Twice Upon a Blue Moon (19 page)

Hazel tried to disguise the festering hurt. She thought she had it under control, until one afternoon after her shift when she spotted Ward’s BMW across the street, idling in the muggy heat.

He lowered the passenger side window. “Give you a ride home?”

“I have a car, thanks.”
What are you doing here?
The question rose to the tip of her tongue, then ebbed back. She reminded herself that she didn’t care. “Anything else?”

It was too much to hope that he regretted their last chat.

Ward tapped ash into the slot in the center console. The lit end of his cigarette burned amber as he sucked smoke into his lungs. “Can we talk?”

Hazel weighed her options.
Yes
would be another zigzag between landmines and buried skeletons, another reminder that Ward was testing her patience the better to report to Dylan when he got back.

“What do you want?” she asked instead. Straight answers were overrated anyway.

The short-lived hint of a wrinkle between Ward’s eyebrows told her all she needed to know. He hadn’t come to apologize. He didn’t feel bad about throwing her out on account of buyer’s remorse. Hazel squeezed the car door with both hands and pushed off.

“Go home, Ward. I’m too tired for this shit.”

“Dylan wanted me to check on you,” he called out, too brusque to be anything but truthful.

Hazel froze in her steps. They’d spoken again. Why did that hurt? Why did she feel neglected? Dylan had made clear that he was giving her time to figure out where they stood. He hadn’t claimed that the same terms applied to Ward.

We’re not the same.
Ward had power over Dylan. Now he was looking to sink his claws into Hazel, too.

“Tell Dylan I do just fine without a babysitter,” she shot over her shoulder.

“What happened to being accosted by creeps every miserable day?”

Hazel whirled around so fast that her handbag slapped her thigh. “I must be moving up in the world ’cause they don’t usually drive BMWs.” The windshield was awash with the red and purple hues of the setting sun, a ribbon of airplane exhaust dividing Ward’s face into warmth and chill down the length of his nose. “Anything else, creep?”

Ward put up the passenger side window. The engine revved at the turn of the key. Hazel watched him pull away with an abrupt turn. She didn’t think Ward even checked his mirrors. Playing fast and loose with six-figure cars was just another benefit of wealth—one more reminder that she and Ward had nothing in common besides Dylan—and even there, they were better off keeping their distance.

Hazel peeled a stray curl from her lips, grimacing at the sticky texture of smeared lip gloss. It wasn’t her fault that Dylan didn’t have better friends.

It’s not Ward’s fault that you can’t be civil
, a small voice taunted. The lapse of judgment weighed on Hazel’s shoulders as much as Ward’s. She couldn’t brush it off or pretend they hadn’t crossed a line.

She locked down the thought before it could spiral out of control. Ward would have to try harder if he was hoping to get under her skin.

She wasn’t about to be run off.

* * * *

After her last foray into the clubbing scene, Hazel’s inclination had dwindled to nearly nothing. But there were only so many nights she could spend catching up with
Real Housewives
, or commiserating with wannabe supermodel flunkees before her eyes began to glaze over. When that happened, the self-sabotaging quadrants in her brain faithfully sent her back, retracing steps and digging up old hurt to sample again.

Time to kill always made for easy self-flagellation. Hazel took about as much of that as she could. It wasn’t until she started flirting with the thought of poking her sister-in-law on Facebook that she understood how deep and how fast she was sinking.

This is why I don’t date
. Bitter shame kindled in her gut as she pushed up from the couch and switched off the TV. A cursory glance of the living room unearthed her cell.

Hazel was halfway through scrolling to Sadie’s contact when she remembered—Sadie was with Frank tonight. She’d borrowed the car for that purpose, too, with the promise of filling up the tank before she picked Hazel up in the morning.

“Crap,” she muttered to the silent apartment.

The wrench in the works didn’t stop her from grabbing her boots and tugging them on forcefully. There were always buses. Cabs. She tamped down the flicker of anxiety that threatened to invade her bloodstream and latched the door in her wake.

She had little memory of the ride to the club. The heat of the day still clung close to the ground, forced down by leaden cloud. Hazel’s tank top stuck to her shoulder blades, an unpleasant, damp compress instantly chilled by the AC that gusted inside Sadie’s favorite watering hole.

