Page 63 of Take Me Home

She was right between Maggie and June. A quick scan confirmed that this was not some communal record for just anyone who passed through the Campbell house. The only other names belonged to his siblings, his parents, his nieces. “You can’t just put me on here.”

“I can just,” he said and started for the stairs. “Come on.”

Inside his bedroom, Ash toed off his shoes by the door while Hazel surveyed his space, part of an add-on to the original house after the twins were born, he’d told her. Clearly, in his absence, it had also become a storage space. Two large plastic bins were stacked under the single window. File boxes lined the wall opposite his typical-guy, blue-and-green-plaid-covered bed. But Ash’s fingerprints were all over the elaborate Popsicle stick chandelier hanging above, as well as a pair of concert posters on the wall—Hippo Campus, Bad Bad Hats.

“I’m getting you one of my ‘sad girl acoustic’ posters for Christmas,” she said, then lifted a pair of black, square-framed glasses from his nightstand and smiled. “So, youdostill wear glasses.”

“Only at night.”

“I want to see.”

He shook his head but slid them on.

“Oh, my,” she said. Hazel didn’t even have a thing for glasses,but shedidhave a thing for Ash in glasses. He was easily ten percent hotter, all scholarly and serious-looking. He was also blushing under her open appreciation.

He pulled them back off and set them on his dresser. “That’s enough of that.”

“There will never be enough of that. Why is it that in movies with makeovers they always take the glassesoffto make the lead sexier? They’ve got it totally backward.”

Ash leaned back against the closed door, popping his knuckles. She strolled through his room some more. Did her snooping bother him? She couldn’t tell. Still, she turned her attention from his walls to their gift bags. “We could wrap these later if you want to hang out with your family.”

At the reminder, he popped out into the hallway and returned with an armload of supplies.

“I’ve kept you all day,” Hazel continued. “Besides, I like them. They’re…”

“They’re a lot.” He lifted the paper towel pouch of cookies from his pocket as if it were evidence and tossed them to her.

A burst of laughter drifted up to them.

“I see why you need the noise at the café. It’s never quiet in this house. Impossible to feel lonely.”

“Impossible tobealone,” he corrected, but he said it with the same affection that accompanied all his empty gripes about his family.

Hazel placed her boots beside his shoes, then selected shiny red paper for her gifts and sat on the floor. He sat across from her, his outstretched foot nearly touching her own. For a few minutes, they wrapped in silence, the voices and TV from below coming to them in bursts. She imagined Ash in this room as a teenager, his boisterous family always present in this subtle, steady way, and felt a pang of longing to have spent time hereback then, even just once. She pictured staying over for noisy family dinners instead of ordering takeout or making sandwiches for herself, his mother pressing a container of leftovers or cookies into her hands as she left. Maybe she and Ash would have come up here to listen to music.

Maybe, in a totally alternate reality, they would have come up here to make out on his plaid bed.

“About earlier,” he said, breaking the silence.

She smoothed a piece of tape more thoroughly than necessary. They hadn’t talked about the kiss yet. In her car after they left the bar, she’d filled the silence babbling about Franny’s wedding plans, mainly to keep from offering to find some secluded park to finish what they’d started like horny teenagers.

“It was—” she began just as he said, “Let me expl—”

“No, please. I was—” she started again.

“Just listen,” he said.

She set the tape dispenser down.

“It was…great.”

Hazel breathed out a sigh. “Agreed. No regrets.”

“Good. So, I wanted to assure you nothing has to change.” At her confused expression, he added, “We were drinking. We were having fun. It doesn’t have to be a whole thing.”

“A whole thing,” she echoed slowly. They hadn’t hadthatmuch to drink. And that kiss had been more desperate and, frankly, way hotter than some random, casual fun.

“Look, I think at this point I just have to say that I find you…” His eyes trailed from her face to her cropped green sweater and down her jeans to where her socked foot nearly touched his. When his gaze returned to hers, Hazel shivered. There was his studious, borderline serial killer look again. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I find you incredibly sexy, Hazel.”

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