Page 55 of Take Me Home

For the next twenty minutes, they searched the cramped gift shop. By the time he made it to the cash register, she was already collecting several bags from the counter. The hostess called his name, and Hazel went ahead to their table while he paid.

When he entered the dining room, Hazel was dumping sugar into her coffee. He smiled, warmth blooming through him. Theroom was packed and loud, and he had to squeeze between the tables. A sudden urgency to reach her edged out the warm feeling, a sense that the evening would end too soon.

“I did it,” she said as soon as he sat down.

“You got everyone?”

“Check this out.” She presented a wood and glass object that looked like a snow globe. “It’s a storm glass—basically an old-school barometer. It’s probably wildly inaccurate and not actually antique, but my dad will think it’s cool.” She pulled more items from her bags. Bamboo bracelets and a beaded purse with a white bird on it for Lucy, a University of Texas collectors’ set of dominoes for Raf, and a macrame plant hanger and hand-painted alpaca salt and pepper shakers for Val. “She likes alpacas,” she said triumphantly, like she’d cracked a code.

“Not bad,” he agreed.

The server came to take their order, and when she left, Hazel leaned across the table. “Well?”

“Looks like we tied.”

“Does that mean we both win? You never told me what you wanted.”

The middle of a crowded restaurant, their server interrupting at any moment, didn’t feel like the right setting for a confession. “I’m still thinking about it.”

“Well, I still want a secret.”

“Fine. What kind?”

She thought about it for a moment. “Something you’re afraid of.”

He didn’t know what he’d expected her to want. Maybe an embarrassing anecdote, like her Pug Boy story. But being afraid was exactly his problem right now. Because if he somehow maneuvered them through their budding friendship and into something more, it would start a clock, ticking down to the inevitableafter, when she would cut her losses and move on. For all he knew, as soon as he admitted he liked her, they’d already be inafterterritory. He had to tell her something else.

The next pressing fear, though, was about his father. A sick weight dropped in his stomach. Ash rubbed his neck, looking for the waitress.

“There,” she said. “Whatever you’re thinking about right now.”

“Youscare me a little,” he admitted, stalling.

She rolled her eyes. “Be serious.”

“I am.”

Hazel crossed her arms, mirroring his own defensive backward lean, willing to wait him out.

His feelings for her were off the table for now, and if he told her he didn’t want his father to deteriorate before his eyes, this whole evening, light and flirty and warm, would stop dead in its tracks. That was the last thing he wanted.

“Geese,” he said finally, an absolute cop-out. “They’re mean as hell.”

The light in her eyes dulled. “Geese. Hmm. I guess that’s true.”

She moved the conversation on to other topics. To the untrained eye, she looked like a young woman with a friend or on a date, smiling, talking with her hands, nodding when he spoke. But something small had shifted underneath. A switch from the Hazel he’d been getting to know—the Hazel who had cried in front of him last night despite how hard she worked to appear unfazed, the Hazel who was afraid ofaftersand small spaces and, he suspected, giving her whole heart to anyone without an escape hatch—to surface Hazel. Still warm, still friendly. She made eye contact with the waitress when she thanked her for a refill. He liked that about her, that she was always courteous,always gave her full attention to servers. But that was also how she was now looking at him, with polite, distant friendliness.

“Okay, you want a secret?” he said once their plates were cleared. “The place I intern for is going to offer me a job after I graduate.”

She smiled that same ninety-percent-Hazel smile.

He made sure she was looking at him and added, “What I haven’t told anyone is that I might not take it.”

And now that smile was down to seventy percent. She was humoring him, but she looked disappointed, like this revelation still didn’t seem particularly personal. “Why?”

“I thought I wanted to do all this cutting-edge, green tech stuff. A lot of it is pretty cool. But I shadowed an architect on a restoration last summer, a protected landmark. They can be tricky. You have all these constraints. It would have been cheaper and easier to demo it and rebuild from scratch. But the challenges made it interesting, and there’s this art to it, and…I don’t know, it was pretty satisfying to save something with so much history.”

There it was—her full Hazel smile. “You’re sentimental,” she said. It didn’t sound like criticism.

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