Hazel squeezed her way through the swarm of bodies, charting a straight-shot route to the bar. She’d picked this place because she knew it, because familiarity counted. The top-shelf whiskey was just a nice addition. Hazel wasted no time in ordering herself a Wild Turkey double with enough ice that the condensation on the glass made her palm slippery-wet. Peace and quiet were out of the question in the club. Some Lady Gaga remix stuttered out of the concealed speakers, filling her ears with mangled innuendo. Her ribcage rattled with the bass line. Her demons couldn’t compete.

“You’re going to think I’m stalking you,” a familiar voice said over her shoulder.

Her demons might have been hard-pressed to lay into her, but Ward was flesh and blood, and difficult to ignore on a good day.

Hazel squared her shoulders but didn’t turn. “Depends… Did Dylan ask you to do that, too?” If she didn’t face him, she could pretend she wasn’t lobbing hurt at an easy target.

“I thought you’d sworn off hard liquor,” Ward replied, sidestepping the question. He was quick to take advantage of the freshly vacated bar stool next to Hazel’s and seemingly all too eager to take her silence for an invitation.

“Don’t worry,” said Hazel, “I’m not counting on letting anyone bully me into bed tonight. Got a strict once-a-week policy.”

“Right.”

The lights in the club might have been low and the music loud, but Ward was easy to read in spite of the dizzying cacophony.

“Clutch that beer any tighter and you’ll be pulling glass shards out of your hand,” Hazel mused. His knuckles were white around the neck of the bottle. She wondered if he was daydreaming of squeezing her neck instead.

“Let’s not pretend you give a damn about the state of my hands.”

“Yeah,” Hazel agreed, “that’s why we sat here the first time… ’Cause I don’t give a damn.” She couldn’t resist meeting his eyes for long. Part of her was curious if he could hold her gaze and hang onto his glorified moaning. The rest wondered at the damage she’d made.

Ward thinned his lips and looked away. “He still doesn’t know.”

Of course, it all comes back to Dylan.

“Why?”

“Didn’t know how to tell him,” Ward confessed, raising the bottle to take a swig. “Least I can do is wait until he’s close enough to kick me in the teeth.”

“Oh, he strikes me as the kind to book an earlier flight if he feels compelled to settle a score.” Hurt prompted the jibe rather than experience. Dylan had been nothing but patient with her. It was Ward who constantly rammed her foundations. “Was I that bad?” Hazel wondered aloud. She shrugged in the face of his scowl. “You’re in such a hurry to write me off that I figure it must’ve been a sub-par experience.”

It hadn’t been. His tooth-grinding moans still echoed between her ears. His tight hold lived on in the bruises he’d left on her hips.

Ward scraped his thumbnail over the tinted bottle, peeling up the label. “Wasn’t bad.”

“Easy, tiger. Compliments like that… You’ll make me blush.”

“It can’t happen again,” Ward muttered, unflinchingly morose despite her needling. “You get that, right? It was a mistake.”

“No shit.” Dylan was one of the good ones, but even good guys had a habit of expecting fidelity. No matter how open-minded, chances were he wouldn’t be good with what she’d done.

Hazel downed her whiskey in a less than ladylike fashion.
So much for clearing my head.

“Thing is, I have no intention of letting you take the heat alone,” she told Ward. He wasn’t the one who had made the first move. That blame rested with Hazel.

She nudged him with her elbow. “I know you’ve got this whole theory about liquor and…what we did.” No doubt that was where Dylan had picked it up. “But it wasn’t like that. Believe me, I know the difference between tipsy and three sheets to the wind.”

“Your ex?” Ward asked. He seemed more guarded than convinced.

“Yeah.”

“Is… Is that who we have to thank for the home movie?”

It was Hazel’s turn to avoid his gaze. The last thing she wanted was to further spoil her evening by dredging up that mess.

But Ward was dogged. He dug his heels in. “What happened there?”

Hazel shook her head, hunting for an appropriate deflection—an answer that would sound convincing without giving him much to go on. Nothing came to mind. Against her will, memories unspooled behind her eyes, every flicker of the strobe lights a camera flash. “Think I’m gonna head home,” she said in the end, groping into her handbag for her wallet.

“Something I said?”

