Page 12 of Take Me Home

Even her lab team was more contentious than expected. Co-led by Zach, a fourth-year student, their meetings frequentlyinvolved the most competitive “brainstorming” sessions she’d ever seen.

Not that she had time for socializing anyway. She’d had to extend her tutoring hours to accommodate Sheffield’s freshmen, pushing her own work behind all the other tasks he’d dropped on her desk.

The real breaking point was when she’d wasted a week transcribing the wrong set of audio files—a mistake that had invited a full dressing-down from Zach in front of the whole lab team—and, simultaneously, Sheffield’s students started finding her outside her office hours. She realized she needed a hideout. And thus—not to be too dramatic about it—her self-imposed exile from school grounds.

“Maybe,” Hazel hedged. “It’s different, though. I didn’t live alone before.”

“Ah. Me, too.”

“You haven’t always been squatting alone above the café like some attic troll?”

“Cami let me crash there. It was supposed to be temporary. That was…” He scratched his eyebrow again. “Almost two years ago. To be clear, I do pay rent.”

“What happened two years ago?”

Ash watched her for a beat before finally giving an easy shrug. “Breakup. Couldn’t afford our place on my own.”

“You lived with a girl?”

“I have four sisters. I’ve lived with girls pretty much my whole life.”

“Yeah, but a girl you were…”

“In love with?”

Hazel was going to saysleeping with. “So, it was serious? You lo—” She tripped over the word, had to clear her throat. “You loved her?”

Ash laughed at her clear discomfort. “I don’t know.” He turned and drew a spiral in the foggy side window with his finger. “Doesn’t everything feel serious when you’re in the middle of it?”

Not if you don’t let it, she thought. If she didn’t crave touch like oxygen, she’d have entirely given up on dating a long time ago. Which explained why, lately, she jumped at the tiniest innocuous touches, the surprise brush of skin when a grocery clerk handed over her change, an accidental jostle on a crowded bus. She wasstarvedfor contact. But at least she was safe.

Ash seemed uninterested in talking about his ex and instead told her about his four sisters—Maggie, the oldest, three years his senior, who taught high school French in Kansas; June, an adventurous middle sister trying to make it as an actress out in California who had been two years behind him and Hazel in school; and Laurel and Leanne, seventeen-year-old twins.

“Wait, the cute blonde who was in all the theater productions and came to your baseball games?” Hazel asked. “I thought she was your girlfriend for a while.”

Ash shuddered. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

He told her the ranch house model in Hazel’s back seat was a Christmas gift for the oldest sister’s two daughters and grumbled lightly about his family being overrun with girls, but the way his eyes lit up at the mention of his nieces totally undercut the complaint. He hadn’t seen them all since summer, the last time he went home, and she couldfeelhow long that stretch had been for him. He was in the middle of showing Hazel a picture on his phone of a little dark-haired girl in a pink, feathered dance costume when the line of cars ahead slowed into an ever-compressing string of red brake lights.

“Is this the construction you mentioned?” she asked.

“It’s usually further along, but yeah.” He had the grace not tosay they should have taken his route, but his fond, heart-eyed affection for his nieces was now shuttered.

For forty-five minutes, they crept through the bottlenecked stretch of highway. The traffic finally sped up again, but not for long. Rain dotted the windshield. Hazel calculated their slow progress against the weather models she’d checked before leaving. Not to give her father too much credit, but he’d taught her a bit about forecasting. The type of storm they were driving into was notoriously difficult to predict, but rain wasn’t a good sign, and they were still five hours from Lockett Prairie on a good day.

“It’s just rain,” Ash muttered, shaking his head at the line of cautious drivers.

“We might want to consider a plan.”

“A plan for what?”

“If we have to wait it out.” Just then, they passed a sign with the distance to the next town. Seventeen miles.

“It’s getting cold. If it freezes, it won’t thaw until tomorrow. We’d have to stop overnight.”

“Preferably in a hotel.”

“No.” He shook his head adamantly. “We should keep driving. If all these people would speed up a little—it’s just rain.”

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