my stash of Glenfiddich.” He swirled his tumbler in her direction as though to underscore the point. Somewhere around the third refill, he’d brought the bottle along to the sitting area. He reached for it now, pulling off the metal cap with his teeth.