In the shaky, dizzying lights, Ward’s features were painted a stark, cadaverous white. He looked both more and less than human.

“Yeah,” Hazel admitted, too quiet to be heard but too obvious for Ward to misunderstand.

“You okay to drive?”

“Don’t have the car. I’ll catch a taxi—”

“I’ll give you a ride,” Ward said, slapping down a few crisp bills and planting his beer on top to hold them in place. “Come on,” he entreated when Hazel dithered. “Thought you liked the BMW.”

She did. It was a cool car and the leather upholstery was like butter to the touch. But Ward’s favors were honey-traps, delivered with an invisible price tag. She considered turning him down. The words rose to the tip of her tongue, a stubborn lie clinging to the roof of her mouth.

Ward sucked his bottom lip between his teeth, his features twisted with worry. He expected her to pass on the offer. Maybe that was the only reason he’d offered.

“Sure,” Hazel replied. “Least that way I don’t have to worry about you tailing me.”

“I wasn’t…”

Ear-splitting music drowned out the rest. Hazel started through the crowd, retracing her steps with the hope that Ward would follow. She didn’t wait for him. She didn’t extend a hand to capture his and pull him along. If he lost sight of her, that was his problem.

The BMW was parked half a block away, on the other side of the street. Gingerly, Hazel propped herself against the shiny hood and settled in to wait. It didn’t take long for Ward to catch sight of her when he finally emerged from the club. He stopped in his tracks a few feet away, head tilted at a considering angle.

“You’re a little overdressed for a pit babe.”

Hazel snorted under her breath. “Dream on.”

She thought she spied the twitch of a smile at the corner of Ward’s lips as she turned away and wrenched open the passenger side door. Flirting with him was off limits. It shouldn’t have come so damn easy. Ward shouldn’t have encouraged it.

Then again, if they were big on ‘should haves’, they wouldn’t have wound up in bed together in the first place.

Hazel buckled her seatbelt, heart pitching into her throat as Ward peeled away from the curb with a squeal of tires. In this, he and Dylan were like night and day. Hazel knew which one she should’ve preferred. She also knew she was grasping at straws if she needed a road test to settle on a favorite.

Ward was the type to blow through yellow lights like a bat out of hell and use his blinkers intermittently. He braked violently and talked as he drove, one hand off the steering wheel at all times. He had a lot of opinions about Hazel’s neighborhood, about nearby Los Angeles, the cultural Mecca next door.

Hazel only interrupted to tell him to pull over.

“Why?” he asked, leaning gently on the brakes.

“That’s my building over there.” She pointed through the windshield to a concrete tower squeezed between two identical others. A gaggle of teenage boys held silent vigil on the cement steps outside, glowering from beneath baseball caps and beanies. Hazel had seen them before. They were the local flavor, safe simply because they were familiar.

His expression indecipherable, Ward eased up to the curb and killed the engine.

“Do you want to come up?” Dylan’s silences were an opportunity to catch her breath, get her feet under her. With Ward, quietude filled her with trepidation about what he’d say next.

He met her gaze. “Better not.”

Right. We might sleep together again.
Hazel smiled and nodded, as though it was little more than a joke. Of course it wouldn’t happen again. It wasn’t like she lived on a tripwire since she’d met Dylan.

“I can walk you to the door, though,” Ward offered tentatively. He slanted a glance through the windshield at the boys who couldn’t seem to tear their eyes from the BMW.

“And get another beat down on my behalf?”

“Hey, I put that guy on his back—”

Hazel stepped out of the car to the tune of Ward’s indignant protests. “Go home, Prince Charming, before my neighbors send you packing.” She ducked down, one hand on the roof of the car and the other gripping the door. “I’ll be fine.”

The smack of the car door cut off his objection. Whiskey buzzing hot in her bloodstream, Hazel made her way up the sidewalk and to the knot of youths. They looked thirteen and skinny under their baggy shirts and low-slung jeans. In a few years, they’d be on their way to harassing women in bars—like the asshole Ward had knocked out on Hazel’s behalf—or hollering at them from tricked-out sedans.

Or maybe they’d land on their feet, grit their teeth and push through college with arrogant jerks like Ward and make something of their lives.

“That your boyfriend, mama?” asked the boldest of the pack.

Hazel followed his gaze to Ward, still parked by the curb.