Page 43 of Take Me Home

Now, across the picnic table, the chilly December breeze carrying the sweet, earthy scent of Christmas trees blew a loose curl across Ash’s forehead. He shook the hair out of his eye.

“Part of that night was fun,” Hazel said, echoing him from before.

“Yeah.”

“And then…”

“Yeah.”

She pulled her hands into her lap, confused by the gulf between how she’d seen him back then and how she was seeing him now.

“You avoided me after that,” he said.

“You avoided me, too.”

“Only once I realized you were always speed-walking around corners when I saw you.”

She gave a helpless little shrug.

“Four years.” He sawed his teeth into his lower lip, shakinghis head. “I wanted to tell you— I thought I’d get the chance, some other time when you were sober, to let you know I really did just want to make sure you got home okay. I wasn’t”—his face screwed up with something dark—“trying to take advantage.”

Remorse wormed through Hazel. She didn’t blame herself for not knowing, for not realizing Ash wasgood,but she wished all the same she’d seen him more clearly then. “I know,” she said.

He pressed his lid carefully back onto his drink. “And I was never laughing at you. I told Justin a hundred times to come clean. He kept saying he would. You don’t know this, but we fought that summer, after you left town. Not just about what he did to you, but that was part of it. When I saw you at that party, and you acted like we couldn’t be friends because I was Justin’s friend, I hadn’t spoken to him all summer.”

He held her gaze, his eyes boring into her, like he had so much more to say. She found herself holding her breath, wanting to hear it. Long seconds passed. The breeze rustled the trees and blew that same errant curl back across his forehead.

Finally, he said, “I guess I just wish it hadn’t taken you four years to come into my café.”

She would have huffed at that possessive pronoun, but she felt strangely breathless, like time had lurched forward and she’d fallen out of step. There was something knowing and steady in Ash’s face now, as though this conversation had lifted a weight from him, but Hazel felt newly burdened, like she’d lost something. Time, maybe. Or a possibility.

Ash sipped his hot chocolate and hummed in approval. Then, he nodded at a batch of trees leaning against the side of the trailer. “What about those?”

White tags fluttered on their branches. “They look like they’re reserved.”

Ash hopped up from the table. “This close to Christmas,” he said over his shoulder, “I bet some of these won’t even get picked up.”

For reasons she couldn’t pinpoint, she wanted him to turn around, to gather her into a wordless hug. Instead, she wrapped her arms around her middle and followed him.

She had to jump back as he hauled one tree out from the group and dropped its trunk to the asphalt with a thud, its unbound branches bouncing from the impact, shaking some needles loose. They both leaned back to see the top of the tree. It had to be eleven or twelve feet tall. The aroma of Christmas surrounded her. And despite having been crammed in the middle of the group, its branches were full and uncrushed.

“You want this tree,” Ash said, not a question.

It was perfect. But she lifted its tag. It was very clearly reserved for anM. Conway.

Ash peeked around the tree, then behind her, then over his shoulder. He tore the name from the tree and toed it back into the mess of needles under the other unclaimed trees.

“What are you doing?”

“If that kid comes out, ask him to show you where the blue spruces are.”

“Asher—”

He pushed her toward the front of the trailer. As she rounded the corner, she ran right into the teenager in question and blanked for a few long seconds before blurting, “Blue spruce?”

After making the kid pull out every last scraggly tree from the blue spruce section of the lot, Hazel apologized for taking up his time. Back by the picnic table, Ash stood with the enormous tree, looking mildly aggrieved at how long she’d taken. “You’re not gonna believe this, Haze,” he said, selling his excitement.

Haze. Her insides flipped. “Wow, where’d you find that?”