Page 2 of Walking Red Flag

Just too much.

There were no other words for what he was.

I opened the door to the apartment and was unsurprised to find Hazel already standing there.

“Hey…”

“What the fuck was that?” she grumbled.

I waited until the door of Asher’s apartment was closed before I gave her a “wait” face.

She did, not saying a word until we were downstairs and stretching outside of the building.

“Well? What was that?” she repeated, frustrated now.

I sighed. “That was Asher being a complete dick.”

Had she not been hanging out with her new office friends over the last month, she might’ve known that Asher and I had been having a few issues.

Those issues were now big issues that were dominating our relationship.

“Asher wants to go out and enjoy more of life than I’m capable of giving him,” I vented. “He wants to hang out with his friends, and he wants me to go with him because he feels guilty when I stay home. Then he says he feels obligated to hang out with me instead of participating. When I do go, he leaves me, and I only see him from across the room of wherever we happen to be. And to be quite honest, I’m not too fond of his friends, and he thinks I have an unhealthy attachment to my family.”

Hazel snorted. “You kind of do, but it’s understandable.”

I stopped stretching and looked at her. “What do you mean by that?”

“I just mean that you are with them all the time, and you never spend time with him unless it’s after you’ve seen to their needs.” She shrugged, like she hadn’t just stabbed me in the heart.

“You know that I love my family,” I pointed out. “I don’t think it’s a crime to want to be around them.”

“No, not a crime,” she agreed. “But you could go hang out with Asher before you check in with your family. You could stay with Asher without completely dropping him if someone from your family calls and asks you for something.”

I snorted. “The only time I ‘drop’ Asher is if someone calls for emergency babysitter help,” I said. “And Auden and Maven are really the only ones that call me to help, and that’s only because they know that Shasha and Brecken, as well as Nastya and Haze, are busy with their own kids.”

I was an aunt of seven.

Maven, my sister, had married Auden, a police officer with Sunnyvale Police Department, years ago. Maven owned a bakery, and was up at the crack of dawn every day making delicious delicacies that made fat go to my hips.

They had three kids: Lola, Brando, and Redford.

My brother, Shasha, is married to Brecken, a high school principal. They had two children, Vivi and Jessa.

Then there were Nastya and Haze, who was also a police officer, or more accurately, a detective. He worked for Fort Worth Police Department. Nastya co-owned her own business with Haze’s daughter, Desi.

“I mean, I know that you do,” Hazel said as she started to jump up and down to warm up her legs. “I just think that you might be in the wrong here. Maybe what he’s saying is kind of true. Maybe you don’t prioritize him, and he notices that.”

We started our run, and for the entire time, I listened to Hazel berate me, as well as talk about her new office friends that were just “the best ever.”

She talked about her really good friend, Rayann, that was married to a man named Gibson. Gibson and Rayann were partiers, and that worked out really well for Hazel’s boyfriend, Mark.

Mark was a social climber. He was all about finding people that could help him level up in the world.

As I listened to Hazel talk about how Mark was driving her nuts wanting to go to the parties that Rayann and Gibson threw all the time, I had to internally laugh because that was exactly what my own boyfriend was trying to do to me.

Yet, Hazel couldn’t see that.

She was so hypocritical.

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